The other day a guy named Tim Uckun contacted me about Ruby people in NZ, and as far as I know there isnt a dedicated space for Kiwi Ruby so Tim started a mailing list.

If you have an interest in Ruby, you can join at NZ-Ruby-subscribe@googlegroups.com

Back in California from the 13th through to the 24th of November. Hopefully qantas's inflight entertainment system won't crash this time :-) Apparently my last flight was the first flight where they were trying out the new video on demand entertainment system. What a hunk of unusable junk it is too. Which is really bad considering Alans Coopers book which uses an inflight entertainment system as an example.

Agile Auckland are meeting this coming Tuesday at 6pm onwards at the Queens Head on Queen St (opposite the comedy club). At 7:22pm Rick Mugridge will be giving away a copy of his FIT book.

www.agileauckland.com (if you haven't met any of the agile auckland people before there are a few photos on the website)

I have often been asked about programming enviroments for kids and what is a good language to learn. I heard about Alice at OOPSLA and deciede to check it out. Its programming enviroment based on maipulating a 3d graphical world. You dont write lines of code, you drag drop methods from objects or looping constructs (no synatx errors!) Its very easy to make 3d objects do stuff. I've had a quick play and have been impressed by how simple and straightforward it is. Its worth checking out if you want to introduce programming to kids. Best of all, its free! it comes with tutorials that are really nice and simple. check it out at http://www.alice.org/

An interesting clarification I got while at oopsla was (clarified by Larry Constantine and Mary Beth Rosson and refering to Don Norman) was that its not so important to find out what users want but to understand what activities they are involved with, what their goals are and to create an innovative soloution based on this. You then verify that the system then allows them to do this easily, that its usable. And of course the best way to do this is in short iterative feeback cycles :-)

"I have no time for software architects who don't code, I do not know enough bad words to describe them."

Well, thought I'd blog about some of the content, but, no point, lots of people here are blogging as the presentations are going! so...If your interested in the RubyConf content... see http://glu.ttono.us/

What is interesting is half the conference is on IRC while the conference is going....any references to ANYTHING and someone gives a URL about it. Its quite cool.

Its quite geeky also, people are coding all the time. Great stuff.

One of the most interesting things to me is that there are several people embedding ruby onto embedded devices. That holds a lot of potential for developing embedded apps quickly. Biggest issue is speed.

The Ruby on Rails stuff is big... most of the Ruby on Rails developers are here, but most of the guts of that will be delved into tommorow.

Well its been a while since I've blogged, but I'm in San Diego for RubyConf and OOPSLA so over the next few days I should have lots to blog about. I'm looking forward to both conferences, both hould be really interesting.

I'm quite liking technology at the moment. I'm down in christchurch for my grandfathers funeral, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0508/S00070.htm. I have brought along my wifi router, my woosh modem, and ta-da local wireless hotspot for my family. too cool. Now If it only was a 10Mb/s connection.....

I got to show my mum google earth, showing her all the spots she grew up in africa when my Grandfather was a missionary there. She was most impressed.