These legacy presentations cover a variety of technical topics. In their time, they were delivered numerous times in a wide range of venues, including educational “brown bag” lunches, lightning talks, user groups, library webinars and technical conferences.
Java Presentations
These are legacy Java presentations covering technologies used for organizations such as AOL, Raytheon, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) agency, and various freelance gigs.
Creating Dynamic Charts With JFreeChart
This presentation describes how to use JFreeChart, a Java open source charting library, to dynamically create charts and seamlessly embed them within web pages.
Maven: Managing Software Projects for Repeatable Results
This presentation explores the features of Maven, a software build tool that has achieved prominence in the Java development arena. Find out how Maven can be leveraged to automate key project tasks.
Ruby & Rails Presentations
These legacy presentations cover technologies used in conjunction with the Ruby programming language and the Rails software development framework. They cover various technologies that have been successfully used for organizations such as AOL, Grab Networks, Metrostar, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, Raytheon, the Department of State, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA) agency, as well as various freelance gigs.
Creating Custom Charts using Ruby Vector Graphics in Rails
RVG is a drawing API modeled after the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard. RVG is bundled with RMagick, which is a Ruby interface to the ImageMagick library. Learn how to use RVG to create custom charts that can be integrated directly into web sites. The presentation provides a general introduction to RVG, then illustrates the use of RVG in a web application that displays nearby stars in a generated perspective diagram.
Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Web Site
There are thousands of social networking sites, each with their own unique sign-on systems. How many user names and passwords do you really want to remember? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a single sign-on that you could use on all of the sites that you frequent? OpenID is an open-source, decentralized sign-on technology that promises this and more. Find out how to implement OpenID for a web site using Ruby on Rails.
Introduction to Ruby on Rails
This presentation provides a thorough introduction to Ruby on Rails and is particularly useful for individuals who are completely unfamiliar with Rails.
Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Apps
This presentation is a distillation of practical tactics that have been used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast, Iran Voices and Votridea. FaceBook is the world’s largest social network, with over 600 million members.
Practical JRuby
This talk provides a number of step-by-step examples that illustrate different ways in which Rails applications can interact effectively with third-party Java libraries. The presentation shows how developers can leverage JRuby to augment Rails applications with the mature, third-party libraries that are widely available in the Java world.
Rails and the Apache SOLR Search Engine
What good is content if nobody can find it? Many information sites are like icebergs, with only a limited amount of content directly accessible to users and the rest, the “underwater” portion, only available through searches. This talk shows how Rails websites can take advantage of the world-class Apache SOLR search engine to provide sophisticated search features. We’ll cover how to get started with SOLR, leveraging the Sunspot gem, indexing, hit highlighting and other topics.
Rails Security
So, you think your web application is reasonably secure? Well, based on the statistics, you’re probably wrong. This talk examines real-world security problems in Rails applications, and shows how they can be mediated.
Social Networking: The Next Weapon Against Bad Actors
The bad guys are getting more sophisticated with viruses, worms, phasing attacks, spam, etc. We need new ways to unite cyber security professionals so they can work more effectively against bad actors. This talk discusses how social networking techniques can be leveraged to increase the effectiveness of the cyber security community.
A Tour of Ruby on Rails
Since its public unveiling, Ruby on Rails has taken the web development world by storm. Rails is an open-source framework, built using the Ruby programming language, that promotes high productivity and reduced development times for real-world web sites. This talk provides a high-level tour of the features of Ruby on Rails. You don’t have to be a programmer to learn how this technology can power your online business.
Using Rails to Create an Enterprise App
(A Real-Life Case Study) Rails is a great framework for quickly creating “green field” web applications. Find out how well it works when creating internal, corporate web applications that have to access multiple legacy databases.
Rails Tips and Best Practices
Rails is a great Ruby-based framework for producing web sites quickly and effectively. Here are a bunch of tips and best practices aimed at the Ruby newbie.
Rails Quick Start Presentations
Quick Start Presentations are short, highly focused presentations designed to quickly familiarize viewers with a single topic. These presentations are ideal for time slots of 10 to 15 minutes. They have been successfully used as: 1) planned interstitial content within longer events, 2) lightning talks, 3) brief introductions to a particular topic.
Quick Start: ActiveScaffold
ActiveScaffold is more than just a replacement for the default scaffold functionality built into the Rails framework. The ActiveScaffold plugin provides a simple way for developers to quickly and easily add sophisticated data maintenance and data display features to web sites.
Quick Start: What is Rails?
This presentation provides a brief, non-technical overview of Ruby on Rails, suitable for both management and technical professionals. For an audience of Rails “newbies”, the focus of the presentation is just on educating viewers about Rails. For a more experienced audience, the spin is typically on how the audience can effectively educate others about Rails as a technology.
Quick Start: Rails LiveTree
This presentation provides a step-by-step roadmap for creating a dynamic tree feature for a web site using the LiveTree JavaScript code and the Rails “acts_as_tree” mechanism.
