We had an excellent turn out at this month’s meeting. I can feel the momentum!

I did a lightning talk on continuations . My aim was to titlate rather than illuminate. I believe I was successful. Oh…and just to be clear the example code is from Jim Weirich .

If you are in the area be sure join us next month. The Kentucky Ruby Users Group meets on the first Thursday of each month, but we haven’t settled into a permanent meeting location yet.

Good friends and fellow Rubists Darren Day and Chuck Fouts are presenting You’ll Be Seeing…Ruby: An Introduction to the Ruby Programming Language .

• Fri. March 31, 2006
• 8:30 a.m. – Registration and continental breakfast
• 9:00 – 11:00 a.m. – Seminar Presentation

• U of L Shelby Campus Information Technology Resource Center (iTRC)
• 9001 Shelbyville Road, Louisville, KY 40222

I attended a preview of the seminar this past Sunday and I highly recommend it. Two long time Ruby skeptics in the audience (of four total) were so moved they are looking at using Ruby for their next projects. So if you are in the Louisville area, curious about Ruby, and like free breakfast, I don’t see how you could pass this up.

By now you’ve read the trip reports , viewed the slides , and listened to the presentations . If you haven’t then shame on you, because there is lots of good stuff there. So I’ll just talk about what RubyConf did for me and how you should change your life to take advantage of my new found knowledge.

First of all I got to do fan boy things like thank Matz for Ruby.

Note that Martin Fowler snuck into the picture, but I had to smudge him out since my understanding is that you have to buy a book from him before you can take his picture.

I also got to have lots of great conversations with my fellow rubyists. Some of it was finally getting to put faces with irc nicks and blog entries. But the chance encounters at the lunch table and at the laptop filled tables during the panels were also edifying. I’m not a gregarious person by nature, so I am very glad I pushed myself to talk to people while at the conference. Talking things over with smart people that have similar goals is one of the best ways to generate interesting ideas. Now I just need to follow through on some of them.

Probably the best part though was just spending three days concentrating on something like Ruby with lots of other people that were also enthusiastic about it. You could smell the Ruby in the air. Many of us spend our days working to pay the mortgage, changing diapers, and cooking dinner. Even though those things are important it is good for the spirit to put all of that on hold for a few days and just geek out. That I am posting a blog entry should be proof enough that RubyConf was very energizing.

My plan is to go to at least two conferences a year. I went to No Fluff Just Stuff and RubyConf this year. And I am very happy with the results. Next year I plan to be at RubyConf again. I would also like to go to a large conference like OSCON or maybe an open space conference .

So what are you doing to make yourself a better programmer and advance your career? One of the things should be regularly attending conferences.

I’ve always been jealous of graphic artists. They juggle dozens of layers and composite images with ease with their fancy photoshops and gimps. I’ve tried several times to do some simple tasks with the Gimp and was defeated in each case. So I’ve found myself going hat in hand to the “graphics guy” (no slight intended to the ladies; I’ve just never worked with a female graphic artist) for even the simplest of buttons and on personal projects I’ve just had to do without.

I’ve used ImageMagick occasionally over the years for converting between formats and checking image sizes. I recently stumbled on this great set of examples by Anthony Thyssen of using ImageMagick for complex multi-step manipulations. When you add in a terrific set of Ruby bindings, the result is graphical independence for people such as myself.

While I’ve still got a long way to go before I master these new techniques, I have used them to generate a banner for this page and a few buttons for a work project. Here’s the source of my banner generating script and you can try it out by clicking the Change banner link at the top of the page. Expect the banner to become ever more decedent as I add tricks to my tool box.

I’ve added an autocomplete feature to liveUpdater.js that I’ve been harping on lately. The javascript is a bit more involved now, but I don’t think the Borges side of things has lost any of it’s charm.

  r.text_input_with_autocomplete(proc {}) do |text|
    if text.length > 0
      `grep -m 40 -i \"^#{text}\" /usr/share/dict/words`.split
    end
  end

I’ve set up a demo for your autocompleting pleasure. It seems to work ok on IE6 and Mozilla 1.7.2, but I’m sure it needs some work for other browsers. I would appreciate any patches that improve support for other browsers, fix bugs, or just clean up the javascript in general (I’m not quite a master of that language).