Musings of a Trained Monkey

Eric Hodel has announced the release of mem_inspect and png gems. Ryan Davis has an excellent movie assembled showing output from these gems. The beauty of the code behind mem_inspect, like looking at the sun, will make your eyes water if you look at it too long. Seriously though everyone should check it out and gain some Ruby I.Q. points. The excellent RubyInline is used internally and there is a rake task that builds a patched version of Ruby from source, wicked cool stuff guys!

I think this should start people thinking about better ways to gain insight into the Ruby memory heap, at least until YARV arrives and changes the playing field altogether.

I just saw about rb2js over at _why's site. Is it the beginning or end of times?

This is exciting in a way that Google's Web Tool Kit isn't. Specifically writing idomatic Ruby is always going to be more enjoyable and less lines of code than working in the devil's language.

(Okay that might be too harsh, Java is like a little demon compared to .NOT)

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.