We’ve been organizing this event every year since 2006, and it’s growing and just getting better year after year. This time we want to open our invitations to the English-speaking communities, so we encourage you, English-speaking rails developers, come and join us giving a talk or workshop.

If you want to give a talk, you can send your proposals here. This year we want to encourage English people who wanna come with us and give talks (but notice that the most of the talks will be in Spanish).

For more information, visit the oficial web or watch the recorded videos on our blip.tv channel.

Conferencia Rails is a non-profit event organized by a group of volunteers, some of which were also on the organization of the successful EuRuKo 2009.

What does planetoid allow you to do?

• Show a summary of the people in a group, with their names, avatars, links to their blogs, twitters and github accounts.
• Aggregate their feeds in one place
• Show the projects that the members are working on, with title, a brief description, and a link

Who is using planetoid?

I keep a list of the sites that are using planetoid. As of today, these are some of the people using planetoid:

• Spain.rb. The Spanish rubyists community devoted to promote our work on the Ruby community, worldwide.
• ASPGems. A Spanish Ruby on Rails company, based on Madrid.
• Flowers In Space. A Spanish Ruby on Rails company, from Seville.
• Planet Girona. Aggregating feeds from Girona blogs.

Want to join?

Just try it, it’s easy to install as a rails application… I’m open for comments and suggestions so if you find it useful but you need a new feature just tell me. And if you use it, send me a note to add your site to the list!

github.com/jaimeiniesta/planetoid

La instalación es sencilla: enchufas el modem USB, y aparece una unidad de disco. Dentro hay un instalador (.PKG), doble clic, instalar y reiniciar la máquina. A partir de ahí basta con lanzar el programa HSPA USB MODEM, te pide el PIN de la tarjeta del módem, lo introduces y en principio pulsarías Conectar y ya está. Pero esto es en Windows, en el macbook está mal hecha la instalación y falta configurar un perfil de conexión.

Para ello clica en el último icono de abajo de abajo a la izquierda y selecciona “Perfil de conexión” en el menú desplegado:

en la siguiente pantalla debes añadir un nuevo perfil de conexión, y después activarlo:

estos son los parámetros de configuración necesarios:

• Cuenta: simyo (o cualquier otro nombre, supongo)
• Número: *99***1#
• APN: gprs-service.com

Y ya está. Lo salvas, recuerda darle al botón “Activar”, y a partir de ahí ya puedes conectar a internet.

A mi me va bastante bien, me llega a 2 Mb, que no está mal para estar en Girona.

Ahora me falta conseguir compartir mi conexión con el macbook de mi chica… se desconecta a los pocos segundos de hacerlo. Si alguien me puede echar una mano con esto, se lo agradezco de antemano!

ACTUALIZACIÓN: sí que se puede compartir la conexión entre macbooks! Debía ser cosa de mi firewall o así. El caso es que ya funciona, 2 macbooks conectándose a la vez con un mismo simyo.

planetoid will let you create users and feeds from their blogs, which will be parsed automatically and shown on the front page. You can set up a cron job to do this task automatically. planetoid is intentionally simple: I didn’t want to create another multi-user blog engine, I just wanted to put together some blogs and show basic info about the authors, so you won’t find here thinks like user registration or posts publication. You just provide info about the authors and their feeds, that’s all.

planetoid is inspired by Aintablog, which is a great piece of software but didn’t give me what I was exactly needed at the moment.

Code is available through my github repository. Please keep in mind that this is an initial draft, fully working, but on a very initial state (I started writing it yesterday), so use it at your own risk

Feedback will be greatly appreciated so please try it and comment what you like / dislike about it!

planetoid can be found here:

http://github.com/jaimeiniesta/planetoid/tree/master

But this time I’m not talking about Internet Explorer, that stupid and paranoid browser we all hate. I’m talking about Hotmail, that stupid and paranoid mail service we also hate. I really hate it because it makes me lose my time trying to convince them that I’m not a bloody spammer. Look, we’ve only sent a few testing emails from our production server and we’ve already been marked as spammers. This has to be corrected right now, what could happen when we launch the site for good and thousands of mails come out of it and get lost on the spam folders of those Hotmail users? And that if you’re lucky enough to reach the spam folder

OK, I’ve complained enough, I’ve got to live with it. Let’s see some things that you can try to improve your mail sending, how to avoid being marked as spammer by Hotmail.

Stop sharing – if you can

Basically, the problem with mails is that we tend to use shared mail servers for sending e-mail. We might be good guys, but we’re on a shared server, so many other e-mails are being constantly sent from it by the other users and we just can’t control it. Maybe your neighbour is selling viagra, who knows? The thing is, Hotmail will mark the whole mail server as a source of spam, even if you’re not a spammer.

The first tip would be using a dedicated server for sending email. Having a unique IP would help avoid those situations, but this might be overkill and expensive. In our case, we’re hosted on EngineYard, and they provide these tips to improve e-mail deliverability. As they say, they have a solution that lets treat shared servers as trusty dedicated servers:

We’ve crafted a rather neat solution that allows you to utilize our shared mail systems while retaining your own dedicated sending IP. This insulates you (and your sending reputation) from being adversely (or positively) impacted by other clients.

To do this, you need to configure a SPF record on your DNS:

SPF stands for sender policy framework. It’s basically a DNS record that MTAs can use to verify that a given host is allowed to send mail for your domain.

It will depend on your domain control panel how to do this.

Microsoft Sender ID

Once this SPF record is set up on your DNS, you need to tell Hotmail this has been set up. You’ve got information about the Sender ID framework, but basically you need to submit your SPF record to them.

That’s a first step in order to clean your reputation in front of Hotmail. In one or two days you should receive response on your e-mail. In my case, they told me that they had added this SPF record to their systems, and that in 48 hours or so the changes would be propagated and I’d no longer be treated as a criminal.

2 days later, things were much better. Most emails sent from our server to Hotmail reached the inboxes! We were happy for a few days, but after that, some Hotmail users told us they still were getting our emails on their spam folders or, even they just didn’t get any message at all.

Ask Microsoft directly

So, I contacted directly Microsoft by replying to the email they sent me telling everything was OK. I showed them some of the Hotmail addresses that were still thinking we were spammers. One day later, they replied back. Quick! Basically they were saying:

Your IP was blocked by Windows Live Hotmail because the majority of all the email that you send to Hotmail has been judged to be spam by Windows Live Hotmail’s internal filtering system. We have conducted an investigation into the emails originating from your IP space and we have implemented a fix for your deliverability problem. This fix may take up to 48 hours to replicate completely throughout our system

So well, it looks like the SPF submission wasn’t enough. And they say they’ve applied a “fix”, I guess they’ll be filtering out our domain or something. Anyway, they also provided links with more info and burocracy I could try to convince them of our innocence. After reading this I went to their Sender solutions section. There, I was interested on the Sender ID program (that I tried before), the Sender Score Certified Email, that looked very promising but you cannot apply to if you haven’t got a dedicated IP, the Smart Network Data Services, which you can’t control if you’re not the owner of the server (I’ll tell EngineYard to do this for me), and the Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program, which I joined. And finally I even found another form you could submit, but also needed data from the owner of the server so I’ll contact EngineYard for this.

The Final Solution

So, that’s all for now. No, there is no final solution. I’m still waiting to see if all these things help us improve our situation with Hotmail. If I learn something new, I’ll tell you here – if you have suggestions, they’re all welcome!

It has been a really pleasing experience for all of us on the organization team, we’ve had a really, really good time sharing ideas and code to organize the main european Ruby conference. I have to admit it, we were really surprised to see Spain was proposed as the candidate country last year in Prague. The czech team proposed Madrid as the candidate city to the group of spaniards that were there, and we were excited to hear it. We eventually changed it to Barcelona instead, as Madrid was already quite full holding the Conferencia Rails (that’s the Spanish Rails Conference that is held every November and organized by ourselves by the way: it’s amazing as well )

So to set this up many things were made during this year: a new association was born, the SRUG (Spanish Ruby Users Group), which has been the organization in charge of the conference. We built a rails app to handle the registration process, talks listing and calendar, paypal payments and more – it was built over a simple app I did for the Conferencia Rails and made much bigger by Fernando Guillén, Juanjo Bazán and Raúl Murciano. The code of this app is freely available on github for use in other conferences, please fork us! We also received the help of the Scotland on Rails team, who sent us a pair of ruby scripts to build the EuRuKo twitter bot and the raffle. Thanks guys!

We even bought a gong for the lightning talks that will be passed from team to team during the next years conferences and will be a symbol for our descendants on the next centuries.

Now it’s time to pass the gong to the next country and start it over again for EuRuKo 2010. I hope they find as much fun as we did during 2009! See you next spring in Krakow!

Desde el equipo de organización del evento ya tenemos casi lista la aplicación de registro, y está previsto abrirla en estos días, en cuanto ultimemos unos detallitos.

Hemos ido recibiendo un buen montón de propuestas de charlas interesantes, pero aún queremos más! Si sabes de Ruby y te gustaría participar, aún estás a tiempo de enviar tu propuesta de charla a talks@euruko2009.org

Y si eres diseñador, ¿te animas a participar en el concurso de camisetas?

Más información en http://euruko2009.org

Sometimes what your code needs is a relaxed approach into the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re stuck, leave it for a while and go for a walk in the woods. Your subconscious will find the solution for you.

This can also be combined with the Siesta-Driven Development methodology, too!

Más información en el blog de Euruko 2009.

Nos vemos en Barcelona!

Proyectos para clientes

2008 ha sido un año interesante, lleno de proyectos:

IKEA: El Hogar De…

elhogar.de
En 2008 formé parte del equipo de desarrollo de Profesionalia para la nueva red social de IKEA “El Hogar De”, en la que los usuarios suben las fotos de sus casas, cuentan sus aventuras, charlan en foros y mucho más…

Arturo Álvarez

www.arturo-alvarez.com

El estudio del diseñador de lámparas gallego Arturo Álvarez crea algunas de las lámparas más raras y bellas que he visto en mi vida. Este proyecto comenzó como un gestor de contenidos que tenía en mente todos los detalles, hasta el tipo de bombilla utilizada por cada modelo de lámpara, pero el proyecto fué cambiando sobre la marcha y se convirtió en algo mucho más sencillo, una especie de gestor de contenidos orientado a subir imágenes. Y es que una imagen vale más que 1000 palabras.

Ameets

ameets.com

¿Eres creativo? ¿Tienes un portfolio interesante? Entonces únete a la red de Ameets, una red social orientada a creativos que está creciendo a pasos agigantados.

Herzio

herzio.com

Este invierno no ha podido ser más interesante para mi carrera! Me encanta la música, y me gusta tocar temas de rock con la guitarra, así que estoy super contento de haberme unido a este nuevo proyecto desde el comienzo. Por el momento no os puedo contar más detalles, pero dentro de poco podrás probar la beta pública!

Proyectos personales

Hey, aún me queda tiempo para hacer un poco de programación nocturna!

PageRankAlert

pagerankalert.com

Mi proyecto mascota desde que comencé con Ruby on Rails allá por el 2006, es un servicio gratuito que te permite rastrear los cambios de Google PageRank en tus webs.

Flora Gavarres

floragavarres.net

El lugar donde vivo está rodeado de naturaleza. Me encanta dar largos paseos por los bosques y hacer fotos de la flora local, al igual que a mis compañeros de proyecto. Hemos construído este sitio para almacenar y clasificar fotos de plantas.

Reuniones y conferencias de Ruby on Rails

Me encanta pertenecer a las comunidades ruby / rails, entre otras cosas porque mola viajar a otras ciudades y conocer gente interesante. En 2008 estuve en dos grandes eventos relacionados con Ruby:

* Euruko 2008 en Praga (Marzo). Allí, se propuso a España como el país anfitrión para Euruko 2009, así que tomamos el relevo, montamos la asociación SRUG, y ahora estoy en el equipo organizador de la próxima Euruko! Nos vemos en Barcelona!

* Conferencia Rails en Madrid (Noviembre).
Este año fué la tercera edición de la conferencia rails hispana, y por tercer año consecutivo formé parte del equipo organizador.

Vida personal

Durante 2008 también he disfrutado de mi vida offline un montón. He consolidado mi nueva vida en Cataluña. He hecho nuevas amistades, aprendido un nuevo idioma y hasta aprendido nuevas recetas!

(algunos de) Mis objetivos para 2009

* Comer menos, y mejor! Comida de verdad, de cultivo biológico, sin pesticidas!
* Dormir más, y mejor! Más Siesta-Driven Development!
* Trabajar menos! Menos horas, y automatizar las tareas aburridas.
* Estudiar más! Al menos, la 1/3 parte de mi tiempo de trabajo debería estar dedicado a estudiar nuevas técnicas y mejorar mis habilidades.
* Ganar más dinero! Sí!
* Divertirme más! Reirme un montón, descubrir cosas nuevas, pasear por el bosque