The OneStepBack site will be up and down today, 25/Apr/2006

I am upgrading software and doing a bit of apache reconfiguration today, so the site will be up and down today … no need to panic.

Geoffrey Grosenbach recently invited me to talk on the Ruby on Rails podcast.

Ruby on Rails Podcast

Geoffrey Grosenbach recently interviewed me for the Ruby On Rails podcast. He introduces me as the “Santa Claus” of the Ruby world (listen to find out why). Perhaps I need to let my beard grow and were a bright red outfit to the next RubyConf.

It was a fun interview, I hope you enjoy it. You can find it at http://paranode.com/~topfunky/audio/2006/Jim-Weirich.mp3.

I am heading to Chicago for the Chicago Area Ruby Group meeting next Monday.

I’m Speaking at Chirb

I will be speaking at the next Chicago Area Ruby Group (Chirb) next Monday evening, March 6th. It looks like the meeting is starting at 6:30. You can get directions and all the details here. The topic will be “Demystifying Continuations” (a reprise of the RubyConf talk Chad and I gave last year). Bring a laptop if you have one, the evening will involve some Ruby coding.

I look forward to seeing some Chicago Rubyists.

A Movie of last Tuesday’s Intro to Rails talk is now available.

An Quick Introduction to Rails

Last Tuesday evening I gave a “Quick Introduction to Rails” talk at the local XP users group. The talk was a departure from my normal presentation style and was inspired (in part) by Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 talk I saw at OSCON last year. Bill Barnett has made a movie of the talk available for download, so those of you who missed it can still see it.

Next Presentation

I will be giving shortened version of the talk again on the 21st of January at the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp sponsored by the Dayton and Cincinnati .NET users group. I will also be giving the popular 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby talk at the same conference. Hope to see you there.

Presentation Links

I probably won’t post the “Intro to Rails” slides. (Update: See below). I don’t think the slides stand alone very well. But several people have asked about links to the stories I mentioned. Here is a partial list:

• David Geary
  • BIO (http://nofluffjuststuff.com/speaker_view.jsp?speakerId=4)
  • The Koolaid Posting (http://rubyurl.com/I9t)
  • Retraction (http://rubyurl.com/HeG)
  • Demo (http://jroller.com/page/dgeary/20050821)
  • The Rails Cafe (http://jroller.com/page/dgeary/20050714)

• Justin Gehtland
  • BIO (http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/speaker_view.jsp?speakerId=5)
  • Java 2 Ruby Project (http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=29)
  • Feedback on J2R (http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=30)
  • Performance Numbers (http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=31)

• Stuart Halloway
  • BIO (http://nofluffjuststuff.com/speaker_view.jsp?speakerId=6)
  • Estimating Rails Jobs (http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=92)
  • Feedback on Estimating (http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=93)

• C.A.R. Hoare
  • The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture The Emperor’s Old Clothes (PDF) (http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/opinions/p75-hoare.pdf)

• David Heinemeier Hansson
  • BIO—Source of the XML Situps quote (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/eurooscon/view/e_spkr/2130)
  • Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/)
  • List of Real World usages of Rails (from which I pulled a small fraction for the talk (http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RealWorldUsage)

There’s some other great articles on Stuart’s and Justin’s Relevance blog site. Also, the Hoare paper is a classic and well worth the read (even though I understand he retracted much of what he said about Ada later).

Presentation Styles

The software I used for the slides runs entirely on Firefox, and a reference can be found here: http://cardboard.nu/blog/2005_12_15/a_cute_mozilla_xul_app.html.

Here are some references on the influences on that particular presentation style:

• Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 Presentation at OSCON 2005 (http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/)
• The Takahashi Method (http://rubyurl.com/r81)
• The Lessig Method (http://rubyurl.com/4YH)

It is interesting to note that TAKAHASHI Masayoshi, the inventor of the Takahashi method, is involved with Ruby in Japan.

Update (Monday: 9/Jan/06)

Several people have asked for the slides and pointed out that if I published them, you could watch them in conjunction with with the video. Ok, good point.

The online version of the presentation is available here.

If you wish to download the presentation for local viewing, or for your own use or modification (under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial License), then here is a tarfile. If you download the tarfile, make sure you specify the data file properly in the URL. See the live link above for an example.

Have fun.