Rails on the Run

During Thanksgiving break I had fun with a friend of mine working on a Ruby challenge while digesting the traditional turkey.

word list.

I personally decided to use SQlite3 to store the words after parsing the text file if the database is empty.

It was a good exercise and it got me to play with SQLite and one of the Ruby adapter library. Once I was done, I decide to play with DrNic cool Gem generator.

http://random-word-gen.rubyforge.org/svn/

And the Rubyforge site

By the way, I did find an almost useful use for this gem. Activation code generator. You know, the kind of string your receive on by email or SMS to activate a feature or an account. It’s always a pain to type a MD5Hash string, while, when using the word generator, the string is made of existing words, making the process way more user friendly.

I also plan on adding some random copyleft text to the sqlite db so the Gem will be able to generate titles, paragraphs and random quotes. I’m just tired of reading lorem ipsum and on top of that, I get to it, I might had text in various languages so you check if your app breaks when using another char set, or if your layout can’t handle too much text.

Honestly, I don’t expect you to use this gem, but I jut wanted to encourage people to start writing their own gem, the process is super easy and rewarding. And actually, feel free to try the challenge and post a link to your implementation in the comments. (That’s seriously, the best way to learn)

p.s: I’m sorry about my RSS feed constantly being reset, it seems to be a problem with Mephisto, my blog engine and we are trying to figure out what’s going on.

DrNic the most famous Australian Rails developer surprisingly doesn’t spend most of his time working on Rails read interview
That’s maybe why he recently became so active in the Rails community ( see Magic Multi-Connections, Magic Models, map_by_methods, Gem Generator etc..)

Today he released something very helpful for the Rails Community, not another Gem or another cool plugin to extend Rails but a web application to help you planning your conferences. We already had other tools such as conference meetup but it’s the first time that we get a product helping you to plan a conference by scheduling the sessions you want to attend.

screenshot of the entire schedule

I had a quick chat with DrNic about his latest creation and here is what he said:

“its been fun building just how I thought session selection might look + feel
web2.0 = permissive voyeurism I think!”

I share the same vision than Nic on session selection and I really enjoyed booking my Rails sessions and seeing what other people selected. (I guess that’s my voyeur side, don’t you like web2.0?)

If you wanna see what I planned on attending, checkout my schedule: my schedule

Thanks Nic for the good work and too bad you are not presenting anything at the RailsConf (move your bum to come up with a better submission next year!)