Just got back from Ruby Conf 2007 in Charlotte NC. I had a great time and met a bunch of smart, fun and nice people. The conference was a great value for the money. This year was the first year I was lucky enough to attend and I'm grateful that it was close enough to DC and that I had the time/funds available. Here are my initial impressions from the first of hopefully many more Ruby Conf's that I will attend.

MS has hired Rob Conery, the guy behind SubSonic (my favorite DAL for .NET). According to Rob, "SubSonic will be the convention-driven toolset for Microsoft’s new MVC framework." This is really good news.

Well, my new website is starting to take shape. It's been in the oven for quite some time now, but I recently had external motivations to set it free even before it was completely baked.

I've been hacking together a Delphi wrapper for LLMozLib. LLMozLib is a static C++ library that lets a developer embed the Mozilla browser in their application. It has been graciously released under the Mozilla Tri-License by the kind Second Life folks at Linden Lab.

Charles Simonyi, best known for inflicting Hungarian Notation on our industry, has traveled to the International Space Station. He has a website detailing his ongoing journey.

It was unfortunate to read how Monson-Haefel has lost the enthusiasm he once had for Groovy. According to his own website his "proudest achievement was instigating JSR-241, The Groovy Language Specification", so it is a strange change of heart indeed. This is especially unfortunate considering what I perceive as an uptick in activity and interest: Groovy 1.0 was just released, Groovy In Action was published, websites about Groovy and using Groovy have come online.

Today CodeGear announced two new products: "Delphi 2007 for Win32" and "Delphi for PHP". I won't comment about Delphi 2007 (just yet), but I will say a few words about "Delphi for PHP".