Barcamp is behind us
So yersteday was Brussel's Barcamp day. I had a good day, meeting Belgian Rails developer, notably the two people of shoob.
I first assisted at Denis Lamotte presentation of Ruby on Rails. It was a well done quick tour of the main ROR features, it just lacked a bit of examples.
Then I went to see Denis Balencourt & Clo Willaert talking about History & Future of the web. The history part was mostly things I know like the birth of the net, the Amazon revolution, Slashdot, and events all the way up to today. It was nevertheless quite interesting. The second part was about the future of the net. Interesting ideas but the thing with predicting future trends is that you never know when a big revolution will occurs, nor what those revolutions will be about, so maybe in two month from know all those predictions will prove false. All in all, it was a good presentation, although I most enjoyed the first part.
The next presentation I saw was from Frank Lauwers about Hosting Web 2.0. He explained the current trends in web hosting, most notably that as web application are evolving, the customers need switched from disk space and bandwith to CPU and RAM. CPU is now the barrier on how much host you can put on a same server. He then explained that today, their problem is that customer still want to pay for space and bandwidth and that they are having a hard time getting paid for CPU time. He then went onto debatting with us about the specific needs of Web 2.0 developer. It was enlightening to hear a hardware guy and a nice presentation.
Bruno Peeters, Measuring web sites was the next presentation. He talked about ways of measuring blog influence on the web. He first explaind the criteria that can be used for measuring influence and then listed some of the existing solutions. Has I am more of a technical guy, this presentation was less interesting to me.
I then went on with Top of the Pops in Ruby, Peter Forret's presentation. He showed the application he had developped, and explained where ruby helped him. His application is grabbing playlists from Studio Brussel and make statistics out of them. I think he has a good idea, but he will shortly have IP problems.
Then François Lamotte & Denis Balencourt demonstrated their system for leaving audio comments on a Typo blog. It's a nice example of integration of Ruby on Rails and Asterisk, but I don't see myself phoning to a server to leave a comment on a blog. But it surely serves as a demonstration of OpenSource technologies integration and the innovations they allow.
The last thing I saw was "A RubyOnRails application for a broadcast company: success factors and lessons learned" by Alain Ravet. Alain showed us the contact management application he created for the VRT. A great example of agile development with Rails. He then explained us what he has learned from his project. It was a really interesting talk as it is one of the few project I know of in Belgium developed for the enterprise with Ruby On Rails.
We then had a drink with all the Barcampers and that was the end of the day.
I did not present my talk as I did not think it would interest people. I was going to show the CONNIE web site I've developed, but it's just another web site. The only interesting thing is that it is made with Rails, and that it didn't took long to create, but that's hard to show in a presentation. The next time, I'll present a more technical topic, diving in some code. As I'm more interested in that kind of thing, I will surely feel more confident in myself.
All in all, it was a great day. I enjoyed meating Ruby On Rails people and the presentations I saw were all good. We're planning on creating a community around Ruby On Rails developer in Belgium, we'll see how that goes in the next month.
Last but not least, I have to thank Peter Forret for organizing such a nice event.
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Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others. The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex. The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat. The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different. It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.