Keith’s Blog

I just gave a lightning talk at the fabulous code4lib conference. My boss at O’Reilly sponsored it and he gave me the unexpected chance to come to Portland and learn about what librarians and libraries are doing (neat stuff). The talk was just a little on why the Atom Publishing Protocol was cool and how [...]

Keith Fahlgren at his TOC Tutorial, XML for Publishers

Originally uploaded by duncandavidson

I just got back from New York and the second annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference. It’s become a very impressive conference in just two years and had impressive attendance and [...]

Ed Borasky: Profiling and Tuning Ruby 1.8
Slides are available here. Cougar is the name of the project that this is coming from?
Is Ruby 1.8 Slow?
To benchmark: Collect a set of benchmark times, then normalize them, then compute the geometric mean of the ratios.
Alioth is a popular (if controversial) set of benchmarks. Using gcc as the [...]

John Lam: State of IronRuby

Photo by dwortlehock
Who works on IronRuby? The core is: John Lam, Hiabo Luo, Tomas Matousek, & John Messerly.
Why did John move from Toronto to Seattle to start working at Microsoft on IronRuby? He was in love with RubyCLR and couldn’t turn down the opportunity to work on a “real” implementation.
Goals
John [...]

Nathaniel Talbott: Why Camping Matters
“I don’t know about you, but I am totally psyched about this conference!” Nathaniel has spoken at every RubyConf.

Photo by laurafries.com
Every talk needs a metaphor, and this talk’s will be the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.
Bacon
The bacon is the connection to the creator, and to chunky bacon. It’s a 4k [...]

I’m at RubyConf 2007 for the next few days. Here’s a stream-of-consciousness blog of the first morning’s talks. Apparently there will eventually be video of the talks online.

Photo by jremsikjr

David Black kicks it off
This year is bigger than ever, with attendance 15 times greater than the first one in 2001. New tracks have been added [...]

A nice tidbit from Joe’s talk at Oscon 2007:
Exposition: I can lie if you can learn