Barcamp and Eating My Words

Last week was BarCamp Tampa Bay, which is an 'un-conference' of sorts. Admission is free, you sign in, and you choose what will be presented that day, wiki style. I did a talk called "Grid Tools: How I manage 300+ Linux servers without losing my mind", which was received pretty well amid the other excellent talks they had this year. My favorite was "Hacking Children's Toys" where a hardware hacker demonstrated getting a root shell on a handheld educational game cartridge player (the Didj). My pal Bryce did a presentation on Ruby on Rails, which unfortunately I missed since our presentations coincided..

Ruby.. the language that I was so sure I was to forsake for Python. My my, how I shall eat my words today. I had a spare hour this afternoon and decided to read over some of the documentation about it and see what it was all about. One hour later, I completed the twenty minute tutorial, read through some comparisons between it and languages like Perl, C, and PHP, which I have written in in the past, and wanted MORE. My head was swimming with exclamations like: "Everything is an object? Everything has methods? I can just modify a class in runtime? It came from Japan? What insanity is this?" My favorite host management tool, Puppet, is written in it, and so is my website generator. So in the least I should learn it and see how far I can run with it, even if it is only to extend those tools.

Oh, and I so want a LackRack. Would be a great conversation piece for the next Lan party..