Last weekend I attended RubyCamp in Vancouver. The sessions were high quality and, as a ruby n00b, it was a great opportunity to learn from the community.

I started the morning by attending Alexey’s JRuby overview. It was interesting to get some insight into the problems the JRuby team has faced mapping between Ruby types and Java types. This certainly seems to be better addressed by the .NET DLR which should simplify matters for dynamic language implementations in .NET.

I also spent some time chatting some guys working on Rubinius. They had some pretty strong opinions about ZenTest and AutoTest over Test::Unit and CruiseControl.rb respectively. Of course, they were slightly biased, but it deserves a closer look.

I talked with Marc Mayo about Git, distributed teams and his company Joyent. He ran an insightful session on the trials and tribulations of hosting high traffic Rails applications.

The last two sessions that I attended were one on Merb (an alternative web framework to Rails) and Scott Patten’s Rubyize This!

Yesterday, I spent some time purchasing a few new domain names. I’ve been using Network Solutions for something like 10 years, and I’ve always used them to manage my domains. I had assumed, naively I guess, that the cost of domain name registration was more or less fixed. But after looking around at other providers, I found there can be a pretty large discrepancy in price. Network Solutions charges over $30 for a 1-year registration, but other providers that I looked at were charging $7 or les

My friend Josie Leung recently returned from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo where she was helping to support a rural medical clinic there. She has set up a charity on GiveMeaning.com to try to raise the funds to support the continued operation of the clinic. The charity needs a certain number of votes to get the project supported, so if you feel so inspired head over to her project and add your vote in support.

GiveMeaning.com is the brainchild of Vancouver-based philanthropist Tom Williams, who I met a couple of years ago at Web Of Change. He gave a few demos of the site at the conference, but Josie’s charity is the first time that I’ve had the chance to use it. It’s nice to see people using ASP.NET for a good cause :)

I’ve recently moved my long neglected blog from dotnetjunkies.com onto a shared host at hostgator.com. My old blog site had been running a pretty old and crappy version of Community Server and had started serving up ads. All the more reason to move. So I’ve started over with a recent version of WordPress which so far is superior in every way to Community Server.

Well, except one. This is actually my second attempt at this blog entry. I had previously made this post and about 5 others when my blog was reset, ostensibly due to a security exploit in WordPress which has (hopefully) subsequently been patched. HostGator’s scheduled backup hadn’t kicked in before the reset, so I sadly ended up losing the posts that I written. So this is a second start with a new theme and a more conservative backup policy. Hopefully things will look up from here.