Meetings
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of July, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. It's very likely it will held be in the Skills Matter overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, this is dependant on people signing up early enough. If you don't we'll be in the smaller 1 Sekforde St. venue and have to turn folk away. So please do register your attendance early (see the note about registration below).
Agenda
Note: Expect more info on each of these talks as we get closer to the actual date of the meeting.
Starling + Memcached
James Cox says this about his talk:
As part of my anti-hermitization, I'll be swinging by LRUG for possibly the first time to
show off starling and why it's cool. Starling was a
project born from trying to manage message queues using memcached.
I'll try and explain how it came about, show how it works and figure out some ways it could be
used productively.
Acts As Xapian
Francis Irving:
I'd like to give a talk about my new Rails search engine plugin,
which is called acts_as_xapian
Pub
The talks generally are all done and dusted by 8pm, at which point we decamp to the local pub, The Crown Tavern for a spot of socialising. If you can't make the talks for whatever reason, you're always welcome to turn up just for the post-mortem in the pub.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows Skills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past few meetings we've used their overflow venue and thus avoided having to turn people away because of fire-regulations. We hope to do so again so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room).
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Jun 19, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 9th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. It's likely, if enough people sign up, that it will be in the Skills Matter overflow venue at The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, if people don't sign up early enough we'll be in the normal 1 Sekforde St. venue. So please do register your attendance early (see the note about registration below).
Agenda
Ruby as Multimedia glue
Nick Ludlam offers up:
A talk about implementing a gem for communicating with the open source MythTV software,
streaming and transcoding recordings on the fly with the aid of Mongrel, and viewing them
using a custom interface written using RubyCocoa on Mac OS X. The talk will
be a whistlestop tour of the various aspects of getting all this working.
Nick released the various components that he talked about on his website and on his github account.
A video of Nick's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video. His slides are also available.
Genomes On Rails
Matt Wood is going to give a talk about the work he's been doing with rails at work:
The Human Genome Project aimed to determine the entire DNA sequence of man:
it was completed in 13 years after an international effort and a billion dollar budget. To further our understanding
of DNA, genes, proteins and their function, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
is building the next generation of high throughput sequencing, using Ruby and Rails.
This talk will cover the infrastructure required to handle multi-petabyte, highly scalable systems
and how we're using Rails to quickly build flexible software to support this effort.
Matt also gave a longer version of this talk at RailsConf Portland 2008 on the Sunday.
A video of Matt's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video. His slides are also available.
Pub
We'll head on over to The Crown Tavern for a drink after the talks. We aim to finish the talks at around about 8pm, so if you don't think you'll be able to make it for the talks head on over to the pub to catch up on what went on.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows SKills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past few meetings we've used their overflow venue and thus avoided having to turn people away because of fire-regulations. We hope to do so again so please register now rather than later (Skills Matter need about a weeks notice to book the larger room).
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on May 27, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 12th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St.. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.
Agenda
Settling New Caprica: getting your pet project off the ground.
Tom Armitage launched a rails forum site called New Caprica back in March after ~9 months of toil. In his own words:
On the way it's had two rewrites, I've taught myself Test:Unit, RSpec,
Capistrano, and a few other things through it, and it currently has
about 74% C0 coverage and a 2:1 Test:Code ratio.
I'm also pretty exhausted, and now have the joy of wrangling real users.
Anyhow, I thought there could be something fun in lessons learned, a few
bits of advice I realised on the way, and perhaps a small demo of the
software.
A video of Tom's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video.
Monkeyweaving: Live Native Monkeypatching
Tim Becker popped up on our mailing list to offer up a talk about a new meta-programming library called weave that he'd been developing. In his own words:
weave is a library for 'live native monkey patching'. It provides a
native wrapper to the C functions in the MRI Ruby implementation that
are involved in creating native extensions. This allows you to swap
native code in and out at runtime.
A video of Tim's talk, filmed by Skills Matter is available on Google Video
Pub
It's LRUG tradition to follow up the formal part of the night with a drink or two at The Crown Tavern. It's an excellent opportunity to find out what the rest of the ruby community is up to, and find people to help you out with your own pet projects. If you don't think you'll make it for the talks we're usually in the pub from about 8:00pm, so come along and don't miss out on the fun.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration allows SKills Matter to organise a larger room if we need it. For the past couple of meetings we've used the overflow venue, but prior to that we've had to close registration and turn people away. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Apr 24, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 14th of April, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St. the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. However, depending on numbers (see the note about registration below) we might move to a larger venue.
Agenda
A video of the meeting, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google video (or the Skills Matter site).
Show'n'Tell
Lots of people have probably written code (be it gems, rails plugins, collections of rake tasks or little itch-scratcher scripts) that they're kinda proud of, but don't really want to pad out a 5-10 minute demo / show-off into one of our "traditional" 20-30 minute talks, so we never get to hear about it. As a community we're probably missing out on a lot of sweet ruby goodness because of that.
This month we hope to change that by running a bunch of Show'n'Tell sessions where people show off their code for 5-10 mins. There's no set idea on what you should show off: perhaps a neat function you're really proud of, perhaps a whole gem, perhaps just some .irbrc hacks that you think are super useful. Anything goes, as long as it's code.
Some people that have volunteered so far:
There's plenty of room for more stuff, so get in touch to volunteer something.
Pub
Exhausted and weary from all the code being thrown around we'll stumble into The Crown Tavern to try to make sense of it all. Here's where we'll hatch master plans to combine all the gems, rake tasks and scripts into a new framework for world domination. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, but don't want to be left out of the LRUG master-plan you should definitely come along to the pub and sign up for a minor bureaucratic position in the New World Order.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory over the past few months to help Skills Matter with managing the rooms. Last month registrations happened early enough that Skills Matter were able to book a larger venue, however prior to that registrations haven't been timely enough and we've had to close registration and turn people away at the doors. The larger room, close to the usual venue, needs about a weeks notice for Skills Matter to book it. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Mar 16, 2008
The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 10th of March, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, in our usual Skills Matter venue at 1 Sekforde St. the Skills Matter overflow venue The Old Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. (See note about registration below.)
Agenda
It's entering silly season in the ruby conference year, with 9 conferences due in March and April (according to this calendar). All the speakers at this meeting are talking at one or more of these conferences.
Challenges in making Ruby run effectively on a JVM
Kresten Krab Thorup, track host and speaker at both QCon and RubyFools, will provide an overview of the issues, trade-offs and challenges in making dynamic object-oriented languages run effectively; both in general, and specifically making Ruby run well on the JVM. Kresten has many years deep knowledge of getting the most out of a JVM, and has recently been working on an research project on building yet another JVM-based virtual machine for Ruby and thus, the talk is organized around issues and findings in building this virtual machine.
A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.
mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app for Channel 4
Thomas Pomfret is going to give us a trailer version of his Scotland On Rails talk. The blurb from the conference website says:
mobileAct Unsigned is Channel 4 TV search for the best unsigned band in Britain. The site lets bands and fans to communicate and
share media. In addition, users get to vote on who should win the million pound recording deal. "mobileAct: a high-risk Rails app
for Channel 4" will report back on Mint's experiences building this mass-market application. In the light of recent TV voting
scandals, the spotlight was on voting. In a very public arena, we had to make sure not only that the vote was fair, but that
it could be seen to be fair.
So we can expect his "trailer" to cover some or all of that.
A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.
Handling Long-Running Tasks in Rails
Andrew Stewart is also talking at Scotland On Rails and so as not to be shown up by Thomas's extra preparation is also going to give us a trailer for his talk, described on the conference site as follows:
Rails is a web framework and thus designed for HTTP's synchronous request and response: you make a request to the application,
the application executes it and returns the response. For your application to feel snappy its filters and actions should take
no more than a few milliseconds to execute. But what do you do if you need to run a task that takes more than a few
milliseconds? Perhaps ten minutes or even longer? You need to move execution off the request-response thread and onto
a different one.
Rails doesn't support this out of the box and it's not obvious how to do this correctly. Happily a number of plugins fill
the gap. They all work differently, though, and cater for different situations. The one you need for your application
depends on your situation.
This session lays out all your options and explains where each plugin is best suited. It shows you how to work with each
plugin. By the end you will be able to make an informed decision about which one you need in any given situation - and how
to use it well.
We obviously can't expect a "trailer" to cover all the plugins and solutions out there, but it's bound to cover some of them.
A video of this talk, filmed by Skills Matter, is available on Google Video or the Skills Matter site.
Pub
As usual, we'll head down to The Crown Tavern after the "serious" meeting. There's usually lots of good ruby chat in the pub and it's a great opportunity to try and thrash out those thorny problems with work or personal projects. If you're not sure that you'll make it for the main meeting, you should definitely come along to the pub and meet up with us there.
Registration
Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come. Registration has pretty much become mandatory, as in the past few meetings we've had to close the doors after an influx of registrants over the final weekend, resulting in standing room only. Skills Matter can book a larger room, but they need much more notice in order to do so. Please, therefore, register now rather than later.
There's also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.
Posted by Murray Steele on Feb 19, 2008