about: things
on me and coding and some things

as you all might warm up already for railsconf europe in berlin later this year i would like to let you know that the berlin user group got its own wiki now. After Florian Gersdorf did restart the meetings earlier this year we are happy to host the rug-b meeting every first thursday of the month at our place in /i-d media. And now, thanks to Benjamin Krause, we got our own place at http://www.rug-b.com/ where we set up the instiki wiki for a better overview on the berlin activities. Have a look over there for agenda, locations, timeings, whatsoever.

For all of our conference guest in berlin in september the rug-b started brainstorming about some special events and/or try to arrange for some benefits with berlin infrastructure. So come to Berlin, hope to see you soon!

I’m in no way linked to O’Reilly or the conference but in any case i’m quite willing to help making the berlin rails conference an even better one than the last. So when you have question or ideas for some socializing events around the rug-b or berlin just drop me a note.


UPDATE: wer des englischen nicht maechtig ist, dem soll versichert sein das “we are happy to host the rug-b meeting” nicht bedeutet, dass ich oder mein arbeitgeber der Veranstalter sind, sondern nur der Gastgeber. Scheinbar hat das der Kommentator nicht ganz mitbekommen. Ansprechpartner sind oben also genannt, aber wer will kann selbstverstaendlich auch mich ansprechen. Oder lieber anonym kommentieren, ganz wie es beliebt.

cheers.


Technorati Tags: railsconf, ruby, usergroup, berlin, idmedia, rug-b

what’s there more left to say? As steffen already posted on our company/product blog he managed to shoot the man himself! David(of ruby on rails fame) in front of our foto-foo webcam snapshot solution. This is best practice par excellence, right there, on location, from there to internet with no inbetween. That is foto-foo: no files, no upload, no hazzle, and, Thanks! David! You are the man, have a good time over there at the rails conf in portland and hope to see you all back in berlin in september!

cheers

Technorati Tags: rails, dhh, foto-foo, idmedia

We had our 2nd ruby users group berlin meeting yesterday with two speakers and the demo of the yet to be released omdb.org project.

First was Tim Lossen giving a good round-up of the JRuby developments. Not of much interest to me because i have’t touched Java in a while. There was a common understanding that JRuby is a good thing and will pave Rubys way into the enterprise world, and with Sun now as official backing partner, JRuby is heading for a 1.0 release this summer for Javaworld confererence. You can already run JRuby based Rails applications inside you IBM Websphere Application server, Yeah! But can you run a Rails application with JRuby from inside a Java applet on your client browser? Hm, interesting idea, we couldn’t answer that yesterday.

Next was the talk by Murphy about the state of the ruby 1.9 release. Murphy mainly used Mauricio Fernandez eigenclass for reference and gave a really great overview around the three main themes of this topic: Roadmap, New and changed features and performance. Everybody loves the hand drawn roadmap image(which i can’t find now) and while a Ruby2.0 release being something from a far utopian future, we might see a 1.9 release later this year. I’m actually not following the 1.9 developments but became inspired to check again. Enumerators for examples reminded me to my STL/C++ years, just now without the template pains :-) Interessting were his comments on performance. Tim already showed some charts which related the JRuby to some other implementations and Murphy made some own benchmarks which were pretty much in line with Tims data. The general information is that 1.9(==YARV) is a couple of times faster, ranging from 3 to 10 times faster. BUT! and that is a big but, Murphy did report that on the real life applications he tested, the speed-up was close to insignificant for various applications. This is because the the performance tuning in 1.9 seems to be focussing on benchmark relevant stuff. And real life application are hardly build from benchmark functionallity. This sounds like, been there, seen that before. History(benchmark tweaking) is repeating itself. For me it doesn’t matter. When others can do 4000 requests/second, ruby/rails is definitly fast enough for me.

Finally Benjamin Krause showcased his upcoming OMDB project(tech blog, development version, live). OMDB is a IMDb in wikipedia style with a creative commons licence. 16501 People(see comment) 16000 movies are already in the database and once it will open up, everybody can extend it. Thats a cool idea conceptually and what he showed technically was nothing less than the equivalent to an “Full House” in poker. For example the subsecond async response times for fetching actors from a huge database which were made possible by his ferret magic. impressive.

And this also led to the agenda for the next meeting where Benjamin will give a talk about ferret on Rails. Everybody wanted to see more of it. Also we will have a talk by Adam about AmzonWebServices: S3 and Rails on EC2 . I’m looking forward to it. And about the open mic section, i’m pretty sure we are releasing our foto-foo into the wild.

And for you to have some fun, we plan to record the talks next time and put them up as podcasts to fit with your online consumption habits. Murphy and Tim also promised to upload their talks for online viewing (to the wiki i guess).

looks like the ruby users group berlin is consolidating.

Technorati Tags: ruby, usergroup, YARV, jruby, omdb, imdb, idmedia, berlin,

military laser guidance technic in the hands of urban rebels makes for a super cool new way of tagging tall buildings with laser pointers. Graffitiresearch from rotterdam is putting high tech in the hands of “writers, protesters, artists and the citizens of Rotterdam”.




go see the movie!


Technorati Tags: laser, graffiti, tagging, media, art, guerilla, marketing

In einer Videonachlese berichtet Blog TV aus Japan mit fünf kurzen Filmem vom 23. Chaos Computer Club  Kongress in Berlin. Wer Japanisch kann, mag sich informieren, aber auch ohne Sprachkenntnisse finde ich es immer sehenswert die eigene Stadt durch die Augen des Fremden zu sehen. Und irgentwo dazwischen kann, wer nicht blinzelt, auch entdecken, wie ich die Viewer zu Blog TV begrüße.

Leider habe ich die letzte PechaKucha verpassen müssen. Diese wunderbare Veranstaltungsform entspricht perfekt dem Aufmerksamkeitsdefizietsproblem moderner Internet- und Medienschaffender:

Kein Vortrag dauert länger als 20 mal 20 Sekunden (also 6:40 Minuten), Langweile kommt nicht auf.

In unvorhersehbar erratischer Weise allerdings gelangen zum Glück immer wieder doch noch Aufzeichnungen einzelner Vorträge im RSS Feed der Veranstallter. Ich weiss nicht ob es ein Highlight des Abends war, aber ich freu mich schon demnächst irgentwo dem intelligenten Aufzug, den Thorsten Rauser vorstellt, zu begegnen, aber  sehen und hören sie selbst.



Technorati Tags: art, media, pechakucha

und für alle denen noch nicht klar ist, das es gar keine schlechte idee ist mal auf dem 23. Chaos Computer Club Kongress im Berlin Convention Center vorbeizuschauen hab ich hier mal als kleines Appetithäppchen ein video gepostet, in dem steini die kuh fliegen lässt. Die kuh in diesem fall ist eine kommerzielle Drone die er im saal schön über den köpfen kreisen lässt und von dort live den videofeed des  so überwachten publikums auf dem screen projeziert. Das Ding ist schlecht zu sehen, ich weiss, aber das ist ja auch sinn der sache. Das ist nur einer von vielen Vortraegen und workshops an diesen drei tagen. Ein bisschen kann man ihm ja auch auf den tonspur lauschen. Fazit ist, dass in ca. 1 Jahr die community eine  selbstbausatz für ca. < 1000 Euro auf die Strasse bringen kann. Schöne vorstellung auch wie 5 Dieter Bohlen dronen gegen 15 paparazzi dronen kämpfen, oder was mann z.B. machen kann wenn man ein quasi unsichtbares flugrät hat, das vollkommen selbständig(GPS geleitet, keine fernsteuerung notwendig, Google EArth koordinaten reichen :-) mit 20-30KM/h ca. 500Gramm fuer eine halbe Stunde durch die gegen fliegt.

Tja, leider, leider, kann ich wohl nicht auf die rails conf in london fahren. und ganz besonders haette ich mich gefreut mir die vortraege am freitag anzuhoeren, allein schon um die aeusserst schwierige frage zu beantworten, welcher referent ist anders als die anderen: