Ive had to rely at times on silence and on talking quick / Defending myself with nothing but my walking stick. Buck65

Here are nine easy tips that will help you communicate better at your next conference.

Figure A Can you read me now?

Dan Grigsbys presentation at RubyFringe was an intentional example of this. All the titles were at the top, with humorous stock photos below.

Keep it in the top third, if possible.

Figure B Takahashi-san frowns on your tiny fonts

Giles Bowkett is such an entertaining speaker that people once skipped the first 20 minutes of lunch to hear the remainder of his presentation at RubyFringe (which involved more than 400 slides).

He also used only the typefaces included with Mac OS X, including Futura Condensed Medium and Condensed ExtraBold, which work really well in bright colors on black. So even if you dont choose to buy a single typeface, you can assemble a great-looking presentation.

• Giles Bowkett Videos Start 5 minutes in to see the slides.

Figure C Working well and looking good

Its easy with either:

Copy as RTF A TextMate plugin. You can paste the syntax-highlighted text and even edit it afterward in Keynote.

pygments A command-line syntax highlighter written in Python. Its used at GitHub to emit HTML but can also emit RTF from any source file. The resulting rich text can be pasted into Keynote.

pygmentize -f rtf -o out.rtf code.rb

Figure D Stay on target

Choosing just the right transition can soak up a lot of time and adds absolutely nothing to the content that people remember afterward.

Dan Grigsby also noted that transitions and multi-step builds make it difficult to go back and forth in the presentation since you have to wait for the transition to finish. Unless

Figure E An unforced fumble while trying to backtrack

Useful Keynote shortcuts (while the presentation is playing).

Figure F The conference wifi WILL fail when you need it most

I love live coding but often it goes awry, creating an awkward situation for both the presenter and the audience.

Give yourself some insurance and either record a short screencast that you can narrate during the presentation, or take screenshots that you can refer to.

Extra Credit!

Figure G Is grey a color?

If youre speaking at a conference, youre probably doing it to promote yourself, your projects, or your business. Make it stick in peoples minds by distinguishing yourself with a color scheme and a typeface that communicate the attitude you want to be remembered for.

Choose a color scheme and use it for all your presentations. Ideally, it would be the color scheme of your company or personal blog. If youve paid for a corporate identity, use it!

Resources

• Color Burn Widget A Mac OS X dashboard widget with a new color scheme every day.
• ColourLovers.com Tons of color combinations for every attitude.

Figure H An easy way to stand out

Again, buy a typeface and use it on your blog and in your presentations.

Theyre not as expensive as you might think! You can get a single font for $20.

Here are some nice condensed ones as mentioned above:

• Antenna
• Caslon
• Block Gothic
• Garage Gothic

Or try these shops:

• FontShop
• Sudtipos
• Vllg
• T.26
• Process Type Foundry
• H&FJ
• Typographica

Figure I Free as in not chained to the spacebar

I saved my favorite for the end

A presentation remote gives you the freedom to step away from the lectern and talk directly to the audience. The remote that comes with Mac laptops doesnt count! It only works if you have a direct line of sight to the infrared receiver on the front edge of the laptop.

A radio frequency transmitter works much better. The Kensington Presentation Remote can be bought for about $40. It works out of the box without the need to install any drivers, and its less distracting than phone-based options.

See you in Berlin!

Ill be in Berlin at RailsConf starting this Sunday. Find me and get a free PeepCode t-shirt!

UPDATE Thanks for the 40 replies right away! Weve hired an individual for the position.

Dublin

Figure A Dublin from my hotel window

I had a great time in Dublin at the end of June. I spoke at an open source conference and met several other Rubyists while I was there.

Ive frequently felt that I should bring home some tchotchke from each of the places I visit. While in Dublin I realized that its not extra things that I really want, its people!

If youre traveling for business or pleasure, I highly suggest that you find the local Ruby group or find a local co-working space and meet people there. I had breakfast with Ana Nelson, who introduced me to Paul Campbell of Contrast, who is working on an error reporting webapp for Rails developers.

He introduced me to Eamon Leonard and David Coallier who happen to be a few musically inclined PHP developers. We had a great time exploring the pubs of Dublin, and I learned that Guinness beer has a different taste in Dublin than anywhere else in the world.

Oh, and a few members of Ruby Ireland hosted a nice dinner in the city.

So the next time you find yourself in an unknown city, meet the locals!

Figure B Dublin alley

Figure C Clocks at the Contrast co-working space

Figure D Ruby Ireland meetup

Elsewhere

I just published a new PeepCode screencast about Phusion Passenger (technical editing by Phusion staff).

Ill be speaking about podcasting and entrepreneurship at BizJam Seattle on Wednesday, July 9.

Jim Freeze wanted me to mention that the Lone Star Ruby Conference is open for registration. Ill be at RailsConf in Berlin at that time, but Im sure it will be a great conference if you can get yourself to Texas. I frequently post other worldwide conference and workshop events at Ruby on Rails Workshops.

Also, Ive helped to launch a Deck-like ad network for Ruby blogs. We have several top quality publishers and have a few spots for advertisers. If you have a product, website, or service that would be of interest to Rubyists, check out Ruby Row.

The old 15-minute blog video was getting really long in the tooth, so its with great pleasure that I can present the new video made with Rails 2.2 and done by Ryan Bates. It really takes it all up a notch by showing the creation of a blog with comments, ajax, feed, api, admin interface, and more.

Ryan Bates is also the author of the wonderful Railscasts.com site that features video explanations on Rails features. Its a fantastic resource and now properly recognized on the screencasting page.

Ive also linked up the commercial Rails screencasters. The amount of material available for people interested in learning by video is simply staggering.

First up this week, a warning for those who dont closely follow the state of the Rails repository edge really means edge now. The bits for 2.2 are getting locked down for release, and the repository has been forked; for the moment, edge Rails is being identified as 2.3 , though that projected version number might change later. If youre trying to install almost-released 2.2 bits on your machine, make sure youre using the 2-2-stable branch, and not edge, which is currently seeing some major changes.

The 2-2-stable code is still seeing changes, but theyre either bug fixes or very small things. This week, that includes fixing a bug in assignment to has_one :through associations , some further tuning of CSRF protection , a fix to handling of checkboxes for Boolean attributes , updating the bundled copies of TZInfo, Prototype, and script.aculo.us, and some Ruby 1.9 compatibility work (though currently full Ruby 1.9 compatibility is targeted for Rails 2.3).

The biggest feature change in the 2.2 branch is the addition of explicit I18n support to newly-generated Rails projects, including a sample locale file, auto-loading all locales in config/locales, and sample settings in config/environment.rb. commit

Also worth noting in 2.2 is a chunk of code removal: a whole mess of special case tests for the SQL Server adapter have been chopped out of the Active Record test cases. Thats because Ken Collins has done tremendous work in making the SQL Server adapter work the way that Rails expects data adapters to work, giving us a big step in the area of backend portability. commit

On the actual edge code (the master branch in the repository), theres a lot more action. With that branch just opened, some pent-up code has been checked in, and some big changes are being made. Its an exciting time, and edge is definitely worth checking out. Here are some of the most notable changes in the past week.

One big set of changes has come from Jeremy Kemper, who has been overhauling the internal Rails testing to switch from Test::Unit::TestCase to ActiveSupport::TestCase. This work also includes requiring Mocha to test Rails (in the 2.2 code, some tests are skipped if you dont have Mocha installed) and generally making the Rails testing strategy (both within core and for generated applications) more consistent moving forward.

If youre one of the people who has always been bothered by the special-case naming of application.rb, rejoice! Its been reworked to be application_controller.rb in the edge code. More info here and here . commit

Rails 2.3 will introduce the notion of default scopes : similar to named scopes, but applying to all named scopes or find methods within the class. For example, you can write default_scope :order => 'name ASC' and any time you retrieve records from that class theyll come out sorted by name (unless you override the option, of course). commit

A lot of folks have adopted the notion of using try() to attempt operations on objects Heres Chris Wanstraths blog post introducing it. Its especially helpful in views where you can avoid nil-checking by writing code like <%= @person.try(:name) %>. Well, now its baked right into Rails. commit

Also new on the syntactic sugar front is Enumerable#none? to check that none of the elements match the supplied block. commit

The render method has been getting smarter over the years, and its going to be even smarter in 2.3. If you have an object or a collection and the naming matches up, you can now just do <% render @article %> or <% render @articles %> and things will just work. Ryan Daigle has some more examples on this. commit

On a somewhat similar note, render_component goes from deprecated to nonexistent in 2.3. If you still need it, you can install the plugin . commit

The autolink helper has been refactored to make it a bit less messy and more intuitive. commit commit

Theres a fix to a memory leak connected to thread safety and asset tags, that could bite sites that were referencing a lot of external images. Aaron Batalion contributed the fix, as well as a blog post explaining the issue. commit and commit

Finally, its worth mentioning that some controversy has erupted over a change made to the 2.2 code five months ago the addition of Array#second through Array#tenth as aliases for Array#[1] through Array#[9]. Without taking a stand on the controversy (Ive done that elsewhere), Ill just note that the most recent edge checkin as I write this trims this down to only support Array#second through Array#fifth and uses the savings in overhead to implement Array#forty-two. commit

Ben Tesch proposes the following personality test:

What I find most interesting is which movie people consider the best movie from a particular director, as it is usually very telling and polarizing in a different way, so to this point I will propose a new personality test where you reblog your favorite movie from each of these directors:

1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc

I would also personally throw in:

6. Stanley Kubrick: 2001, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, etc.
7. P.T. Anderson: Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia.
8. Errol Morris: The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, etc.

I'm a FRHMPDBF (Fargo, Rushmore, Harold and Maude, Mallrats, Pulp Fiction, Dr. Strangelove, Boogie Nights, and The Fog of War). Notes: I've only seen one Hal Ashby movie. I very easily could have gone with The Thin Blue Line, Magnolia, and perhaps even Kill Bill. I would choose anything else on the list over any of Kevin Smith's movies. Most of my picks I'd seen for the first time around the same time period, approx. 1995-1998. And what a sausage fest...I'll add Coppola's Lost in Translation to the mix. (via sandwich, who intriguingly chose Darjeeling over Rushmore, Tenenbaums, Zissou, and Bottle Rocket. I wonder what personality defect that indicates?)

When I profiled the Metropolitan Life Tower (and an unusual postscript) a couple of months ago, I mentioned that Daniel Libeskind was working on an addition to the building that would dwarf the iconic clock tower. New York magazine has a rendering of what the building might look like, taken from the architect's new book.

Initial designs show a glass-curtained tube with cutaways spiraling up and around the facade to reveal segments of terraced verdure, like cultivated patches on the side of a steep alpine slope. "We didn't just fill up the tower," the architect says. "We've taken space away [from the apartments] to create the gardens," which are actually balconies tucked within the envelope. "It's as if nature has come back into the city," he says.

At RubyConf 2008, other than giving his own Scaling Ruby talk, Gregg Pollack of EnvyCasts was hard at work getting summaries of all of the presentations from the speakers. In RubyConf 2008 in 90 Seconds you get a fast-fire summary of the summaries. In RubyConf in 31 Minutes you get a more complete record - good viewing for anyone who didn't attend the conference as it gives you a good idea of what's on the Ruby community's mind.

One of the coolest features of RubyConf

Ruby's most popular Web application framework, Ruby on Rails, takes another giant step today with the release of Rails 2.2! It follows on just five months after Rails 2.1, but offers even more significant improvements, particularly in the areas of compatibility, internationalization, and documentation. Read David Heinemeier Hansson's release post for a quick overview.

Ruby Inside's sister site, Rails Inside, was launched alongside Rails 2.1 in June, and would, you'd think, be the ideal place for a post like this, but no. Rails

Technical editing by Joshua Sierles, sysadmin at 37signals.

Content by Geoffrey Grosenbach in collaboration with Casimir Saternos.

Part of our job at PeepCode is to research new and upcoming technologies that alpha geeks are talking about. XMPP/Jabber instant messaging has been getting more buzz recently. What is it? What does it do? How can you use it to enhance your applications?

XMPP is an open, real-time instant messaging platform that is useful for sending and receiving notifications between servers and humans. You can use it to receive administrative notifications from your website or to push notifications to subscribers much more efficiently than current poll-based solutions such as RSS.

After viewing this 48 minute screencast, youll be able to work with XMPP from Ruby, including:

• Connect to a Jabber server
• Send presence notifications and update the user icon
• Receive message notifications and friend requests
• Use DRb (distributed Ruby) together with Jabber to send messages from a Rails application

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or at a discount during the month of Peepvember!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000600 of screen real estate with smoother, high frame rate animations.

By Jarkko Laine, workshop teacher and author of the Apress book Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

Modern web developers have learned to organize their server-side code into model, view, and controller.

Your front-end development can also benefit from organization into content and behavior, which is much easier to accomplish than you might think. Dare I say that it makes front-end web programming as easy as Visual Basics object and event hooks?

Jarkko Laine steps through the features of Dan Webbs Low Pro library to help you attach functionality to HTML elements and events. Youll see how Prototype.js can drive a full-featured application and give you organizational tools to keep your Javascript code maintainable.

Chapters include:

• Towards Accessible Javascript
• Brief History or Javascript on Rails
• Introducing Low Pro
• Refactoring an Existing Rails Application
• Going DRY With Multiple Elements
• Bubbling Performance with Event Delegation
• More on Behavior Classes

Refactoring your front end code will make it easier to work with, easier to extend, and easier to use. Get the scoop with this PeepCode PDF book.

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers or as a single purchase for only US$9.

I caught up with this thread on Joel’s discussion board today. We software developers will take any opportunity to rant about the bass-ackwards code we have to deal with on a regular basis. For passionate developers, it’s understandable that most code wouldn’t live up to our standardsonly a select few projects have the amount of resources necessary to truly pursue perfection. Over time the exposure to imperfect code can condition us with unfair knee-jerk reaction to new code.

How bad is the code really?

The world is full of terrible code. Usually that becomes painfully obvious at maintenance time. When an existing project is opened up for the first time by a new team member, I think the instinct is to see the flaws before the brilliance. What kinds of things make code stinky? Well it depends who you ask, but some possible reasons are:

• Unnecessary duplication of code (under-abstracted)
• Overly complicated code (over-abstracted or unnecessarily clever)
• Too many files/classes
• Giant monolithic classes
• Wrong design patterns applied
• Stupid algorithms
• Failure to use appropriate libraries or framework features (reinventing the wheel)
• Inconsistency (lack of conventions)
• Numerous obvious comments
• No documentation

Anyone whose done their share of code maintenance has probably been annoyed by most of the things on this list one time or another. “If only they had done it this way.” It’s easy to just assume the code sucks based on a first impression. Once you jump to that conclusion, every minor flaw affirms your prejudice.

Pet peeves

Let’s step back a minute and give ourselves an ego check. To an experienced developer there are hundreds of nuances that will stick out like a sore thumb, but they are likely to annoy you far more than they actually impact your productivity were you to consider them objectively.

If you’re not careful, your concern for the code boils over into judgement of the previous programmers. Maybe the last guy wasn’t up to snuff in this language, maybe his pet peeves were different, maybe he was just a blathering idiot. Whatever the case, why dwell on it?

I’ve managed to make it through a lot of bad code without slowing down much. Every once and a while a refactoring or straight-up delete and rewrite was necessary, but most of the time I was able to grit my teeth and get some changes done relatively quickly.

Real reasons code “sucks”

The problem facing you is likely to be different from what the last programmer faced. It would be foolish to assume that the software was designed with the same requirements that you have in front of you today. Who’s to say the business goals haven’t changed drastically since then?

You and the last developer have different information. Even after you’ve spent a lot of time on the code and understand all the intricacies and business goals, you still may not know the history of the project. Maybe the code has grown and shrunk and morphed into something completely different from when it started. If it’s time to refactor, maybe that’s your job.

It’s also quite possible that refactoring is not worth it. Good developers innately want maintainable and aesthetically pleasing code, but there is a cost. We can’t write perfect software before we understand it, and we can’t refactor without spending time. The developer is usually in a better position than the manager to assess the long-term cost of not refactoring, but he also has a vested interested in exaggerating that cost. To make a fair assessment, the developer must have a direct business interest. Even then there’s a great deal of uncertainty. It’s always a gamble.

Cognitive dissonance

Developers are conditioned to be right. Our job requires a fiercely logical thought process and the ability to make absolute assertions. Being wrong means things are broken, sometimes spectacularly so. And because we think so hard about things in this way, our conclusions are usually well-reasoned. But we are still human, and we still have the same defense mechanisms around our belief systems as everybody else. The insidious thing is that our reasoning blinds us to our own subjectivity. Our open-mindedness is a badge of pride, but also a set of subconscious blinders.

The only really objective thing about software is its output.

Software engineering is about making choices. Some choices are pragmatic (C++ for performance), some are philosophical (Ruby vs Python), but most are an intangible mixture of past experience and future expectations. When you see some code for the first time, the chances that it will mesh with your experience and philosophy are pretty slim. Eventually you may come to appreciate it for what it is, but in the meantime every tradeoff that didn’t follow your current line of thought will irk you.

Software is messy

None of this is to say that there aren’t real quality problems in the software industryof course there are. But I think it’s worth carefully considering our own motivations and biases before judging how bad the problem really is.

We may not like dealing with inadequately-funded balls of mud, but that’s probably where most of the paying work is. Even in relatively clean code bases, reasonable people can disagree on style or architecture points. Regardless of initial code quality, there will always be difficult and inelegant maintenance that needs to be done. My goal is to keep emotion out of it, and just fix problems. Refactoring is great if a business case can be made, otherwise just slog through as fast as possible without complaining.

Easier said than done, I know.

Scotland on Rails is pleased to announce that Conference2009 will be held March 26-28 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

We are now accepting submissions. The closing date for submissions is December 1st 2008, so theres still time! Please mail your plaintext proposals for 45 minute sessions to submissions@scotlandonrails.com.

Alternatively, if you are interested in sponsoring the conference, please mail sponsorship@scotlandonrails.com for a prospectus.

Lastly, if you wish to be notified when we open for registration, you can sign up on the site.

Come and enjoy all that Edinburgh has to offer (whisky! castle! volcano! ruby! whisky!) in March. We hope to see you there.

Yugui (Yuki Sonoda) announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1-preview 1:

This is a preview release of Ruby 1.9.1, which will be the first stable version of the Ruby 1.9 series. Try it out now and get an early taste of a modern, faster, multilingualized, and much improved Ruby with clearer syntax.

If you encounter any bugs or problems, please let us know via the official issue tracking system:

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org

You can download the release from;

• ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-preview1.tar.bz2

  SIZE: 6169022 bytes MD5: 0d51dc949bb6b438ad4ebfabbb5f6754 SHA256: dc39000537d7c7528ef26af8e1c3a6215b30b6c579c615eaec7013513410456a

• ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-preview1.tar.gz

  SIZE: 7409682 bytes MD5: 738f701532452fd5d36f5c155f3ba692 SHA256: 99443bdae9f94ba7b08de187881f8cbee172379edf9c5fa85fc04c869150ff6d

• ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-preview1.zip

  SIZE: 8569116 bytes MD5: 5f68246246c4cd29d8a3b6b34b29b6ac SHA256: a6c3a7bf7ea83b595024764926353e08596a78e40c57ac58c568662e5e88df95