What’s that coming our way? Why, it is the weekend, and we’re real excited here because that means fun times with video and comedy. Two of our favorites.

Come on by Holocene this Sunday for an irreverent Kelley and Jason show. Highlights will make the next installments of Noboto, recently noted in the Mercury’s own artsy blog, and frankly, we’re glad to be noteworthy. Thanks.

Sunday, July 2 9pm $5 at Holocene

Well our plane got in after midnight last night, we got in a few scant hours of sleep, and we’re back at work in the sweltering morning heat of Portland. With a predicted high of 102 degrees today, this office is going to get mighty hot, mighty fast. So I’m going to keep this summary brief, because we have a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time!

RailsConf in Chicago was amazing. There were so many good talks, and great keynotes by some of our heroes like Martin Fowler, Paul Graham, Why the Lucky Stiff, and of course, David Heinemeier Hansson. We took some pictures, and some other folks posted pictures of Kandace here and here. The people were great, too. We had a chance to finally put faces to the names of many of the people in the Rails community, which was in itself very rewarding.

The best news of the conference was the partnership with O’Reilly. Which means that next year, the show is moving to Portland. Yay! Which is great, because the worst part of the conference was the venue itself, and for me, the flight to and from Chicago. With that out of the way, I’m sure to enjoy myself a lot more. Hopefully, others will too. But I will say that no-one puts on a tech conference as well as O’Relly, and we’re pleased as peas that they’re going to be part of the picture.

So back to the working week… but a much more inspired one!

Well, for those of you following the episodes of Needmore Designs, it’s been an awful boring week, hasn’t it. We’re real sorry about that. It’s not going to get much better, because now we’re leaving today for Chicago and its RailsConf, for a four day crash course in Ruby and Rails and stuff like that.

You can of course reach us by email during that time. We’ll be checking several times a day, and keeping an eye on things from there. We may also have a chance to post some notes from the conference.

Meanwhile, we expect to launch as many as three great new websites not long after we return. Stay tuned for more exciting news from Needmore.

Well Rails Day 2006 has come and gone, and we’re really proud to have the fruits of our unusual labor available to you at cuppin.com. Please visit, have a look around, even perhaps create yourself an account. We’d love to hear what you think.

The experience was quite thrilling for me. It’s not usual to have such a sense of community surrounding an event that pretty much takes place all over the world. But we really got into the spirit of the thing, and Peat in fact was working so furiously that he ended up the highest ranked committer in the event, and our team (Peat and I, aka Team Needmore Coffee) ranked second! I definitely wouldn’t have even considered such a thing if not for Peat, with whom both Kandace and I always have such a good time collaborating with.

Finally, I have to say that this was a great way to get excited about the Rails Conference coming up in Chicago next week. We’re very excited to meet all these other great talents, and learn all about Rails!

(For those curious, to “commit” something simply means that you’re basically “saving your changes” to the Rails Day server. The rules for the event said that you had to commit at least ten times, just to kind of prove that you were working the whole time. But it’s not a bad idea to commit as often as you can, because that helps you keep in sync with your teammate(s). It also kind of proves that you were awake the whole time!)

Now the story can be told. Ray is joining forces with Peat Bakke to create a Ruby on Rails application, from scratch, in 24 hours. Starting tomorrow night. The team will be called Needmore Coffee and we’ll be competing in something called Rails Day for cash and prizes. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with a web application that everyone can use and enjoy.

Wish us luck!

Today we helped our friends at Sonic Arts post some of the Ingredients 2006 Videos for your viewing pleasure. For those not familiar with Ingredients, contestants were basically given a bunch of sounds, a bunch of video clips, and 24 hours to assemble a coherent 3-6 minute music video. The collection posted on their website today represents over half of the submissions, and a is great chance to see many different ideas coming from the same raw material.

The O’Reilly Mac DevCenter is running an interview with Allan Odgaard, creator of the brilliant Mac text editor TextMate. Learning about Allan’s development style, and how he keeps motivated, is a highlight of the interview.

“I work with only a subset of my to-do list, and release minor updates regularly, which helps make it feel less overwhelming, and gives a sense of accomplishment,” he says. “I also keep at least a few tasks open so that, if I feel I am getting nowhere with the current thing I am doing, I can just switch tasks.”

Moses Gunesch is a nice guy and a brilliant Flash developer. Maybe the best I know. He’s so bright, in fact, that he’s in the process of writing what he calls the Fuse kit, which is a kind of all-encompassing effects framework you can use in your code. This is something that would benefit almost every mid-to-advanced-level Flash developer out there, myself included.

The problem is that he refers to his project as “open source,” and I don’t really think it is. Let’s compare it to, say, Ruby on Rails. Rails’ creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, very early on took pains to create an extensive and helpful website, including a blog (to which anyone at all can comment), wiki (to which anyone at all can add), and complete API docs. He released the source long before a 1.0 version was available, and updated it often. He took advantage of the open nature of his project to get more and more people involved, and it was so successful that it’s become an entire cottage industry, and there are a huge number of businesses who rely on his framework extensively. In short, it was a huge success, largely because he releases early and often, and shares everything (flaws and all). David never asked for money, he instead used his framework to make money and release successful products through 37signals, products that have been much-improved by community contributions to Rails itself.

Contrast this with the Fuse kit. You cannot download the Fuse kit, you have to email Moses and request a copy. You cannot discuss the Fuse kit without asking for a membership on the forum. In fact, the forum login screen even offers you a link to download the Fuse kit, even though you actually can’t. If you email and ask for a copy, you are put on a private list and instructed to use the 1.1 version, in development, and offer feedback. Notice the key difference here – it’s all private, private, private. About the only thing you can do on the public site is read broken documentation and donate money!

I’m not trying to tell the talented Mr. Gunesch how to live his life or do his job. Presumably he’s been very successful, his work is first-rate, and I know firsthand what a smart guy he is. But what does give me pause is when he publicly refers to Fuse as an Open Source project. I don’t believe that he violates the definition of Open Source, but I do feel that it violates the spirit of the thing.

Here’s hoping that Moses shares his work openly with the world of Flash designers.