Ok, so now that I’ve returned home, I’ll post the second half of today that I simply didn’t have time to do earlier.

So after the lightening talks came Web 2.0 Beyond the Browser by Rich Kilmer. Rich stated that this talk was added last minute to replace Jim Weirich as he wasn’t able to attend. Despite the short timeframe Rich had to prepare for his talk, he did an outstanding job detailing some of the more interesting aspects of his company’s product – the name of which I can’t remember. Most of the slides were pretty diagrams or bulleted lists that showed a pretty generic overview of the architecture of the app, with some heavy explanations from Rich to flesh them out a bit more. At the end of his talk he did a quick demo of the application and it did look like a pretty nice platform to make myself a bit of cash off of as soon as they release an api. While I did enjoy this talk a lot, I really don’t remember too much about the specifics, as I was nearing sleep or was just deep in thought or something. I really wish I could’ve paid more attention, as I was pretty interested by what they were doing. All I can really remember is that their original idea was to put a mini desktop onto a jump drive for some reason, and that the application had a flash ui. Either way, it sounded pretty smooth during the talk.

Next up came a talk that I was extremely interested in since I heard the speaker would be at RubyConf. I found myself very satisfied with the presentation. This talk was, of course, I18n, M17n, Unicode, and all that by Mr. XML himself, Tim Bray. This talk taught me a few things about Tim Bray. First of all, it may be a good idea that he switches to decaf. Second, the man is obviously very passionate about internationalization. He started the talk off with a brief overview, or tutorial, on Unicode. He followed this up with some pros and cons of Unicode support in various languages, with Ruby’s support obviously coming out least favored. While the talk really made me think, the questions and answer section was probably the best. There was a point during the talk when Tim expressed in several ways why it’s such a terrible idea to use casing when it’s available to you in your language. Because of this, somebody in the audience asked some simple question regarding casing, and this spewed off a string of additional questions regarding casing. I have to say, quite a few people in the audience felt embarrassed for Ruby by this point. All of these questions seemed to irritate Tim, and his answers, although nearly identical each time, kept getting shorter and more to the point. To me, it felt like the Rubyists int he audience couldn’t accept the fact that casing was a bad idea, and kept trying to offer similar solutions that would repeatedly get rejected by Tim. As I said, this was pretty humorous, but I did indeed feel Ruby suffering.

Once Tim grew tired of owning everyone with his insane grasp of all things encoding, we moved on to Speak My Language: Natural Language Processing in Ruby by Michael Granger. This was another talk I was really looking forward to attending. Michael did a near constant string of demonstrations, with some brief pausing for slides and alternatives. I have to say, I was extremely intrigued by what Michael was showing us, and it really made me curious about the sort of things that can really be done with natural language processing. Michael was, next to Laurent Sansonetti, probably one the most humble speaker thus far in the conference, though it was obvious he definitely knew his stuff. He went into some interesting detail about 2 of his projects that were essentially ports of Perl modules. I’d love to give the names, but I honestly can’t remember them. I will try to find them out, and then edit this later (possibly!)

After Michael’s talk, there was a series of 30 second to 1 minute announcement slots made available to members of the audience that had something to announce. During this 10 minute period, several people came up to tell us all about jobs, or meet ups etc. One of the anouncees was Ani Babaian, an employee for Microsoft. Since the incident yesterday, it’s been kind of a running joke with everyone in attendence to pick on her for being both a Microsoft employee, and a .NET developer. Today was no different, with Rich Kilmer kicking her out of the announcement line the second he saw her join it. When she finally got her chance to talk, she informed us all that the Ruby.NET project is looking to add some heads to the team, and she also offered up a copy of Microsoft Vista Beta 2 for a prize during the next round of giveaways. Obviously everyone had a pretty good laugh at this, but sure enough it was added to the prize pile to be handed out when the time came, but on the condition that Ani signed it.

This brings me to the part of the day when Chad Fowler announced that they would be raffling off the Vista cds first. I sat in my seat and I just knew I’d be called – though I feel everyone else felt the same way, as a hush befell the audience. Sure enough, my name appeared on screen, and all I could say was “Oh GREAT”. Probably a bit too loud actually. At any rate, I took a little picture of my sweet winnings:

Now as you may have guessed, I was absolutely psyched with winning an expiring beta copy of Vista. Actually, when I went up to get my prize I tried to tell Chad or Rich that I already had it in hopes that they would give me the coveted Ruby Cookbook instead.

Directly after receiving my prize, we were all ushered off to our 1 and a half hour dinner break, at which time I took the liberty to drive home and blog about the events prior.

Since nobody cares about the delicious spaghetti I had, we’ll fast forward to Matz’ keynote.

Matz has a certain way about him that makes you all warm and fuzzy inside whenever you hear him talk. He just seems like a geniunely nice guy. His keynote was more like a proposal of a game in which members of the community actually help out to make Ruby better. Matz stated that the talk was very similar to the one he gave in 2003, but that in 2003 it failed to work properly, and the only real thing to come out of it was the rarely used RCRchive. He also announced that a stable version of Ruby 1.9.1 would be out Christmas 2007, and that YARV would be merged in by then. Let’s all pray. Overall, Matz’ keynote was pretty funny, and definitely interesting, but it was also a bit too short for my liking. I would’ve loved to hear more about it, as it couldn’t have lasted longer than about 20-25 minutes including the q and a session.

Afterwards we waited around for the RejectConf to start, however once it did, we saw the size of the room and how badly it contrasted to the crowd in it. Thanks to lack of seating, and a very hot room, we just decided to call it a night. One funny moment did occur after we all met in the parkinglot to chat. We saw Ani running over to her car to grab a non descript box which one could only assume was filled with copies of Vista Beta 2 (ARRG! ONE NAME LATER AND I WOULD’VE WON A BOOK@), and she came over and handed us all a copy. Because of this, I really am planning to frame the signed copy she’d originally given me, just as I told RubyConf as she held the microphone. That must mean that the other copy can go directly into the trash, again just as I promised RubyConf. Just joking, the second copy will likely go into a spare machine. I’ve always dreamed of playing SVG solitaire.

At any rate, this concludes my day 2 at RubyConf 2006. Tune in tomorrow for more amazingly useless information.