Keith’s Blog

I took a couple of quick shots of the group:

and the grid:

More details on my xml.com blog post.
Tim Bray has better photos here.

I’ve been messing around at work trying to make some automated scheduling charts (basically Gantt-like) in Ruby. I’ve implemented it a couple of times using SVG::Graph, which is close to what I need, but I end up having to rewrite a lot of methods whenever I really start using it. It occurred to me today [...]

Well, I finally caught up with the crowd and got JRuby running on one of my dev boxes. The reason I’d been interested in it from the getgo was because Ruby lacks any support for internal XSLT processing. All those system()s were starting to get me down, especially as I’m trying to get a DocBook->PDF [...]

[Read this for an introduction to what I'm talking about].
Now that we’ve got our FrameMaker documents in XML, how can we exploit their new format? One of the first things I did was to create new ways of reading (eventually changing) the simple data stored within them. This isn’t all that earth-shattering, but when you [...]

I gave a short talk at the first North Bay Ruby Users Group last Thursday (Feb 15, 2007) about my recent work implementing an Atom Publishing Protocol library in Ruby. Here’s the presentation:

[Read this for an introduction to what I'm talking about].
The first step of doing anything useful with MX is the ability to get back out into MIF. Thankfully, this is an entirely trivial job in XSLT.
[This code thanks to my boss, Andrew Savikas.]

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″
xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
<!– author: Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media –>

[...]

My O’Reilly colleague Andy Bruno has just written a pair of posts on converting FrameMaker’s MIF (link may be old/die) format into XML (henceforth ‘MX’). I’ll be writing a few posts outlining the ways in which we’ve leveraged MX at O’Reilly.
[Update: Series continues here with getting back into MIF, and reading bookfiles.]

I’m pleased to announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group with a first meeting on February 15th, 2007 at 7:30pm 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us their meeting space, so we’ll be holding the meetings at [...]

Especially a picture of SVN commit messages:

PS: That’s an RSS feed via Trac, a decent tool if you can manage to set it up…

So, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately in the Ruby community about BDD and rspec. Like this person on ruby-talk, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. However Dave Astels’ great Google Tech Talk video (worth watching in full rather than just a part, thanks James Britt) has at least [...]