So it’s once again dinner break and day 2 of RubyConf 2006 is drawing nearer to a close. Today, the dinner break is a brisk 1 and a half hours, and then there will be a Keynote by Matz. Because of the shorter timeframe, and the need for food, I’ll try and make this quick.

I arrived at RubyConf around 8:46 and quickly found a seat with a plateful of cheese danishes from the continental breakfast bar.

The setup time today was much quicker than it was yesterday, so the first talk wasn’t far off schedule.

The opening talk was Open Classes, Open Companies by Nathaniel Talbott of test/unit fame. I expected this talk to be very dry and businessy, much like his RailsConf 2006 talk Homesteading. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just how I think of businessy talks. To my pleasure there was more talking about Ruby during this talk, but had no slides or anything to keep me completely alert as it droned on for what felt like hours. Every time I hear a talk by Nathaniel, I get the urge to quit my day job and break out onto my own as a consultant. I suppose that’s the type of inspiration Nathaniel is hoping to provide with his current string of businessy talks, but that’s fine with me. I don’t have a problem with businessy talks, they just aren’t as entertaining to me as code centric talks. Nathaniel did a fairly decent job of relating Ruby to business, and discussed how businesses can be improved by following these learned concepts.

Next up was Laurent Sansonetti with Leveraging Mac OS X from Ruby. I was really eager to watch this presentation in hopes that it would further motivate me to purchase a mac. This talk rocked out loud for a lot of reasons. Laurent did an excellent job of live demoing usage of RubyOSA to control itunes, and RubyCocoa to display a basic media player he’s written. I’m really hyped on the progress he as a sole developer has made on RubyOSA, and I’m really looking forward to getting a mac so I can write some killer software with it.

Directly following Laurent was Rinda and DRb in the Real World by Glenn Vanderburg. This was a fairly good talk, and covered setting up a tuplespace and a ringserver with Rinda (at least he had some slides displaying code and showing some of the relationships between the tuplespace and the ringserver.)

Sometime around Glenn’s talk, a couple signed draft copies of the second edition of The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton were given out, and I didn’t win one. However, I did end up winning something directly before the dinner break, which I’ll go on about later.

Anyway, for lunch we all went across the street for a bite of chipotle and then returned to wait forever and a day for the conference to resume.

Once the conference began again, what was supposed to be a talk by John Susser entitled More than enough rope to hang yourself was instead a series of 9 lightening rounds, as John wasn’t in attendence due to a severe case of the flu or something.

These lightening talks were mostly really interesting, and included some awesome examples of Ruby being used in the real world by Ara T. Howard. There was also a brief description of what sounds extremely useful, called “Hoe” by everyone’s favorite asshole Ryan Davis.

The last three talks before dinner were all exemplary, and deserve a dedication of paragraphs. Because of this, and the fact that I’m now out of time on my dinner break, I’ll join these 3 talks in to my post on Matz’ keynote later this evening.

I will also include some photos of the prize I won, compliments of Microsoft and the good humored Ani Babaian. She was also THE .NET chick who won the Ruby Cookbook (or some other book) yesterday for being the person in the room who supposedly knew the least about Ruby.

At any rate, back in a few hours.