Monthly Meeting
Organized by John Labovitz
Time: Tuesday, May 2, 2006 from 7–9pm
Location: FreeGeek, 1731 SE 10th Ave. Portland, OR 97214
Agenda
Update on FOSCON planning.
Chris Dawson will discuss his new Rails-based presentation tool P8: “A short discourse on Ruby, Linguistics, Zen Buddhism
and Time Travel with simultaneous Japanese translation and subtitles.” He will also recap his weighty opinions on Canada on Rails.
Caleb will say something about the recent website hackfest, what got accomplished, and maybe do some planning for the next one.
Participants in the Ruby quiz project may chat about their solutions to the Rock Paper Scissors cheater problem.
Minutes
Chris meta-presented his P8 presentation tool, an extension S5 with additions for collaboration. This was a loosely coupled, multidimensional talk combining Japanese linguistics, poetry, and Chris’s impressions of Canada on Rails. Chris was impressed by several presentations at the conferences which called for “less is more,” but was worried about the “guild/wizard” factor entering the Ruby community. He also wished the “back-channel” IM/IRC chatting to be better integrated into the actual presentations — and has wonderfuly built that feature into P8. Folks were impressed by Chris’s work, and offered several suggestions.
Brendan asked whether there were any regular “hang-out” places where Ruby people gathered. Several places were mentioned; however, this scribe forgot to write them down. Perhaps those who had suggestions could post them to the list.
Folks chatted about alternate framework code like Camping and Markaby, but found they weren’t so useful for production apps. Eric mentioned Mollio, which does a lot of the CSS work for you.
John described the short meeting of the FOSCON/OSCAMP planning hoedown. The group is still brainstorming on the type of talks/performances that we want to encourage at the evening party. It was pretty well accepted that pdx.rb will be working under the umbrella of the OSCAMP folks to do Ruby-specific stuff onsite at OSCON, as well as promoting cross-collaboration, like network games or robots tournaments. We’ll get together next month for more discussion.
Ben talked about Ruby quizzes. He described some of the potential projects, including his work on anti-cheating the cheater in the rock-paper-scissors quiz. Folks are encouraged to participate in future quiz work; they should post their idea to the mailing list and start working on it next week in order to be done by the next meeting.
Toph suggested a presented on the DL module that let’s you use the dynamic linker from Ruby; maybe he’ll do it next month?
Caleb talked about the website hackfest that occurred last Tuesday at the Lucky Lab. Many good changes were committed, including unit tests by Keegan. Next Thursday at 7pm there will be more hacking, and people should attend and improve the website!
Eric announced he will be doing a presentation on his VectorSection (was UberConverter) next Thursday at the Student Union at PSU (see pdxlinux.org for details).
Danny <danny@slabtownmedia.com> is looking for some help on a couple of Rails projects he’s working on.
John Wilger <johnwilger@gmail.com> is looking for help on ExplainPMT (explainpmt.com), an open-source project-management tool for extreme programming.