Curated
How you do what you does
Alex Payne has an idiomatic and wonderful way of sharing the interesting parts of his workflow through writing. Bet you can’t read just one.
By far, I’ve found al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness the most insightful and closest to my own “aesthetic”, as it were. It’s worth regular review, which is why I’m bringing it up right now.
See also, Workflow Voyeurism.
Thor doing his thing
My wife doing the canine agility:
Go Thor!
More monads
“While we’re talking about monads”:therealadam.com/archive/2… you should read into the compelling argument that jQuery is, in fact, a DOM monad. It’ll set your mind straight. Also, give “All About Monads”:http://www.haskell.org/all_about_monads/html/index.html a look - I just started reading it, but it’s making a lot of sense.
DataMapper + Factory Girl
I’ve been toying with “Factory Girl”:www.thoughtbot.com/projects/… lately. The code I’m currently working on needs to generate lots of data before tests run and Factory Girl is handling this well compared to fixtures or coding my own data generators. So, in some unrelated toying with “DataMapper”:datamapper.org/doku.php, I came to wonder if Factory Girl and DataMapper play nicely together.
Turns out they do! The only hitch is you need @dm-validations@ in addition to @dm-core@. Since no one seems to have written this up yet, I thought I’d “share my results”:gist.github.com/49017.
Compare and contrast
Compare. “Suburbs built on top of military/industrial complexes”:infranetlab.org/blog/2009… - intriguing yet awful. Quirky and cute - “people re-enacting Far Side comics”:www.flickr.com/groups/fa…
Contrast. Assaf Arkin notes that the current “recession may bring us more apps that put function over form”:blog.labnotes.org/2009/01/1… Hopefully this means we won’t hear about Rich Internet Apps (blech!) for a while. On the other hand, hopefully we will see more apps that leverage “game mechanics”:bokardo.com/archives/…
Monads + Ruby = crazy
Guaranteed to boil your brain: do notation in Ruby. You got your monads in my Ruby! He uses ParseTree and Ruby2Ruby to rewrite your code. In other words: heavy.
I’d love to point you to a good monads tutorial, but the monad fallacy prevents me from doing that. I’ll try again once I fully grok them.
Awesome people, hacker spaces, double basses, dictionary
Brian Oberkirch is a big fan of people who are doing awesome stuff on the web. Me too! I’d add to his list: Ryan Tomayko, Greg Borenstein, Garrett Dimon, _why the lucky stiff, Jeremy Keith, Robert Hodgin, J. Chris Anderson, and Christian Neukirchen. My list, like his, is incomplete, so make your own!
A hacker’s space in Kansas is renting an underground bunker to house their activities. Recommended joke: those guys wouldn’t know a hacker’s space from a hole in the ground.
This image and story makes me want my double bass really badly. Don’t miss the story; it’s fantastic.
Pro-tip: go ahead and add refactoring to your system dictionary. You won’t thank yourself later, but you won’t curse the machine either.
The Next Generation meets Reading Rainbow
Star Trek: The Next Generation was, for all intents and purposes, my jam. I was just the right age to enjoy it when it was on the air. Concurrently, I was the right age to watch Reading Rainbow. Ergo, the episode of the latter regarding the former was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
Comicus
“Matt McCray’s”:www.mattmccray.com Comicus is a CMS for “web”:www.zoodotcom.com “comics”:www.lilmonstas.com/. You may know Matt better for his excellent “CMS-in-a-Rails-plugin Comatose”:github.com/darthapo/… but he wrote this in PHP. More impressively, he wrote it in a style that doesn’t have all the grunting that is normally involved with writing PHP. He’s got classes, templates and everything! I salute you, Matt.
Generative Van Halen
I saw this last week (really!), but it appears the “blogger embargo” was broken on Sunday, so here goes.
“Microsoft Research released an app”:research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/… that lets you sing along to a drumbeat and then it generates music to match your singing. Many moons ago, an acappella version of “Runnin' with the devil” made it’s way on to the internet. Some brilliant joker used the former on the latter and you get: something that’s just not quite right. It’s especially interesting how the software tries very hard to accommodate David Lee Roth’s off-beat entrances.
In my opinion, the “DLR soundboard”:www.thetyser.com and the “Roth Alarm”:rothalarm.ytmnd.com are even better uses of the source material.
I found more awesome on the web
Via Tinker It Now!, I ended up at Live Control of Open Source Animation in Animata. Therein, real-time 2.5D animation is controlled via a likeness of Mickey Mouse laden with Arduinos. Said gizmo sends data to PureData, relaying data to software called Animata. Animata does the animation sweetness.
This led me down a whole rat’s hole of awesome. “Matt Niinimäki”:originalhamsters.com/index.php “is up to awesome things”:vimeo.com/mattiniin… Animata seems “wicked cool”:animata.kibu.hu/tutorials… — it’s like digital marionettes, except not creepy. PureData, near as I can tell, is like Little Big Planet, but for audio/video. The “PureData documentation”:puredata.info/docs/manu… is dense, but there are good examples and docs included in the application (look under Help→Browser). Pd, so far, has the distinction of being more inscrutable, for me, than Haskell. I can run Haskell programs; I cannot, for my life, figure out how to make Pd patches go.
Let’s enumerate: “Arduino”:arduiono.cc is open source hardware with a dandy little programming environment that makes writing embedded programs vastly less onerous than is typical. PureData is visual-patch-language-thing for creating audio-oriented systems with some graphics smarts on the side. Animata does interactive real-time animation. All of these great toys are open source.
Did I mention “people are making cool stuff”:therealadam.com/archive/2…
Birdland, Forgetting, Libertarianism, Hoboken
Hello, 2009! Let’s try a slightly different format. Starting it out with ““Birdland” by Weather Report”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqashW66D7o&feature=related can’t hurt.
Shawn Blanc says “the best todo software lets us forget”:shawnblanc.net/2009/thin… I absolutely agree. Shawn also pointed out “Rules For My Unborn Son”:rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/, which is indeed a great set of guidelines on being a mensch. A choice “JFK quote from therein on optimism”:rulesformyunbornson.tumblr.com/post/6117…
Provocateurs “Zed Shaw”:www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009… and “Giles Bowkett”:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/01/f… are in much better form when they are tilting against libertarianism. Which isn’t to say that they’re right or libertarianism is wrong. They’re just better at tilting against social abstractions.
If you’ve ever looked at writing tiny web apps or services with Sinatra, you’re probably interested in “what’s proposed on the Hoboken branch”:gist.github.com/38605. “Ryan Tomayko”:tomayko.com has great taste, I tell you.
Ogres and APIs
Bringing Merb’s provides/display into Rails 3:
The symmetry relates to another point in API design that I've been interested in lately: progressive expansion. There should be a smooth path from the simple case to the complex case. It should be like an Ogre, it should have layers.