We had a triple-header at the September meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby and Rails group, held as usual on the third Tuesday of the month at RMC Research in Portsmouth.
Brian Turnbull… spoke on the HTTP protocol, reprising a well-received presentation he did at the SeaCoast Linux User Group last week. At SLUG, he was able to talk for over two hours. Due to the schedule, Brian was far more restricted this time, but did a great job of covering the material and trimming it to fit the allocated time. RFC 2616 is the key document you want to read, and it is quite readable.
Scott Garman… spoke about the Virtual Private Server (VPS) that will be offered to contestants of the upcoming RailsRumble. He showed us the console and talked about the advantages of a VPS over some of the other shared hosting solutions. Scott had recipes for setting up the VPS with Ubuntu 8.04 and Rails in two configurations: one using Mongrel and the second using Passenger’s mod_rails plugin.
Nick Plante… spoke on the git version control system and the GitHub hosted services.
The doorprizes were many and generous. The big prize was a conference admission to the upcoming Voices That Matter Professional Ruby Conference, coming up in Boston November 17-20. I was lucky enough to win that. Nick Plante also brought three copies of his new book co-authored with David Berube, Practical Ruby Plugins, so many folks went home happy that night.
Tune in to the next meeting of NHRuby by keeping an eye on the website at http://www.nhruby.org