For some reason, doing a Google image search for “inflatable cockroach” doesn’t return many good results. How are our children supposed to learn if they can’t see gigantic artificial versions of repulsive vermin? So, even though this cell-phone photo is a year old, here’s me doing my part in addressing the problem:

The full RubyConf videos are now up. Included in this batch is my talk, “Conversations vs. Laws: What do we mean when we say Ruby is dynamic?” I got to jam in a bunch of tangential interesting ideas, and somehow found a receptive audience to them. The only blemish on the experience was that Laurent Sansonetti was giving his OS X and Ruby talk in the other room, so I had to miss that. Good thing for video.

Video for the RubyConf 2007 talks is coming, or so we’ve been told: The good folks at Confreaks seem to be churning away at what is most likely a massive post-production job. I’ll be sure to point to the video of my talk when it’s out.

In the meantime, here’s a dorky game we can play: If you didn’t see my talk at RubyConf, download the PDF of my slides, and then try to figure out what the hell I was talking about. As I’ve said before, my talk slides are usually this confusing without the accompanying talk. Is it hopelessly smug to suggest that this should be the case for more talks?

Until recently you could’ve said I wasn’t a serious video game player. I’ve always enjoyed them, sure, and I was always happy to check out games owned by my friends or roommates, but that was about it. But Halo 2 got a hold of me a few years back, and when Halo 3 came out this year I finally got Xbox Live. And now, as all of my friends and co-workers have to hear me talk about endlessly, I’m completely totally hooked. …

Another year, another RubyConf. 2007 was bigger than last year, maybe with an attendance of 500 people, and it’s hard to say if it’s kept any of its intimacy. The new semi-two-track approach (single-track in the morning, double-track in the afternoons) seems a good middle-ground to me. The only problem is that it’s probably nigh-impossible to predict demand when you’ve got two tracks. There were many afternoon slots in which one of the rooms was packed, the air dense with nerd-musk. Not a good thing.

The conference program overall seemed to have a highly theoretical, philosphical focus: Marcel Molina talked about beauty in code, Luke Kanies talked about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and then I talked about post-structuralism and dynamic typing. I was genuinely prepared to have the talk with the least amount of code, but then Luke had none at all, so there you go. Anyway, I enjoyed this aspect of the conference. It’s like we’re becoming a sort of OOPSLA-lite, which is preferable to becoming the next Java One.

I left this conference excited about the year ahead, for lots of different reasons:

• The one-two punch of JRuby, which will tempt more of the enterprise world into Ruby-land, and Rubinius, which will make it easy for programmers to contribute to an implementation without being C wizards.
• RSpec upcoming Story framework, in which high-level tests can get expressed in re-usable, described blocks. I don’t have the problem of needing to make these tests readable and writeable by non-techies, but I sure do have a lot of too-long integration tests in the Rails apps I write.
• Treetop, an easy-looking DSL for text parsing. I don’t know much about parsing and am not sure when I’d use Treetop, but it certainly seemed simple.

I also ended up leaving with a few questions that will have to be explored further:

• Is my sense of testing completely different from that of others? Why is it that nobody seems to feel the same about mocking and stubbing as I do? Why am I fine with writing less longer tests instead of lots of shorter tests? I have a feeling that I’m writing good tests, and that other people are writing good tests, but that there are nonetheless some fundamentally different mental models being employed here.
• What’s up with the resurgence of attempts to transparently map Ruby to SQL? Jim Weirich brought it up during his talk as a learning exercise only, but a later Google search reveals Ambition. Having gone partway down this path years ago with Lafcadio, I’m not sure what to think. Ambition seems to use ParseTree, which would overcome some of the limitations of Lafcadio’s approach. But working with Ruby query inference in Lafcadio made me wonder if the idea’s a good thing at all. More on this later …

I’ll be speaking at RubyConf again this year, for the third time. The title of my talk is “Conversations vs. Laws: What do we mean when we say Ruby is dynamic?”, and it’s basically going to be a potpourri of random ideas that may or may not be related to software engineering, such as Islamic art, restorative justice, anarchism, queer theory, and Platonism.

Ruby-interested readers will probably have noticed that my contribution to open source in the form of code has dropped like a stone in the past few years, so when I was thinking about doing a talk this year, a more abstract subject seemed like my best bet. Of course, now that my talk has been accepted I have to actually research the thing, and now I’m thinking it might’ve been easier just to write a few thousand lines of code …

RubyConf is from November 2-4, and it looks like tickets are still on sale. Tickets sold out last year within hours, so if you’re interested in going this year, you should buy immediately.

I’ll be in Rochester, New York on Saturday September 29, speaking about conservation issues in new media art. Often with these sorts of talks I’m presenting as a techie with a touch of conservation experience, but in this case I’ll be presenting on one of my own works and talking about conservation issues from the point of view as a new media artist. Even better, I’ll be sharing the session with the terrifically talented Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

In the odd chance that I have any readers around Rochester who’d be interested in coming to this, please contact me, because I think I can wrangle some sort of discount.

I’ve subscribed to Harper’s Magazine ever since high school, and it has easily influenced the way I think, and the things I value, far more than any other publication. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a bit of a fanboy for once-editor Lewis Lapham, who made the magazine what it is today. I have fond memories of seeing him do a reading at a St. Paul bookstore about a decade ago, absent-mindedly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he read some winding, über-erudite essay comparing television journalism with the pagan rites of imperial Rome. (And, in case you’re wondering, there are politics geeks in this world who are as maladjusted and cringeworthy as any pudgy Captain Kirk-wannabe you’ve ever met.)

These days, Lapham is a sort of emeritus editor at Harper’s, and he doesn’t write his “Notebook” column every month. But his newest column (not yet available online) is a doozy. First, he heads to New York’s storied Rainbow Room for a panel discussion featuring foreign policy heavies Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, and Brent Scowcroft. He tweaks the airy pretensions of these supposed wise men, and then notes that the United States may no longer be capable of effectively waging war, for reasons more sociological than geopolitical: Wars are powered by warriors, and too many Americans today see war as senseless, not noble. (John Keegan’s A History of Warfare is now on my Amazon wishlist, not that I need more ginormous non-fiction books around the house.)

And then, as casually as he might announce that he prefers Orange Pekoe over Earl Grey, he lets slip that this mandarin of American letters has been trying out a pasttime that even his own grandchildren might see as hopelessly crass:

I was reminded of the oversight soon after the Rainbow Room briefing when I came across the Internet game World of Warcraft, said to be played by as many as 8.5 million combatants located at all points of the geopolitical compass who pay $15 a month to pursue their dreams of godlike power in the online world of Azeroth. My guest pass granted access to the kingdoms Mulgore and Durotar, brought with it directions to the battlefields in the Burning Crusade, explained how to spot the differences between a Troll, a Silithid insect, and an Orc, when to beware the Blood Elves in Azshara, where to gather magic spells with which to ring the Scarab Gong or maybe assemble the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. Lost for an hour in the Elwynn Forest among the Murloc Oracles of Crystal Lake, I began to hope for rescue by Kissinger or Brzezinski, operating as the online avatars Bismarck and Maximus, sending reinforcements (in the personae of dwarves and shadow priests) from their computers in Washington.

Holy shit Lewis Lapham played WoW??!? The man who studied under C.S. Lewis at Cambridge, who dissed Roman Polanski while testifying in a British court, whose great-grandfather was a founder of Texaco, and who of all things doesn’t know how to make his own coffee—this same Lewis Lapham somehow got online, made a character, and played WoW? How on Earth did this happen? That’s like Prince trying out for American Idol. Or Thomas Pynchon getting a Twitter account.

By the way, sci-fi MMOG Eve Online just hired an economist, who’ll be publishing reports on in-world issues such as inflation. I’m not the only one who thinks this is going to get interesting: Judging from the comments attached to this announcement, it looks like there are a number of EO players with strong interests in economics themselves.

If you ask me, Eve Online sounds far more interesting than WoW or Second Life, but that’s exactly why I stay away. For somebody with my interests, a game with a realistic economy, complex organizational dynamics, and vicious backstabbing would be like a bottomless bag of crack cocaine. But if Lewis Lapham started playing, who’s to say? I mean, being a member of his corporation would be pretty badass.

This Wednesday, June 6, I’m going to be taking part in a panel discussion on media preservation presented by Independent Media Arts Preservation and Electronic Arts Intermix. My part on the panel will be to talk about new media arts preservation, in particular the work I did on Shu Lea Cheang’s work Brandon when I was at Rhizome. The other panelists are Ann Butler, Jeff Martin, and Glenn Wharton.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22 Street
5th floor
New York, NY

For more info, check out the full announcement over on Rhizome.