I attended the Mountain West RubyConf 2008 in Salt Lake City, UT.



It promised to be enlightening, and was. Some of the best sessions were unexpected gems (no pun intended). Following is my take on the sessions that provided some unique insights. Videos of all presentations are available on the Mountain West site.

Ruby is a popular text processing language that has gained a lot of momentum over the last few years, mostly due to the rise of Ruby on Rails. It has a lot of the good things from Perl, but implements a fully object oriented model and syntax.

Ruby is part of the default install of OS X.

I recently purchased a new Intel Macbook to replace my trusty iBook G4. Much has been written about the Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel processors and there is no denying the market power of Intel, but I have some comments now that I have spent a little time with both kinds of Mac.

The Dashboard is a handy feature of OS X to keep information flakes and small tools at the ready.
Read on for how to disable (and enable) the Dashboard.

User forbade pointed out this great guide from the Linux Documentation Project:

Advanced BASH scripting (pdf)

It is also available in other formats.

Amazon.com offers a variety of web services to make building highly scalable web applications easier. One of those services is called the Simple Storage Service (S3). It provides a way to store and retrieve files (up to 5 GB each) on Amazon's distributed servers. S3 has both a SOAP and REST API. You can use the S3 REST API with only the native command line utilities installed by default in OS X Leopard (and Linux).

The say command tells your Mac to talk back, reciting either a string of text or reading an entire file.

An intrepid reader asked the following question:

How do you install a .dmg package from the command line?

Many applications are distributed as disk images, a compressed binary format. If you double click a disk image in the Finder, it is mounted automatically. Once mounted, installation of the application is typically done by dragging an icon to the Applications folder. The same can be accomplished from the command line using two commands, hdiutil and cp.

Macs check for system updates on their own (by default) and prompt you when there are updates to apply to your system. If you want to update immediately, like after a fresh OS X install, you can check for updates by clicking on the Apple menu icon, then Software Update. However, if you want to update a system remotely -- a frequent need for remote servers -- you can do it from the command line.