These past two weeks I have been engaged in something that is best described as “continuous contact parenting”.  In past summers we have sent the kinds off to various camps.  But this summer I am at home and available to spend with them 24/7.  I want to make the most of this time.   Because I know that in less than a decade both of them will out of the house, and I will probably have time for them at that point, but they will probably be too busy with their lives for me.

But how to make the most of the summer?  Should I just sit around and do whatever comes to mind.  Should we just play board game after board game.  Read books.  Watch movies.  What should we do?

I had some very specific ideas on what an ideal summer day might look like.  It should have exercise.  Time for eating.  Piano practice.  Math worksheets.  Piano writing.  But there is one area that I thought we could focus on and have a lot of fun:  Electronics and robotics.  After putting all that together, we came up with a daily schedule that we would try for two weeks:

The electronics time was spent learning about voltage, current, resistance, using the multi-meter, understanding the relationship between voltage, current, resistance, soldering, striping wires, reading circuit diagrams, making connections between components on a breadboard, using a Parallax Basic stamp.

Here are some pictures to give you some idea:

We also put together some kits:

In fact, we have a “wall of completed projects” where we put a postcard or something to indicate the projects that we have finished:

We have also programmed Parallax’s scribbler robot. 

During our free time we did end up playing a board game, Settlers of Catan.  My friend, Daniel Parker, in Austin introduced it to us a couple of weeks ago.  Since then we have played dozens of games.

This is just a small glimpse of the things we have been up to. 

Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), the creator of Ruby, was there.  We got to meet and talk.  He is a very nice person.

Here is a picture of (from left to right) me, Matz, and Daya.

The previous posts are random notes that I took through out the conference.  I mainly took them for myself… but maybe they might be of interest to you too..

jQuery, merb, datamapper

Who is your customer?

What are you building?

What do you know about your customer?  how do you fit in their lives?  Pricing?  Marketing?

Build a good trial

target audience> trials > customer

Eating your own dogfood…

No integrated billing…

mperham@gmail.com

http://mikeperham.com

Associate Professor

http://faculty.stedwards.edu/jameswm/

jameswm@stedwards.edu

Spiceworks overview

updating remote installations

performance of ruby

avoiding deadlock

extensions for adding and modifying

scanner tweaks

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Live examples of jQuery: http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Live_Examples_of_jQuery

HPricot – good for scraping websites

doc = Hpricot(open(“”)

http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/

http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/hpricot01.html

Juggernaut – lets you do server push with rails

http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/

Ambition

create SQL statements

http://errtheblog.com/posts/63-full-of-ambition

http://ambition.rubyforge.org/

Prawn

- easy ruby based PDF generation

http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/

http://www.rubyinside.com/prawn-ruby-pdf-library-987.html

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoGeneratePDFs

Capistrano

Ruby VMs

roo – spreadsheets

can open google docs!

http://roo.rubyforge.org/

http://rubyforge.org/projects/roo/

dtrace

skynet – map reduce for ruby

Data Fabric – easy chart data

http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/7/9/introducing-data_fabric

merb

Mack Framework

Sinatra – easy quick way to build web application

Webby – generate static websites – rake task to

shoes – dsl for generating GUI applications

Hackety Hack – help kids learn programming

redmine –

Pool Party

RAD – Ruby Arduino Development – electronics (build robots)

http://rad.rubyforge.org/

Adhearsion – builds astrics – Voip

Rack

http://rack.rubyforge.org/

create a web frame work with only interfacing with Rack…

passenger

github

Starling – a light weight server for reliable distributed messageing

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/events/ruby-sunday-scaling-twitter-and-other-lessons-from-mr-cook-001221.php

http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter

http://www.justinball.com/2008/08/18/using-starling-workling-with-ruby-on-rails/

Ruby EventMachine

http://rubyeventmachine.com/

http://rubyforge.org/projects/eventmachine

Thin – fast, fast server..

Ebb

NeverBlock – really fast web server for Ruby…

(creator of Ruby)

4,000 years ago we had one language (Babel)

That one language was “Fortran”

Hired by NaCl  – open source integrated

1999 – First book published

It should be “Rails on Ruby” since Rails is a DSL for the web built with Ruby…

Sometimes Smart People:  Just don’t understand the nature of ordinary brains..

Flexibility <–>Understandability

Ruby became “Enterprisy”

“There are under one million professional Ruby developer now and were projecting there will be four million plus by 2013″

Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner (eweek.com)

Ruby focuses on programmers NOT computers.

Primary goal is to enjoy programming…

Matz: “I love meters”

Question from the audience: “Do you think you are learning how humans related to world by creating a language?”

Works for EngineYard – Rubinus lead developer (http://rubini.us/)

meme – an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation

alias_method_chain is AOP…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

Zed Shaw

http://www.zedshaw.com/

PickAxe book online

http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

in the ruby community, ideas spread quickly.. Things change quickly…

Who doesn’t like it?  The Enterprise… They consider it dangerous… (could he be talking about EA?)