Useful Miscellany

SDForum and RubyCentral are putting on a joint conference on Ruby in the Bay Area during the weekend of April 22-23. Unfortunately I've already committed to being out of town that weekend, though it's possible that I could reshuffle some plans.

I've received several invitations to check out the 30 Boxes shared calendar, but haven't had time to play with it. Initial poking at it looks like there's no easy import/export with iCal, so I'm unlikely to use it. If you're looking for a shared alternative to Yahoo's calendar, though, and aren't dependent on push/pull of events to/from a mobile device, it's a good bet.

Most of my time during the past couple of months has been spent attempting to clear out my schedule so that I can work on a book revision (still pending contract, but looking good) and start learning Ruby. I expect things here to be mostly quiet for another few weeks, at which point I'll be setting up my development system for Ruby on Rails and blogging about the experience as it unfolds. I'm an old-time C programmer, now a bit rusty, but I like what I've seen so far of the syntax and conventions for Ruby. I'm really looking forward to getting my decks cleared enough to sit down and start learning it.

I'll be in Boston next week for LinuxWorld, stop in at the Usenix/SAGE booth and say hi. Other conference plans are:

• LISA Regional Training Event, May 8th, San Jose (come learn project management from me!)
• Usenix Annual Technical, Boston, last week of May
• BlogHer'06, San Jose, July 28 & 29
• LISA '06, Washington DC, first week of December