It’s time for a social!

Join us on Tuesday at Capital Ale House in Richmond’s West End for light banter about Ruby, Rails and Related topics.

Let us know you’ll be there

Here’s a copy of Matt’s prototype.js presentation

And a few links from Jon so you can learn more about Git without a trip to your local library:

Linus Tolvalds on Git

GIT Peepcode

Git on Rails screencast

Git-SVN Crash Course

Be a man and migrate your SVN repo to GIT

Handy Git aliases

show the current branch name in your prompt

Hey, guys! I’m not going to be able to make it on Tuesday even though I’ll be in the area shortly thereafter.

I’d like to introduce you to Blanket, a library designed to make automated, remote backup easier. I’ve had to set up automated backup before, and I wrote this package to make it more enjoyable for myself and others. I was also experimenting with a lot of new technologies and techniques, which makes it even more rewarding that the end product ending being a preliminary success.

The pitch is: go from 0 to backed up in ten minutes plus transfer time. And you can set up as many blankets as you want, to backup a piece of filesystem, a MySQL database, an SVN repository (or Confluence, but I realize not everyone is into that.) After you get it working, it should take no time at all to put it in a cron job. Get your stuff backed up, people! It’s simple now, and I will help.

An introduction to Blanket is available at the excellent GitHub. There’s also the blanket project on RubyForge which means that I also have my first Gem in the wild.

Install it, kick it around, and if you like what you see, take a look at the development road map and see if you’d like to get involved. I have some GitHub invites if you need them, so please contact me if that’s an issue.

Some helpful tips over at Macworld to keep Mac users up to speed: http://www.macworld.com/article/49489/2006/02/softwarespeed.html

Show up @ 5:30 to meet and chat. Presentations should start around 6.

This month Jon Maddox will be presenting and introduction to Git.

Also, Matt Overstreet will be discussing the prototype.js library “Ruby on Javascript”.

Presentation will be follow by an Open mic and Jam time.

Head out to upcoming to let us know you’ll be there

Apple continues to encourage the adoption of Rails. First by adding ruby, rails, capistrano, cocoa bindings, etc to the basic Leopard install andRuby support in Xcode. Now they’ve upped the ante by including support for rails in Xcode. This was announcing to the Apple Development world as the main headline on their regular Developer Connection mailer.

Have a look at the artilce here . This is the first in a promised 3 part series intended to cover creation to deployment.

A couple thoughts,

First, while Xcode has rich SCM support it’s agonizingly not available in the “Organizer” interface used for Rails apps. This won’t stop command line users and you could use something like svnx for subversion, but the lack of integration of such a well developed Xcode feature smarts. Not to mention Git…

That said, the design interface is really worth a look. It’s wonderfully simple. The editor supports a file system tree view, basically cloning Textmate. At the top of the window are 4 “buckets” that can be used to hold your own scripts, grouping them to match your coding stages. The tutorial also instructs you on how to add a call to script/server to your “run” bucket. It would be a simple to add Capistrano and testing scripts. Another bucket comes pre-filled with your basic rake tasks. (Maddening, because they are detecting it’s a rails app and adding these, but not bothering to look for a .svn folder.) Still, I could see pulling up a chair and working here in a revision or two.

Join us on Tuesday for a code jam! Bring your projects or questions. Let us know your showing up: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/428759

I would like to, again, thank James Robertson for coming down to Richmond to talk about Smalltalk. I was very happy with the talk - everyone seemed really interested - questions were even asked!

James covered some basic Smalltalk stuff: syntax, reserved words, operators, image-based environment, browsers. He then pulled out a Seaside demo, complete with some in-web-browser debugging. [I'm thinking I should have taken some notes during the talk so that I can write a better review.]

It was nice seeing Smalltalk in action, one of the Grand daddies of dynamic languages. Remember, though Smalltalk is roughly 30 years old, from it came: Refactoring support, SUnit - which spawned JUnit, Edit & Continue - the ability to work with live code in a debugger, and, of course, MVC. I'm sure there are more items.

James brought and left a few CDs with VisualWorks 7.5, non-commercial version, preloaded. Contact either Mel Riffe or Matt Overstreet for information on obtaining a copy; he also sent a few with the visiting Charlottesville crew (thanks for coming out guys - excellent questions)

Feel free to add your review in the comments. Cheers!