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.

http://odz.mx/61Pb1

I’ll be writing more about Confreaks, the equipment I’m using now, and the revised process I’m using these days.

dscacheutil -flushdnscache

on 10.4 and earlier try:

lookupd -flushdnscache

Needed this just now as I was setting up the new sub-domain for Goruco 2009 Confreaks site.

ATTi is a Platinum sponsor for this conference and one of my Sr. Engineers, Lori Holden will be presenting on ActiveORM, part of the merb + rails => Rails 3 project.

Instead I spent the day doing an internal web-cast of our (ATTi) all hands meeting.  Using technology and skills I primarily aquired while building out Confreaks.

Carl Youngblood my partner and Brad Midgley our as needed hired hand are actively working in Florida to post process what was recorded today and to prepare for tomorrow.  I regret that I was unable to be there, but we (that’s the corporate we again) had a major system upgrade scheduled for this weekend that I could not skip out on.  As it turns out we had to push the release off a little in order to keep certain partner agreements.  Regardless we have work to do this weekend to get things wrapped up for the full launch of this system upgrade in a couple of weeks.  So I appreciate my business partner and the effort he has put in to improving our systems and processes to make the AAC recording go smoothly.

Which leaves me sitting here, reading emails, my most recent copy of Communications of the ACM, and general playing around on the interwebs…  Just installed the Tweeter-Tools plugin for WordPress.

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.

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.

Headed overseas to record the second annual Smidig conference.

I wanted to stick a photo of LAX in here, but it turns out the USB cable I use to transfer photos got stuck in a bag that I put in my checked-in suitcase… So photos will have to wait until I get to Norway.

It’s 77 degrees here in LA now, supposed to hit a high of 92, in Oslo it is 50 degrees with a high of 52.  Oslo is also 9 hours ahead of LA, so I’ll be landing arriving there Wednesday at 2:30 PM, which is the equivalent of 5:30 AM here.  Yes I am practicing my math for you, are you impressed?

I’m really liking my AT&T data card (company issue) it is a fantastic convenience at times like these.

Been home about 90 minutes, in that time I helped my friends over at Rareview deploy Build 2.0 of their project management application Projecturf.com.  This is a different role for me, I am not involved with the development of the software, just sysadmin functionality on their servers, and their source code repository.  So they have been working on an update to the site since May, it was great to see it launch with as little effort as was required.

Only six more days until I have to jump on a plan for Oslo, Norway to record Smidig ’08.  It’ll be fun, just have to get my YPC team going on the next release before I head out next week.

Because we don’t record the open spaces portion we are able to participate, although a majority of the presentations are done in Norwegian, the open space discussions were conducted in English when ever necessary. Check out the Smidig 2007 videos from last years conference, Warning: there are only a few in English so if your Norwegian is non-existent you’ll have a hard time getting much out of them.