Seth Ladd's Blog

Aloha, I wanted to drop some knowledge in the hopes that it might help others with their own conference. Here's what I learned from putting on Aloha on Rails : * People wait until the last minute to sign up. I thought I knew what this meant, but it's quite literal. Certainly, people signed up with the early bird discounts, but I had signups all the way through the end. * I sent out marketing "care packages" to user groups (including posters and hawaiian chocolates), however I don't get the sense this actually helped with registrations. * Oddly enough, a lot of my marketing was through Twitter. * I did exchange sponsorship for advertising with Ruby Row, and I know that some people signed up because of those ads. * I invested a lot in hiring and working with a professional Design firm (http://www.ocupop.com) This helped make the conference look professional and legitimate. I can't stress the importance of having a professional firm han...

Aloha! I'm humbled to be November's Featured Techie on TechHui , the Hawaii Technology Community. Thanks to Alex for the interview, and to Dan for putting together TechHui. It's great to see our island foster a vibrant community.

I love Ruby on Rails , I love bringing people together to talk about web development and engineering, and I love Hawaii. I wanted to do something amazing, something big, that could bring Ruby on Rails to Hawaii in style and share the Aloha of our Islands with the Rails and Web Development communities. I'm proud to announce that I am organizing and producing Aloha on Rails, the Hawaii Ruby on Rails and Web Development Conference . The conference will take place October 5-6, 2009 at the beautiful Marriott Waikiki on Oahu. The Aloha on Rails Conference is the premier destination event for Ruby on Rails and Web Development. This unique, two day event unites the community’s top speakers and talent with motivated and excited attendees for an unforgettable conference in beautiful Hawaii. Two full days of informative and timely sessions covering Ruby on Rails and the future of web application engineering. The sessions are not simply blog posts, but will be full of wisdom, experience, ...

I presented the wonderfully named " Scala: Java, Erlang, and Ruby’s Hot Three Way Love Child " Scala presentation to the Honolulu Coders back in 2007. I went looking for the actual presentation online, and I'm not sure I ever posted it. I had a brief fling with Scala as I was looking for multi-core friendly environments to build data processing frameworks. I came away being very impressed and look forward to deploying Scala in a future project. After Erlang and Scala, I started programming in a functional style back over in my Ruby code. I consider the experiments a win for that fact along. This post is to prove that I knew Scala before it was cool. :P

I've been playing with Hadoop Pig lately, and having a fun time.  Pig is an easy to use language for writing Map Reduce jobs against Hadoop. Our data is very hierarchical, and we calculate a lot of aggregates for self nodes, their children nodes, and self plus children.  We have a few tricks up our sleeves for SQL for handling these types of aggregates, but of course with Map Reduce an entirely new way of thinking is required. Luckily, Pig allows for easily created User Defined Functions (UDFs) that extend the Pig language.  I was able to take an existing Pig UDF, TOKENIZE, and alter it to suite my needs. Specifically, our data looks like this: 111,/A/B/C 222,/A/B 333,/A/B/C We need to answer questions such as "How many records for A and all of its children?" In this case, the answer is three. We also need to answer "How many records for just A?" which is zero, or "for just C?" which is two. Our strategy is to take the path (eg /A/B/C )...

If you're excited, like I am, about Amazon's recent announcement that they are now offering Elastic Map Reduce you probably want to try a quick Hadoop MapReduce application to test the waters. I found out quickly that if you are on a Mac (as I am) you'll need to perform a few quick configurations before things work correctly. Below is what I needed to do to get Hadoop running on my Mac with Java 1.6. This post assumes you are running the latest Mac OS X 10.5 with all updates applied. Enable Java 1.6 Support To enable Java 1.6, open up the Java Preferences application. This can be found in /Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences. You will need to drag Java 1.6 up and place at the top of both the applet and application versions. Open up a terminal and type java -version and you should see something like the following: java version "1.6.0_07" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_07-b06-153) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_07...

I am currently building a web application that makes heavy use of wizards and forms built with Ext JS . I am sending the form's values as JSON over to a Ruby on Rails server. Thanks to Rails 2.2.2, the JSON is automatically converted into an parameter hash. For a little background to the problem I am about to describe, HTML checkboxes are notoriously difficult to work with, because if the user does *not* check the box, then the browser will not send a value when the form is submitted. This makes it difficult to handle a state change from checked to unchecked. Rails makes this a bit easier because it will render both a hidden field with a value of "off" as well as the original checkbox. If the user checks the box, both values are sent but Rails will use the value from the checkbox (and not the hidden field). If the user does not check a box, only the hidden field's value is sent, which means the "off" value is sent. However, when using Ext JS to r...