For the last three Tuesday nights I've been racing in the Central Coast Dirt Criterium [1], up at Mt Penang Parklands, not far from where I live on the NSW Central Coast. If, like me when I first heard about it, you're wondering what a criterium (crit for short) is, check out the wikipedia article that has some background on the sport, with a focus on the more traditional road race. It's a lot of fun, and all you need is a mountain bike, a helmet, and a MTBA license [2] to race. The guys from Pushy Galore [3] and Edge Cycles have set up a fun course in the park, that requires a good mix of technical skills and raw power to get around at speed, don't worry if you're a beginner though as there are three categories of entries that cater for all skill levels. Looking forward to racing again next week, and hopefully seeing some fresh faces on the track.

[1] Unfortunately the organisers misspelled the name of the event as a "Criterion", so if you're googling for details you won't find much if you use the correct spelling.
[2] If you don't have a license you can get a day license for $15 at the race, or sign up for a yearly license for $90.
[3] Best name for a cycle shop ever.

So, I fell for the Quechup invite I received earlier today, and it appears they may have spammed everyone from my gmail address book. Of course they didn't disclose this during the signup process, if they had have, there'd be no way I would have continued with the sign up. Anyway, a big apology from me if you did receive the Quechup spam, please delete it if you received it, and whatever you do don't sign up for their service. Scumbags.

Jason "Snapper" Crane has uploaded his video recap of Rails Camp to Viddler. Thanks Jason!

Matt Allen -- Rails (tm) uber-geek behind iseekgolf.com -- presented on scaling a large Rails (tm) app at the last Sydney Rails (tm) Meetup. Unfortunately I didn't make the meeting, but Lachie Cox produced a screencast of the talk that's featured today on Viddler. My motivations for posting aren't entirely selfless, as Lachie's superbly rendered intro features 20 seconds of beats and bleeps by my alter-ego genlevel.

Sitting in our room in the super-funky Jupiter Hotel and dumping some thoughts here before I pop our for a burger and some beers.

Here's a quick wrap up of the sessions I attended:

DHH keynote: a nice celebration of rails achievements to date, and an outline of what's to come in Rails 2.0. Looks like we'll be seeing more DRYing up of controllers thanks to the conventions introduced with the RESTful routing back in 1.2. And everything he demoed is available today on edge.

Full stack testing with Selenium and Rails, Alex Chaffee and Brian Takita: I've toyed with Selenium in the past, but never found it as compelling or convenient as the combination of Test::Unit and Autotest. This was an enlightening session as I hadn't previously heard about Selenium RC. It's essentially a Selenium test server that remotely controls (RC) any number of browsers to execute your Selenium tests. The idea of being able to automate cross-browser testing is appealing, so I expect I'll look into this when I get back.

Going Off The Grid, Rails as Platform, Evan Weaver: Evan covered a broad number of topics loosely focused on using parts of the Rails stack on other projects. What looked most interesting was Shadow (gem download), a "zero configuration restful record server". Essentially it's a mongrel driven server that reflects on, and provides a RESTful API to any database you point it at. Simple, but effective. Also of interest was his use of Django to provide an admin application, for a Rails schema, with little configuration required on the Django side of things. Interesting as well were Evan's thoughts on the database as a hash, aggressively denormalising, and pre-caching.

Adding Tests To Legacy Apps, Evan Henshaw-Plath & Heckle, Kevin Clark: some practical advice on how to start testing existing projects, if you're not already (why not!?). Boils down to writing tests to replicate bugs before fixing them, and writing tests to test existing functionality before undertaking any refactoring efforts. Kevin Clark gave an introduction to Heckle. You've quite possibly seen Heckle before if you follow Kevin's blog. It mutates your code and then runs your test suite to determine whether or not the mutations cause failures. If they don't, then it's likely your tests are inadequate. Given the number of possible mutations, and the time taken to run your tests, this can take come time. However, Kevin mentioned a new feature that runs a more narrowly focused set of tests using the rules from ZenTest.

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, Adam Keyes: Some great advice on learning from others by learning how to read their code.

Spam I Have Known, Jim Weirich: I found Jim a very entertaining speaker. This was light on technical details, but high on laughs as Jim told us his story of fighting spam on the Ruby Garden wiki. It's mind-blowing the effort that the spammers go to, and the sneaky tricks they employ. Lesson learned, never underestimated a spammer.

Avi Bryant Keynote: SmallTalk == Ruby so why not implement Ruby on the smalltalk VM. I don't really have my head around the implications of this, but Avi's clearly a super-smart guy and a very engaging speaker.

Ze Frank Keynote: woo hoo! Inspiring comedic genius. Ze has this uncanny knack of making me feel great about myself. Given that the Show is now over, it'll be interesting to see where he next invests his talents.

That's it from me. I'll try and post another wrap-up tomorrow.

Timbo beat me to the announcement, but what the hey, I'll throw in my 2c. If you live in Australia, and you're working with Rails (even it's your little bit on the side), then you'll want to get along to Rails Camp for a weekend of Rails and Ruby-tastic shindigery.

If you haven't already signed up, get onto it right away because half of the 30 available spots have already gone. Your $95 will cover accommodation, meals and supplies for the weekend and any surplus will go back to support Rails and Ruby meet-ups in Oz.

Check it out and sign up while you still can.

No, not that kind!



I'm came off my bike onto some rocks on Saturday morning. After putting up with the pain for a couple of days I went and got some x-rays. "There is a fracture through the radial head [...] and a large effusion is noted within the joint." Bugger! No cycling for me for two weeks, and it'll be painfully slow one-handed programming in the meantime. Now where did I put that neural-typing-interface...

No, this isn't a post about the much loved model-view-controller pattern. It's just a heads up to say that from today I'll be posting rails and ruby related snippets over on a tumblelog hosted by Tumblr rather than here on teamaskins. I've wanted to keep this stuff separate for sometime, but never had the spare time to setup a new blog. The guys at Tumblr have made it really simple to get started and let you host your blog under a custom domain name, so from now on you'll find my ruby ramblings at subrosa.teamaskins.net.

Here on teamaskins we'll return to puppy photos and inane rants about all sorts of whatnots. So, if you've been fond of my rails related posts grab the subrosa feed. And unless you want to hear about what I'm having for lunch tomorrow, you might want to unsubscribe from teamaskins.net.

Peace.