Sean Mountcastle

Back in July I attended the Advanced Ruby Studio in Reston, VA. At the time I had wanted to blog about it but my life suddenly became extremely busy and I left my blog to languish for several months. To rectify that, I’ve decided to write up this post providing an overview of the studio and my impressions.

The instructors for the three day course were Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, two elite Ruby programmers (and excellent teachers). While I wouldn’t consider every topic covered during the course advanced, I will say that there was a good mix of intermediate and advanced content (and some of the advanced stuff was really advanced!)

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The folks over at Aquafadas are running a promotion entitled, “Give Good Food to Your Mac.” It’s a very sweet deal as you get to choose from 28 different Mac OS X apps and the more you purchase the bigger the discount. If you purchase three apps, you get a 30% discount, 40% for five, 50% for seven and 70% for ten.

Here’s a little hint, pick the five apps you really want (even if they are the most expensive apps available). This will start you off with a 40% discount for the apps you want. Then pick the two cheapest apps — once this brings your discount up to 50%, the total will probably be less than it was without those two apps (unless you’ve only been choosing the cheapest apps). Finally, pick the next three cheapest apps — you should end up with ten apps for a total cost which was less than price of your original five! You’re getting the five apps you want, plus another five free and then they’ll throw in another app at check out (for me it was Postino, a feed reader — I’m not sure if they give the same bonus app away to everyone or not).

This great deal is time limited and ends on December 9th, so get on over there and scoop up some great Mac apps.

The full list of apps can be found after the jump.

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My how time has flown. It’s been four months and a day since I last blogged and I need to get back to it. By now I’ve probably lost all of my subscribers and NetNewsWire doesn’t even recognize it as a dinosaur (I guess that means my blog’s turned into oil — yay for me with it nearing $100/barrel).

I have several unfinished posts stuck here in WordPress and several more rattling around in my head. For those of you who are still hanging around, here are some of the topics:

• The Advanced Ruby Studio (I attended this back in July).
• How to distribute your Ruby app without giving away your source code.
• Performance tuning a networking application (in C).
• Developing for mobile phones (specifically the iPhone and Google’s Android).
• Game programming in Ruby (with and without Rails).
• Interviewing technical candidates.
• Startups.
• Book reviews.

This past Wednesday we held the July Northern VA Ruby Users Group. We started off with two short talks, first by Patrick Reagan on two mocking libraries for Ruby (Flexmock and Mocha), the second was on Haml and Sass by Devin Mullins. For the final hour of the meeting, Matt Scilipoti spoke about using Rails with legacy databases.
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My friend Dave is was looking to get an iPhone now that his Treo died. I already have AT&T service and I’d love to upgrade to an iPhone as well. Being an old AT&T Wireless customer from before they were purchased by Cingular and renamed (and now back to the old name) does not appear to be an asset. I’ve had the service before I was married, consequently if I’m going to upgrade my phone, consolidating my service with my wife’s through AT&T’s family plan would probably be best for us.
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Last week, I was fortunate enough to be one of the few folks who attended the Northern VA IGDA meeting where Paul Barnett spoke to us about desire. Specifically what you can and cannot control to influence your customers into buying your product (in his case a subscription to a MMORPG). That is, to make them desire your product.
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