Noel Rappin Writes Here

I was fortunate to spend this Thursday and Friday at RedDirt RubyConf in Oklahoma City. Here’s a quick conference report, and random thoughts about single-track conferences in general. This is my second try at writing this post, excuse me if it’s a little disjointed (the first one was eaten by my writing tool – the dark side of continually trying out new writing app, but more on that later…) I want to make sure I say up front that James and the rest of the organizers did an outstanding job with the logistics of the conference.

I just gave my RedDirt RubyConf talk introducing a new gem for JavaScript testing from a Rails app called Summer Breeze. It makes you feel fine, blowing through the Jasmine in your mind. More specifically, Summer Breeze is a tool for generating fixture DOM output for Jasmine JavaScript tests directly from your Rails Views with a simple DSL for specifying fixtures Summer Breeze is based on work by JB Steadman and Jonathan Barnes that can be found at http://pivotallabs.

Here are a few random tips that have come up while working on an application using Refinery CMS, Globalize, and who the heck knows what else… Extending stuff from Refinery Refinery is about as extendable as a Rails framework gets. Although it provides you with a lot of default behavior, it’s not that hard to override. Refinery is made up of a collection of Rails Engines. For example, the main display of pages is in the refinerycms-pages sub-gem.

Hey, guess what, I’ve got another iPad text editor or two to review. The thing is… I really like writing on the iPad, with or without the bluetooth keyboard. It’s a very lightweight, fun writing machine. But all the editors I’ve used have flaws that have been making them less than workable for me. I still like them, but I’m getting resigned to their limitations. For example, iaWriter doesn’t see subfolders, meaning that it doesn’t work with Scrivener sync directories.

So, I’ve been writing technical books for about ten years. What can I say about that time overall? Here are two pie charts representing my published books to date. I’ve thrown in the Lulu version of Rails Test Prescriptions just for the heck of it. Care to guess what the pie charts represent? Before I give the answer, please note that there is basically no correlation between the values in each chart.