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.

Tomorrow is the first day of my last week in the office at AT&T Interactive (ATTi).

It was a tough decision to leave behind the teams that I have built up at ATTi over the last two and a half years, but living in Oregon has long been on of my goals.  My step-daughter and grand sons will be four hours away, and I believe it will be easier to get my kids and extended family up to Oregon (our vacation stomping ground, growing up) than it was to get them down to SoCal.

Aaron Patterson will be taking over the ruby community relationship role that I was filling at ATTi.

Alf Mikula and JR Fent will continue to run the LA Ruby Meetup, and JR and I are going to continue to run the Los Angeles Ruby Conference.

My work with Confreaks will continue and we’re looking forward to recording and publishing the International Ruby Conference X in New Orleans.

G5 is a ruby shop and over time we will be building up the engineering team.

I’ve had a great time in Los Angeles and look forward to the new challenges in Bend.

There are way too many people to thank and to recognize, if I tried I’d only end up missing people, feel free to contact me at coby@randquist.us or coby@confreaks.com.

This is our 28th la ruby meetup, starting in May of 2008.  We’ve only missed one month.  28 meetings… That’s great, but in addition to the regular monthly meetup a we’ve also ended up hosting various code jams, hackfests, and lunches.  In addition Evan Phoenix and Shane Becker have recently established Nerd Club Los Angeles that meets every Tuesday night from 7PM to 10PM at Blank Spaces on Wilshire Blvd near La Brea.

So the expansion of the Ruby community here in LA has been awesome over the last two and a half years.

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The jira4r gem is in source and has a mirror on github. You will also need the soap4r gem.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'jira4r/jira_tool'
gem 'soap4r'
require 'soap/mapping'

login_name = 'soaptest'
login_password = 'soaptest'
jira_address = "http://jira.atlassian.com"

j = Jira4R::JiraTool.new(2,jira_address)

j.login(login_name,login_password)

comment = Jira4R::V2::RemoteComment.new()

comment.author = login_name

unless ARGV[0].nil? or ARGV[1].nil?
comment = Jira4R::V2::RemoteComment.new()
comment.author = login_name
comment.body = ARGV[1]
j.addComment(ARGV[0].upcase, comment)
puts "Added comment '#{comment.body}' to issue: #{ARGV[0]}"
end

You will want to update the login_name, login_password, and jira_address variables to your own values. It’s late I’ll do more to clean it up and experiment more with the Jira RPC API.

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.

If you have questions feel free to contact me.

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.