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I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this thing’s really good. Behold, Barackula: The Musical. Yes, I’m serious. Imagine the musical episode of Buffy. Now make it about Obama. Need I say more?

It’s also a great example for the famous Red Camera.

Suggested listening: Scott Bakula by Sunspot

Back on the 15th, I had one of he best weekends of my life. I went to BarCampNYC3. BarCamp is so amazingly simple and brilliant–a lot like Twitter in a way.

A whole bunch of people show up for a conference, with nothing planned. They gather around The Grid and sign up for time slots to talk about just about anything: database design, traveling the world, funding a startup, anything. And then they’re off! Look at the Grid, find something interesting, and go engage.

At the core of BarCamp is the Law of Two Feet, which states that if you’re not interested in what’s happening in one place you have the right and the responsibility to use your two feet to go somewhere else. The corollary to that is that if someone leaves while you’re presenting, that’s ok. They’re just doing their duty to the Law of Two Feet.

The atmosphere of BarCamp is electric with potential. Anything could happen. Again, it’s like Twitter: remember when 90% of Twitter chose color teams in 24 hours? You never know what’s going to happen next at BarCamp, but if you want you can be the cause of it.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of BarCampNYC3. I can’t wait for next year, and I hope to see a lot of you before then.

Pictures from Flickr
More media from Technorati

From the W3C’s recommendation on Ruby Annotation in Asian character sets:

1. Introduction
This section is informative.

Oh good. I was wondering.

If you haven’t heard of RSpec yet, go check it out. If you write any code in Ruby, you should be testing it with RSpec. It’s a little like Test::Unit written in English. With Test::Unit I was never sure how much to test. RSpec makes it clear to test and clear to read. This is exactly why Ruby rocks.

The RSpec folks have just kicked it up a notch with support for Stories. Specs give you what Rails people would call unit and functional tests: they test individual objects. Stories give you integration tests, which make sure everyone plays nice together. As of yet there’s very little in the way of documentation on the RSpec site, but there’s already a great Peepcode screencast. Check it out, gape in awe, write some stories.

HOWEVER: if you use TextMate, don’t use the RSpec bundle that’s in the repository. It’s old. I spent a good hour trying to patch it up before I had to give up, and then I found a better solution. Turns out the RSpec guys host a TM bundle on RubyForge alongside RSpec itself. Go figure. Grab the latest version from there, and everything should work fine.

The great thing about Mac applications is that they’re usually dead simple to install: just drag the app to Applications. That’s it. Some things, however, are a little more complex, and need an installer. I don’t know about you, but I’m always a little nervous letting an installer have its way with my system.

That’s why I was happy to discover this little trick. To find out just what that installer’s going to install, just choose File → Show Files. It’s that simple.