Musings of a Trained Monkey

Very interesting proceedings thus far. I've spotted lots of "famous" rails bloggers spotted in the flesh. Highlight so far would have to be seeing someone play an AC/DC song ('You shook me') on an accordian.

More to come!

UPDATE 5:15ish: Wow! There are lots of awesome people here. Very intelligent questions in the sessions. Jim Freeze's Asterisk presentation was educational for me as I have no background in telecommunications software at all. Also because Martin Fowler, DHH, and Nicolas Seckar (no site?) were sitting right next to me! Seeing their reactions to some of the material was funny.
Stefan Kaes's optimization techniques & tools session yielded some interesting tips for performance tuning. I sat at a table with Jarkko Laine and Matt Biddulph. Two guys that have done a lot to get Rails recognized as a serious alternative to Java/.Net. Matt was very interesting to talk to, looking forward to his presentation on the work he did for the BBC tomorrow.

I've been learning the ins and outs of working with Rick Olson's new Blogging/CMS Lite project, Mephisto. I've been impressed so far. Feature wise it offers a lot for as small as the code base is.

Using Liquid templates instead of rhtml is taking some getting used to. I have a close port of this Typo blog running on my laptop. I am still ironing out some kinks with interpretation of <pre> and <code> tags between Typo and Mephisto. Mainly my older posts with code included have issues. I do miss some of the sidebar functionality and I will be taking a look at adding a "feedparser section" to be able to recreate some of the sidebars in Mephisto.

Rick and company seem to have implemented caching the right way, everything just works and is fast! I can definitely see why the Rails blog decided to make the switch.

Seth Godin speaking at Google. I haven't finished watching it all yet, but Seth is a brilliant speaker and writer. His latest book All Marketers Are Liars is a great read for all of us intellectual types.

Here is a funny screen grab:

Sure would hate to have to pay that fine...or suffer instant death for that matter :-P