Cristiano on Tech/Life

One of the first people I met at BarCamp was David Hayward who was playing with a Nintendo DS equiped with a motion sensor. On the second day I atteded his talk about the effects of AI in games, and I was amazed with his “hand drawn slides” which was a style I recognized from a post once at PresentationZen (can’t find the link at the moment, but I will keep looking).

When I later on talked with David he tolled me that his was actually not how he intended his slides to be but just a result of bad preparation. The slides where actually handdrawn on some paper and shot with his nice DSLR camera in the gravel between some plants. I still think it brings some kind of Zen-garden style to the slides and it proves that you don’t always need fancy slides to make your point.

David on the left

Are you done using your Palm, trying to sync it with your pc and then have it to get to recognize your terrible handwritting? Don’t look any further because here is the new GTD (getting things done) tool: The Hipster PDA. The concept is very efficient and some people have even made templates for different activities.

There are a lot of interesting people here in London, including my new neighbour who will start working at Symbian in April. For his final project at university he made a VNC viewer for Symbian. The tool allows you to use your symbian phone to control anything running VNC server. Today he gave me a demo and I was really impressed.

So, I managed to create a nice web-app in RoR in very little lines of code, and it even has user login! Now the real problem that I encountered is this: how do you deploy a simple web-app with RoR? I mean, I don’t want to put the code on SVN and then use some advanced system like Capistrano to deploy my app to 5 servers. I just have a Mac Mini with integrated Apache and 4 users that will use the product. How do I do a SIMPLE deployment?

It is just weird that an app that is so meant for developers with deadlines, it is very badly documented on how to do a simple deployment!

Today the Merlin Show Podcast was launched and Episode 2 features an interview between Merlin (43folders productivity guru) and Jonathan Coulton (Code Monkey).

I decided to take up Ruby on Rails (bit late, I know). First thing I noticed is that setting it up on a Mac beats setting up Django on a Mac. I haven’t really mastered it yet, but spend most of today trying to build a simple “grocery-list-manager” that would help me and my housemates to keep track of what is spend. I’m almost done and hope to post some screenshots soon.

For now I want to place some interesting links to get you started. First there is the Ruby on Rails homepage which has a few excellent screencasts to get you going. Don’t whatch them just once, because I noticed that even if you watch them after trying a project on your own you can still find new things. The other link is this quick overview of Ruby syntax and Rails by Patrick Lenz. Although not necessary, learning a bit of basic Ruby really helps you understand some things you would normally not be able to wrap your mind around. The last link is to RadRails (free), an Eclipse based editor with integrated browser and server. I think I prefer it above TextMate (not free) but I have just started.

In response to my comparison between BarCampLondon2 and FOWA before, both Simon Willison and Dan wanted to note that they DID have a nice experience at FOWA. But then Alper came with this nice article on the Kwiqq blog where Raj Anand described his experiences at BarCampLondon2 and FOWA. Nice thing here is that Raj tried to quantify his grief in terms that you and I should be able to understand. I quote:

BarCamp (Tag: BarCampLondon2):

• Flickr: 1,545 results
• SlideShare.net: 10 results
• Google: 93,100 results
• Yahoo: 48,900 results

FOWA (Tag: FowaLondon07):

• Flickr: 930 results
• SlideShare.net: 0 results
• Google: 576 results
• Yahoo: 259 results

Although I was proud to have an OpenID login on my website, I am glad that Simon Willison noted that the plugin actually didn’t work. I managed to fix it so now anyone CAN login with OpenID. Don’t have an OpenID yet? get one here!