As I looked at some of the Ruby libraries for CouchDB, it was clear that they have very different approaches. In the hopes of keeping them straight I began making a table. I am sharing it for your right-angled pleasure. Warning, it is in beta form. If you post comments, I [...]
A DC-area programming group, the Potomac Hackers, is meeting on Wed., March 25 in the DC area. The location will be decided by a vote, please RSVP on the Google Group.
Who are the Potomac Hackers?
We started last year — we were called the Potomac Ruby Hackers back then. To be more inclusive, we [...]
On Sunday, April 19, 2009, those interested in e-democracy will gather at eDemocracyCamp in Washington, DC. Join us.
I want to find a way to personally get involved to improve change.gov. Just jumping into the site itself doesn’t seem to cut it for me. Submitting through the contact form doesn’t feel satisfying either. I want to engage more fully.
I’m not star-struck by change.gov. Yes, the team is iterating quickly, doing good technical work, [...]
I am an e-participation geek*, and I have a great hopes for what is possible in the future with change.gov.
I have lots of questions about the Web tools and the team behind it. Here are just a few:
What is the vision of change.gov? Where is it headed?
What are the metrics for success at change.gov?
Where [...]
You probably have heard that Rails and Merb [will] Merge.
According to the Rails and Merb blogs, both teams agreed, and that’s that. But in other industries, things aren’t so simple. If Google and Yahoo wanted to merge, the antitrust authorities would want to get involved.
But in the open source community, we don’t have antitrust [...]
First, the easy part, installing memcached and libmemcached using MacPorts:
sudo port install memcached libmemcached
Now, for the memcached gem — not quite so easy for me on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard):
sudo gem install memcached
Building native extensions. This could take a while…
ERROR: Error installing memcached:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
…
extconf.rb:21: shared library ‘libmemcached’ not [...]
Ruby DCamp is coming up on October 11 and 12 in Washington, DC. It will be an unconference, which means that the participants will drive the event.
It has a big emphasis on participation from Rubyists of all levels, whether new or experienced. DCamp is being planned by some very involved people in the [...]
The “traditional” way of setting up paths in *nix bash environments is to use the ~/.profile file. However, I recently read about /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d and wanted to give them a try. I tried rearranging /etc/paths to look like this:
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
Then I restarted my Terminal and inspected the path. No change. That’s strange. My principle of least [...]
I’ve seen the phrase “rock star software developer” one too many times. This trite and misleading metaphor needs to die. By decapitation if necessary.
In my opinion, the key ingredients of being a rock star are mediocre talent, a massive publicity machine, and an insatiable ego. These are not qualities that I want [...]