As I’m sure many of you are aware, I’ve had a difficult time articulating what exactly Sprouts is and does. Finally, someone else has taken a stab at and I think he’s done a better job than I have!

Aaron Evans has published his first exploration into Sprouts and I just wanted to share it before too much time went by.

I just wanted to get a quick announcement out there.

While Ali and I were working at Bunchball, we built out a huge application using PureMVC.

As we worked with PureMVC, we encountered some issues that didn’t quite feel right. One of the major factors that drew us to PureMVC in the first place was that Cliff designed everything to work with interfaces instead of hard-coded object references.

This proved to be a critical feature that helped support our desired modifications.

Since leaving Bunchball, Rajat Praharia (the CEO) has generously agreed to let us open-source the modifications under a new project we called, FlexMVCS.

It looks like some of the modifications we made have been integrated with later releases of PureMVC, and to be honest, we haven’t really kept up with changes in the underlying project.

As it stands, we’re not planning on putting much time into this project, but we wanted to get it out there for people that might find it useful.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

Updated on June 23, 2008: There was just a release to RubyGems 1.2 yesterday and RubyGems is now blazing fast, no more index updates and who-knows-what-else every time you install a gem.

Ali and I ran into an interesting Ruby bug on OSX Leopard last week and I thought I’d share the result of our finding….

Basically, we were requesting a 2k RSS feed from a url that had two sub-domains as in:

http://sub1.sub2.example.com

The request worked fine if we hit the server with only one sub-domain as in:

http://sub2.example.com

In the first example, the request would hang for exactly 60 seconds and then return the result. When we tried with a third sub-domain, we got a 120 second hang and then an error.

After digging through the Ruby sources, it looked like the problem was in the TCPSocket C implementation so I threw an email up on the Ruby list.

Turns out the fix is that if you’re trying to use Ruby networking features that sit on top of TCP on OS X Leopard, you may need to add the following to your code:

require 'resolv-replace'

Found the fix in this thread.

I also added this line to /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb (around line 11) and RubyGems is suddenly much, much faster.

Just getting a quick note out to everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There’s been a last minute setup of the Silicon Valley Flash User Group (Silvafug) and I’ve been asked to present Sprouts.

Of course I’ll be giving the now-traditional 5 minute ‘up-n-running’ demo that everyone is probably sick of seeing, but afterward I’ll be getting into some nuts and bolts of how Sprouts works in my own Test-First development process.

Paul Robertson is speaking for the first half of the evening on “AIR: Windows, Menus, and the System Tray.” which I’m really looking forward to!

At the time this post went to press, the Silvafug website hadn’t yet been updated, but according to this email, the event is scheduled to go from 5:30pm to 9:30ish at the San Francisco Adobe building (601 Townsend Street).

For those of you that don’t know, this means that we’ll be at the Mars bar from about 9:30-ish onward!

Hope to see you there.

Those of you that know me know – I wear flip flops.

I wear flip flops all the time.

I wear flip flops to business meetings, interviews, first dates, fancy clubs, I mean everywhere.

I wear flip flops even when it’s a rainy, windy, San Francisco, 40-degree, summer day!

I suppose you can take the boy out of Florida, but, well, youknowhowitgoes….

In addition to the cold toes, it now looks like there might be another good reason to wear Shoes.

Why the Lucky Stiff of Ruby fame has come out with a new (and not-quite-ready) cross-platform, native component, open-source, GUI toolkit called Shoes.

I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately thinking about this problem. By lately, I mean something like the past 10 years. I’m definitely excited to look more closely at this project as he’s claiming support for all kinds of media, drawing apis and even native components.

I’ll be looking into this Shoes-thing more in the coming weeks and I’ll be sure to let you know what I find.

In unrelated non-technical, but still somehow nerdy news, I may have found a new favorite musician and music site today.

Check out muxtape which is a fantastic exercise in clean, semantic, UI for media (I dare you to view source).

Be sure to listen to the Kimya Dawson track at the bottom of the link above.

Nice.