railsconf: dead phones and no excitement

my phone officially died today.  it's been ill for the past 3 days...it was in intensive care today...but didn't make it.  it's a brick (thin, small one).  anyhow, a trip to the store and i'm going to try to survive the weekend with a "normal" phone (text messaging is the most advanced it has.

anyhow, back to railsconf after a jaunt...

some of the sessions here have been PACKED.  i wasn't able to get in to some...shame on me for being late...namely "clean code" and "doing REST right" were packed to the gills -- to the point apparently that the fire code was violated in one (one of the security guards was freaking out as people were not listening to him and walking in)...too bad i missed those -- nobody was walking out, so i assume that == good.

i'm sitting in a session from the guys who are building codegear (a rails ide).  it's the 10 cool things i learned on the path to rails enlightenment.  it's not an effective message here.  lots of slides.

now he's talking about why i'm here, the ide. 

SIDEBAR: there are three companies here competing in the rails ide space: netbeans, codegear, komodo -- all seemingly (2 at least) eclipse-based ide's.

this is the PM for the project -- he's showing a lot of things but most falls into these categories so far: syntax coloring, code completion, project creation, etc.  what's funny is that so far what i've seen in a lot of these ide's are in sapphire in steel -- and you get some bonus stuff from that plugin as well.  now if you are a mac user, that might not help, but maybe these others will be to your liking...

seems like he's fumbling a bit through the demo (ah, beta code).  mozilla is embedded into the ide for some assisted debugging (looks like mainly for ajax development -- viewing dom, etc.)

well, not terribly exciting i have to say (and ending 20 minutes early doesn't give good impact)...i think i'm too geeky and not picking the right sessions...