JHU and Diploma

Yesterday, I got my diploma for my Master's degree. Sorry, I don't have a picture of it to post. [ I got home quite late last night and pretty much went straight to bed ]. I really didn't give it much thought when I completed the degree. But now that I have the the piece of paper in hand, I'm glad I took the year off and did it. It is a nice feeling of accomplishment. Additionally, since I lost misplaced my undergraduate diploma, now I something to hang if I ever decide to frame it. =)

Talking about JHU, I wanted to point an email I got from the program a few days ago. The school announced that they are adding an Intro Rails class. Really cool! More about rails at some point. Also, Karthik is a good teacher. He knows the material that he is teaching and is excited about it as well. Definitely take a class from him if you get a chance.

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1) New EPP 605.* courses:
A) Starting in Fall '07, there will be a course on Ruby on Rails. The
APL section will be taught by Dan Weimer; MCC section instructors are TBD.
B) Ajax. Starting in Spring '08 there will be a new course entitled
"Rich Internet Applications with Ajax". The APL section will be taught by Marty
Hall and the MCC section will be taught by Karthik Shyamsunder.
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Dry Cleaning vs MetroCard

Recently, I thought I lost my MetroCard. But after I got my pants from the dry cleaners I found it and it still works! It is a good think since there was over 20 dollars still on it. Woohoo!

My First Tech Conference

A few weeks ago, I attended my first Tech Conference.The conference was called GoRuCo - (Gotham Ruby Conference). It was a very nice conference (well, don't have anything really to compare it to). I learned about some interesting ideas and projects that are going in the Ruby community. I was hoping to learn a little core Ruby stuff, but I still learned a lot.

Some of my thoughts on the presentations:

Camping - It is a MVC based lightweight framework Microframework . Initally I didn't really see the point of the project and a couple people I spoke with also had the same thoughts. However, a few days later at work, it dawned to me how it would be useful in creating a simple a frontend to a small internal db. Camping Project

Adhearsion - It got me psyched up to want to go play with VOIP.

Business Natural Language(BNL) Ruby Systems - It was very interesting presentation on how to create a BNL. I was kinda of shocked in what approach they used to convert "sentences" into Ruby code(think simple string munipulations). I definitely want to try it and see if I have an opportunity to implement it on a project. Check out the presenter's homepage for more details.

Also, did I mention that the conference was held at the Google's NYC office? It is huge! It fills a full city avenue block.

Photos of the conference taken by other people - you can spot me in a couple of the photos if you look closely enough.

And what is Ruby? Well, hopefully that will be a future posting. =)