Leave a CommentLeaving WordPress
Bear with me and please bookmark http://rubymerchant.blogspot.com as I am leaving WordPress behind.
You might wonder why I came to WordPress, the reason was WordPress allows me to categorize my blog posts.
Reason for leaving
1. It has eaten up a lot of my blog posts, do you see my last 2 empty posts. it has happened with me in past.
2. It’s verrrrry slow, yes 5 r’s in that.
Good Bye WordPress!
2.
Innovation Workshop
Today was the first day of a 2-days “Innovation Workshop”. Having already spent some time in Ruby and RoR,it was kind of way to basic for me, but for a person who is just starting to learn ruby/rails can start rolling after these kind of workshops.
Even if you are good at Ruby it might be worthwhile to attend such sessions as they let u know the usages of various ruby features. Ruby Dynamics for example,before the session I knew how it works, but after session I know where I can apply that.
Few things I learnt were
- Less code better code, Camping web framework by why the lucky stiff has been written in 4k lines.
- Principle of Least Surprise
- Usage of Irb(interactive ruby), ri(ruby index, similar to man utility on UNIX systems)
- Why’s funda of Read it aloud, read any line of ruby aloud and it would be an english sentence.
- Blocks are similar to Anonymous Delegates of C#.
- Eval is actually EVIL
Some portion of Ruby and the sweet giant Rails to be covered tommorow.
Ethanol over Oil as a fuel
Dicussions have been going on from a while for the use of BioFuels as a fuel over oil(petroleum products/gasoline)
A talk by Vinod Khosla BioFuels: Think Outside the Barrel summarizes(well actually details out with a presentation having 130 slides!!!) on the advantages of using Ethanol as a fuel for vehicles over oil.
Pros of using Ethanol
1. Cheap ($0.75/gal when compared to $1.60/gal of petroleum)
2. Reduction in green house gases which lead to global warming.
3. No need to depend on Mid-East countries for importing Oil.
4. Increase in Farm jobs for producing Ethanol.
Challenges
1. Oil companies dont wont to die.
2. Production of Flexible-fuel vehicles at a larger scale(General Motors has already started working on it)
Many including Vinod are backing a ballot initiative in California — the California Clean Alternative Energy Initiative — that would charge oil companies an extraction fee for the oil they take from California, the nation’s third largest oil-producing state. This would generate $4 billion in ten years, which would be used to reduce our petroleum usage by 25% and to fund research in our universities on clean technologies. The goal of the initiative is simple: cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable energy and fuels.
I hope this initiative gets acceptance and soon we all drive ethanol run cars; I read it somewhere.. its the not the question of how many dollars oil is costing more, but it is whether we want to survive or not?
Whats common with Kannada Police Dept. and Los Angeles Police Dept.?
Both maintain a blog!
Reason: so that news could go out to media persons and public in a fair manner
Check out,
Yet Another Crush
Yes yet another crush:)
Lots of people have already fallen for her because of her simplicity, elegance and dynamics. Then I heard about this guy to whom she has been engaged since 3 years , not long ago
Well the lady is none other than Ruby and the guy to whom she has been engaged is Rails.
Can I impress her more than Rails?
Few words of experience at Pune Hackhathon
Before stating my experience(which is going to be pretty long), I would like to sincerely thank Vaibhav(Better labs), Shashank Date(Reevik Technologies) and all those who were involved in the organization of this event; it was a platform for people like me to boost our confidence levels by doing something like developing a web application in 36 hours.I also congratulate all teams for their best efforts in their respective applications.
the bottomline is that ”The event was a grand success!!”
2 Weeks Before Hackathon (what the heck is hackathon?)
I heard about Pune hackathon from the PuneRuby mailing list around 2 weeks in advance of the event. The first question I asked myself was ”Will I be able to develop a complete web application in 2 days, and if I have to then I better start preparing for it from now on”. Days went on, clogged in work at office and at home and as usual I just couldnt take out time to think of an IDEA for Pune Hackathon,
few days(3-4) before hackathon ( an idea to choose from a pool of ideas)
Managed to take out sometime after office hours and came with an idea to develop something for myself, Myself and my colleague Vishwanath came out with a bunch of ideas, but finally we chose Expense-O-Meter; being spendthrift, this would definitely turn out to be a handy tool for me atleast.
A day before Hackathon(Raring to go)
It was 22:00 hrs in the evening and we still hadn’t dicussed anything beyond our website name; We(me and Vishwanath) went to Cafeteria to discuss on what all features to have inside our website; came up with few while having an Egg Sandwitch(it stimulated few ideas as I had just spent few another bucks on it). Anyway our discussion went on for couple of hours and then we drove back home promising each other that we would give each other a wake up call at 06:30 HRS or so(I had hit the bed at 02:00 in the morning)
The D-Day
It was 08:30 and my alarm for some reason didn’t ring, similar things happened with Vishwanath, and thanks to Raingod for pouring rains like CATS and DOGS on the D-day. we managed to reached the venue at 10:30 and because of rains only few had turned up at 10:30. we waited for sometime, talked to Dibya, Shashank and Vaibhav on things related to ruby and RoR, explained them about our idea of developing Expens-o-Meter.
On your marks, get, set and go…..
Vaibhav signalled the start of the event,we went on to our workstations and right away we prepared an xls(I am good at it!) listing milestones with estimated hours.
On our way in Rails we learnt a lot of things in depth which we had covered in breadth before. things like using Ajax with rails, migrations, graphs in ruby, javascript etc. We modified the plan once every 3 to 4 hours to accomodate the slippages.
In between this intensive work, Vaibhav dropped in to share his views and reasons to host such an event; the primary reason being to form a community of real enthusiasts who could help Indian tech industry to move towards developing PLATFORMS along with solutions which it currently indulges in.
It was past midnight, and thanks to whistles of Akshay which kept us awake!
It’s a new day,
It was morning and we were still at Milestone 2 of 5 (5th milestone was real testing of the application); Thanks to Viki from Betterlabs from making our morning really good by helping out with kewl UI for our main page! the UI gave us a push and we were on the track and had quickly moved on to our 4th milestone, which was to develop reporting feature. we faced some problems while trying to use one of the Graph libraries of ruby and decided to work on completing other minor leftovers.
In the End, it does matter!
36 hours were gone, and it felt like eternity to me; we had actually done a LOT of things in last 36 hours.
Presentation and PIZZA time
Everyone started presenting their work, I was amazed to see the features everyone had in their websites, many things had happened overnight; DalalSTreet by Pratik for indeed impressive of all.
After a pizza break rest of presentations were done and it was the time to announce the results.
Shashank asked few questions like how many of us had used Rails/Testing features, to which no hand raised 
the justification was that it was just 36 hours we had!
Our project being rewarded 3rd came as a sweet surprise to me;I am sure there was a very narrow margin between rating of all the applications which were developed.
here I am now with my msn nick being ” This spike is not going to die”, looking forward to enhance the application developed and putting it on to Internet soon.
The journey of the ruby merchant begins……
