BarCamp was a blast yesterday. I met some really great and smart people, and my presentation went over very well. I think we’ll have some more people using Radiant in the near future. For those who didn’t get to see my presentation, or want to review what they did see, click below for a PDF of the slides (with notes).
Thanks again to Pete Thomas for doing the legwork, Ad Astra for the space, and all of the sponsors for helping make it happen!
I just had to capture this for all posterity:
Just two weeks on GitHub, and we’re already in the top 10 forked repositories. Woohoo!
This week I had to figure out how to offload a really long-running task into the background in one of my Rails apps. I had looked at BackgrounDRb (BackgroundRb? I’m not sure if it uses DRb anymore, and it’s easier to type that way, at least for me.) in the past, but it recently reached 1.0 and got a new lead developer, so I gave it another look.
Tonight I recorded a wonderful conversation with two really cool guys about how they are using Radiant in their business and what it has done for them. Look for the first episode of the Radiant podcast in about a week (once I finish cleaning up the audio). I interviewed them over Skype and used Ecamm’s Call Recorder to record the conversation. Which brings me to my next point…
I recorded the interview uncompressed so that I could keep the quality as high as possible. Once I finished the recording, I used Ecamm’s included tool to split the resulting MOV into two separate tracks (me and the interviewees). I then proceeded to fire up GarageBand to layout the tracks, filter and do some editing. However, once I got one track into GB, whenever I would dump the second track in, I would get the original track duplicated.
I tried renaming the files, renaming the tracks, inserting them in a different order, etc. No dice. I was about to say, “Apple, you are not as cool as you think you are. You gave me a crippled product and there isn’t even any documentation that it is cripppled!”
After hours of searching the help and the intarwebs to no avail, I tried, on a whim, compressing the files using AAC or MP3 and then importing them.
Guess what. THEY WORKED!
So, the moral of the story is: If you want to edit/mix more than one plain audio track at a time in GarageBand, compress them first; or as I plan to do, clean them up, then compress them, then mix them.
So now it’s documented at least somewhere.
In the wake of incredibly successful BarCamps like San Francisco, Austin, and Orlando, it’s about time we had one in Kansas City. On Wednesday afternoon, I met with Pete Thomas who is organizing BarCampKC and we both agree that there is a bunch of incognito innovation in Kansas City. If you are an entrepreneur, designer, blogger, podcaster, programmer, or doing anything creative with technology, this will be your bag, baby. Get in touch with Pete via the BarCampKC blog or shoot me an email if you want more information. We’re looking for venues and a sponsor still, so any suggestions or offers are greatly encouraged!
I’ll be presenting about Radiant and we already have lined up Tom Mornini of EngineYard and a few others. Check it out!
There are many beginning and advanced Ruby on Rails books available, from the authoritative Agile Web Development with Rails to the cookbook-style Rails Recipes. However, healthy guidance for intermediate-level developers is lacking at best. Ironically, this is the most crucial stage in the process of becoming proficient with Rails because one must begin to learn why, not just how. Eldon Alameda's Practical Rails Projects (Apress, 2007) effectively fills that gap. I know Alameda from our local Ruby User Group and spoke with him frequently while he wrote this book. His expertise with Rails definitely shines through in the hefty 621-page volume.
