Free as in Time

Back on December 31st Pat Eyler of Linux Journal published some predictions for the Ruby world in 2008.

Among them was that Merb will “come forward as a better Rails”. He believes that “it won’t overtake Rails in terms of deployments or mindshare in 2008, but it will get big enough to be taken seriously.”

I’m not familiar with Merb, yet, but a little poking around on the Merb site suggests he might be right. (That and a great rant against much of the Rails community from Zed [...]

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Abstractioneer recently posted the shortest guide to Atom and Atompub I’ve ever seen:

Essential Atom and AtomPub in 30 seconds

Atom is this: You have a bunch of things, or sometimes just one thing. They always have unique ids, they have timestamps, and tell you who created/is responsible for them. Oh yeah, if you can, please provide a short snippet of text describing each thing.

AtomPub is how to discover, create, delete, and edit those things.

Everything else is optional and/or extensions.

Now that’s concise.

It’s been a while since my last “Ruby Tuesday”, but I’m hoping to revive the feature. Here’s some stuff that caught my attention this week:

InfoQ has a quick piece on The Forgotten Ruby Web Frameworks:

With the success of Ruby on Rails, is there a place left for other Web frameworks written in Ruby? Everyone knows Rails, some might even have heard of Merb and Camping, but has anyone heard of Nitro, Ramaze, Sinatra, IOWA or Cerise? InfoQ quickly tours these frameworks and how they are appreciated (or ignored) by [...]

A while ago, I upgraded to WordPress 2.3. I host my blog with Dreamhost, and they have easy, “one-click” installs for this sort of thing, but the one-click upgrade wouldn’t work for me. Turns out there was a problem with the path the one-click robot was using to apply the upgrade: I had entered an extra trailing slash at some point along the road, and this broke the poor little one-click robot’s brain. It just couldn’t find the code it was supposed to update.

This isn’t something I can re-configure from [...]

The other guys from Resonant and I are off to the Free Software and Open Source Symposium at Seneca for the next couple of days.

Last year’s event was quite good. We learned a lot of interesting stuff and met some really cool people.

I’ll try to blog from the event as time permits.

There’s been a lot of chatter of late about Moodle talking to other systems like Second Life (Sloodle) and Facebook. Sadly, I don’t think anyone I work with/for is listening to the chatter, but if you are interested, here are some relevant links:

York University is poised to be among the top five largest deployments of Moodle in the world when they launch in September

Sloodle

Seamless Integration: Facebook as a Personal or Shared Learning Environment

Finding a purpose in Second Life

An assignment drop box in Second Life, tied [...]