A friend of mine recently asked me about adding time formats to Rails apps. It’s not completely intuitive on how to add new "default" symbols for date and time formats or to get a list of the built in ones. The API has the built-in lists of constants under DATE_FORMATS but it’s a bit difficult to read on that page.

The current JRuby team members are all passionate hackers with intimate knowledge of Ruby, Java, and of course JRuby. That said, none of us were on the team at the project’s original inception. I assume the JRuby pioneers thought JRuby would be a good idea—I know I did, when I first heard about it. For a lot of folks though, it’s somewhat less obvious. Why is writing JRuby on top of the JVM a good idea, they ask. Are we nuts, evil geniuses, or is using the JVM just a solid pragmatic decision?

Ok, this is not Microsoft's fault, but it is a perfect example for the windows experience.

While working on a nasty IE JavaScript bug in my windows VM I kept getting an annoying popup saying: "SUN Java - Update available".

After clicking it away several times, I though "heck let's install it so it keeps quiet" and I clicked on the icon. After waiting several minutes for the installer to load data and seeing some of the nice progress bar, I got this wonderful message:

Warning: Operating system not supported! - Thank you for choosing Java (TM) ...

I attended RailsConf 2007 in Portland Oregon and had a great time. The Rails community is growing so large its unbelievable. Its starting to get all 'enterprisey' as well.

I wrote an article for Lxer summing up some of the events. I'll reproduce it here:

Railsconf 2007

• "Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." -Daniel Burnham