It was a great conference @madisonruby, and I’ve been to a lot of them…  Although I haven’t entirely decided if it was an awesome conference in it’s own right, or if I just had an awesome time. Don’t get me wrong Jim and Jen and their staff did an incredible job, and it was a very well, and very innovative conference.  So my previous statement was motivated by the fact that this is one of the first events where I was really able to take the time and hang out and socialize after the conference, and that made a big impact on me.  In all seriousness it was an awesome event in it’s own right!

The recording gear I’m using now is simpler to setup and tear down and takes less space to hall, after doing this for almost five years and the last two on my own I’ve started to figure out how to relax.  Of course it has taken a lot of refinements over the past two years to simplify and adjust to all the equipment changes involved when I went from SD to HD.

Off the top of my head the things that were really awesome about MadisonRuby:

• Local artisans / entrepreneurs presenting on their passion
• Contentious panels with a great moderator (@stevenbristol)
• Sexy Yoga (@l4rk)
• Overflow room with video of main hall (yes larger conferences have this, but I had not seen it at a regional ruby event)
• 5k Run and related 5k Drink Run (alright it was a walk, but there was a good 40 yards or so of sprinting)
• @jremsikjr / @jenremsik as organizers
• … time to socialize and hang out with many of the folks that I’d only met briefly in the past
• … oh yes there were numerous great presentations

If you get the chance put it on your schedule, I can only see this conference (like the state’s cheese) getting better with time!

So glad I had the opportunity to participate.

If you’re asking where are the videos, please follow @confreaks on twitter for details.  The recording was done in conjunction with Less Films and post production is being done by them as well.

Normally I’d just hook up my MBP and use synergy to share the keyboard and mouse, but right now I have my MBP doing other things…  So I checked out the latest version of my app to the windows box and went to run the migrations.  FAIL

No sqlite3 file… I guess I haven’t done any development on this box in a very long time.  So I run a

gem update –system

It eventually complets, and then I do a

gem install sqlite3-ruby

This ultimately results in an error message about not having nmake installed.

So figuring there was not a native version for windows yet, I ran the following command:

gem list –remote –all sqlite

To get a list of all gems starting with sqlite, found the sqlite3-ruby gem and installed the prior version, to see if it was already available for windows.

gem install sqlite3-ruby -v=1.2.3

And that did the trick.

Net result I’m back up and running my app on the windows machine, making changes and finshing videos.

The rubyconf2008 videos should be available on Tuesday (11/25/08), follow ‘confreaks’ on twitter for the latest news.

This morning we had Matz’s Keymote – Reasons for Ruby, then in room one I’ve watched Greg Pollack’s presentation on scaling ruby, and am now watching Using Git in Ruby Applications by Scott Chacon. Interesting git for everything.

Trying to get a regional conference organizer’s meeting together tomorrow evening.

One more a link on the name change at YELLOWPAGES.COM know known as AT&T Interactive.

Hard to believe this is my 3rd RubyConf.

Good things are in the wind…

Hopefully more soon from the east coast, videos will be recorded, processed and posted to Confreaks as quickly as we can.