I am looking for an intern (more details) for later this year. I have a number of interesting ideas for projects, most of them involve Ruby (more specific JRuby), Android and Eclipse. Your skill set should include at least Java and if possible Ruby and/or Eclipse API.

I’m looking for a commitment of at least three months (I would prefer six) and you should be within one or two years of receiving degree. If this sounds interesting please apply here and add a note that you would like to work with Frank Spychalski in Munich.

Yesterday was Girl’s day and our office hosted a few girls from schools in and around Munich. Read the rest of this entry »

I found the DIY page for demotivators and had to create one for Ruby. Enjoy!

Yesterday I installed version 2.5 of WordPress (which is great!) but the menu in the admin interface uses up a lot of screen estate. That’s why I just patched wp-admin.css to save some of this precious space in the admin interface. Just follow the above link and replace your version found in wp-admin/ if you think the menu is too big. Read the rest of this entry »

Second day has started. Today it starts with a few talks on testing…

George Malamidis — „Synthesized Testing“

Already 15min behind schedule, but so far interesting.

This has 4 lines of code. It is already a big ruby function.

Vassilis Rizopoulos — „rutema: One test tool to rule them all“

I’m thinking on how to write in a polite way “This talk was boring”. It was. And the tool uses XML Hey, this is a Ruby conference- you should use YAML or even better a cool Ruby DSL.

Tomasz Stachewicz — „Sharing the load“

Sounded interesting but there was a question after the talk which suggested that the guys reinvented the wheel and that BackgroundDrb is a better solution for what he has done.

Petr Krontorád — „Building Rails Playground – using Ruby’s dynamic nature“

Mumble, mumble, small text, cannot read the slides, mumble… Sorry I don’t have a clue what this talk is about.

Tim Becker — „Lessons Learned Writing Native Extensions“

Type-along tutorial on how to write C extension for Ruby. Very interesting, this could actually make me write C code again… He has started talking on cats and tigers and it seems like he wants to teach us how arrays work in C. Booooooooring. Finally he is done with this and is back on the interesting topics like conversion of data types. Overall a really interesting talk. By far the best one today so far. Tim’s post with code samples and links.

Matt Ford — „Aspect Oriented Programming in Ruby“

It’s his birthday. Happy birthday Matt! He talks about Aquarium a neat aspect oriented programming solution for Ruby. Very nice. I have to play around with this when I’m back home.

Dushan Wegner — „Philosophy & Programming“

This first lightning talk. “Imagine I’m holding a beer and put out this ideas”. “Programmers are better philosophers”. A very cool talk about the similarities of programming and practicing philosophy.

Marcin Raczkowski — „Distributed programming with ruby“

Hard to understand but interesting. Sadly it is impossible to read his code when he is showing examples in the editor.

sorry missed name and title Akira Tanaka – „IO.copy_stream“

Interesting talk about IO in Ruby. Great final “status” slide:

Accepted by Matz yesterday @La fabrica
Submitted today to Ruby 1.9

Wow!

Gregor … — „Context-oriented programming for Ruby“

Took a long time to get to the point. Which part of lightning talk did you not understand.

Florian Gilcher — „Patterns (yet another) pattern matching library“

Interesting talk. Can be found at patterns.rubyforge.org.

Raimonds Simanovskis — „Using Ruby with Oracle“

Good quick talk. I never had to work with Oracle so I never had the problems he was talking about.

Daniel Liszka — „One RubyStack to Rule them All“

Strong accent, to much text on the slides. But sounds like a neat idea… www.bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

Ry Dahl — „Ebb Web Server“

Yet another Ruby web server, obviously it’s faster than all the others because what would be the point otherwise. ebb.rubyforge.org

Wouter de Bie — „Capistrano, Webistrano“

The final lightning talk. I’m hungry off to find some food…

Dr Nic — Demo

So it wasn’t the last talk. They squeezed in a short demo on how to use his gem generator. Very cool! I have to use this to play around with native C extensions.

Final announcement

It seems like next year’s EURUKO will be in Madrid. Great! Never been there. See you next year! It’s not decided yet. Krakow and Warsaw are possible sites, too. Hm, I’m still for Madrid

Sumary

I think I should have slept in today like Todd and would not have missed a bit. Here are some pictures from EURUKO 2008 on Flickr and even one with me. EURUKO was great. A big “thank you!” to all the people who have organized it. I’m sure I will be back next year, no matter where.

The first day of EURUKO 2008 is over.

Yukihiro „Matz“ Matsumoto — „Keynote“

Matz talked about the future of Ruby. It was very interesting. He talked a little bit about the upcoming features (I will link to the slides when they become available) and about the design decisions behind Ruby. For me the most important quote was:

I designed Ruby not to work best but so that people can perform best

Koichi Sasada — „Ruby meets VM“

Koichi explained some details of YARV but some points were lost because a few of his slides were in Japanese.

Favorite quote:

(on his “No Ruby/No Life shirt”) for me it’s No Ruby / No Job

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo — „JRuby: Ready For Action!“

Made me download JRuby during the talk

David A. Black — „Per-Object Behavior in Ruby“

I have to reread the slides, because I fell asleep (not due to the talk but to the fact that we are in Prague and had a few beer yesterday)

Nic Williams — „Meta-Meta-Programming with Ruby“

Memorable talk, very funny, great final slide (see @16:35)

Lightning talks session

Two talks on an agile white board and on a Ruby to PHP compiler.

VC with DHH

a little boring, bad sound quality and even worse video

I just stumbled over an announcement about OLPC Germany. Last Tuesday was my first chance to play with an OLPC laptop. Everything but the keyboard feels incredibly solid and well made. The only thing I didn’t like was the user interface. I found it quite non-intuitive but perhaps this gets better if I spend a little more time with it. And if not: I can always put Ubuntu on it.

One thing is for sure: as soon as these laptops become available in Germany, I will buy one.

I tried really hard not to trash my former² company 1&1. But they are such an easy target Read the rest of this entry »

I just found out about EURUKO 2008. It will take plaze in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 29th to 30th. From what I’ve heard are EURUKOs fun events and I would like to go this year if I can find the time especially because of this announcement:

19. 02. 2008 · Matz is coming to EURUKO!
We are very happy to announce that Matz (most probably accompanied by Koichi) is coming to EURUKO! There are currently more than 100 people registered to attend, so thank you all! We will update the website in next couple of days with more details on program, information about sponsors and other stuff.

It has been some time since I used Ruby but it is still my favorite language by far.

Update:

I just registered for EURUKO I will probably go by car so if someone from the Munich area needs a ride, just leave a comment… And a bonus feature: I found this Tech Talk of Matz talking about Ruby 1.9 today…

…please learn about well formed URLs. And if it’s really too hard for you to figure out, I would be happy to come over and help for a Finals ticket or two

What’s the problem?

I’m a nba fan and I subscribe to the NBA.com RSS feed (http://www.nba.com/rss/nba_rss.xml) which works fine most of the time but sometimes I get an empty page. Why? Because some lazy developer thought it might be a good idea to add ?rss=true to every link.

If you look at todays feed you can find this item:

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Cavs' Gibson Expected to Miss Four to Six Weeks]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3255778?rss=true]]></link>
<description>...>
</item>


If I follow the link ESPN returns:

<!-- obj null -->


The suffix ?rss=true appears after every link in the feed so I’m pretty certain it’s not ESPN’s fault…

Update:

It’s even better. Not only do they destroy external links by appending ?rss=true, they kill their own links, too:

<link><![CDATA[http://my.nba.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300025597?rss=true]]></link>