Tom and I decamped from our Youth Hostel in downtown Chicago to the Hyatt Rosemont (no, not the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, that being the big Hyatt so obviously visible from the Rosemont station on the CTA blue line), in preparation for RailsConf at the Wyndham, a mere 25 minutes down the road.

... Or at least I'm sure it would be 25 minutes, if there was any simple pedestrian route between the two. Instead, we were forced to 'Jay Walk' countless times, dodging traffic and receiving much-needed advise from US Postal workers:

Postal dude: Hey, be careful!

Us Yeah, we're just trying to cross the road!

Postal dude: You need to find the button to press to turn it to 'Walk'

Us: Where's the button?

Postal dude: That's _your_ problem. You English?

Us: ... yes? (Tom answering there)

Postal dude: You're doing well in the soccer!

Us: (Tom again) Sure, except for the second half...

Postal dude: Oh, you lost right?

Tom: No.

Eventually we did make our way to the Wyndham, only to swiftly return back to Rosemont CTA station, and then Jackson bby way of the Blue Line - exactly where we started out from earlier in the day! A 10pm dinner isn't what I was planning on, but it was good fun having dinner with Steve, David, and Cory.

As Tom and I were walking back to the Hotel (again, dodging traffic), I coined this little beat poem.

  Hy-att

   Why is
     your
  'A'
             so big?

  Why-att?

I think I'll leave it there.

Hy-att

      I'd quite like 
  to 

      Try-att.

   why-are-you-so

              Qui-att?

when
  will
    you
      bring
        my
          EGGS?

Fry-att.

I really will stop now. Amy seems unamused.

Anyway, we're all sat in the Wyndham foyer hacking away at things (blogs, testing Rails' caching, playing Nintendo DS's, writing presentations), and the air conditioning and wifi seem to be coping admirably for the greater part. This seems to be the general plan for today - sit on our arses with laptops and see what comes of it.

Dave Thomas gave the opening keynote at RailsConf 2006 in Chicago this morning, and decided to add a bit of gravitas by invoking Hilbert's mathematical program.

Dave proposed that there are three key areas which the Rails community needs to focus on to strengthen it's position in the computing world.

Firstly, he suggests that Rails needs to respect constraints that exist in the database: foreign keys, composite primary keys, and probably most immediately-usefully, automatically enforcing validation constraints based on information already in the DB schema.

Next, Dave talked about enhancing the scaffolding. It sounded like he'd basically like the scaffolding to emulate administration interfaces. He also suggested that corporate types might want skinnability. This whole thing I'm not too sure about; the cool kids are starting to distance themselves from scaffolding (there are even talks here about that), and in particular the skinnability sounds like... well, a nightmare.

Finally, he spoke about some problems he felt existed for the deployment of Rails applications. 'Capistrano is great, but server login information shouldn't be in the application', in a nutshell. His proposals for deploying to some kind of capistrano URL sound great, but with no implementation behind it, we'll have to see how it might turn out.