A console for any Ruby project
I’ve been finding this little snippet extremely useful lately:
$ irb -Ilib -rmy_libraryIf your Ruby app or library follows the idiom of requiring all the files for your app in a file named after the library, this will load everything up. If you’re being clever, you may need to invoke said cleverness before you can really get started poking around.
Anyone doing something similar?
John Mayer, closet software developer
“The idea is to run as many concurrent streams of production as we can." - Is John Mayer recording an album or bootstrapping an indie app?
More harmful than harmful
We are lucky to live in a time when 99.9% of programmers will never have a legitimate argument for using GOTO (hi kernel programmers!). But in case you’re feeling nostalgic and/or ornery, there’s always COMEFROM. You can even implement it in Ruby via @callcc@!
Elevating the art of language implementation
Suppose we can take the following statement as true:
Whether you use it or not, the state of the programming craft has been elevated by many of the ideas bundled in Ruby on Rails.
ActiveRecord in particular brought many ideas that made it easier for more people to program with a database. Whereas before most people thought in terms of mappings or extracting data from hashes, AR gave a more fluent and object-like notation to work with. Thus, more interesting applications were born.
Right now, good VM technology is limited to Sun and Microsoft, while Apple, Google and Mozilla are re-inventing it for their web browsers. Open source languages, mostly, lack this VM technology.
ActiveRecord improved the state of the programming craft by spreading ideas that make working with a database easier. Could a similar improvement in the programming craft be realized by diffusing the knowledge of how to implement a good VM through a library? Is this a worthwhile aspiration?
Postmodern comedy gold
The Nietzsche Family Circus - random Nietzsche quote + vintage comics = comedy gold.
When technical discussions get intense
Pro-tip: trying to unwind contentious technical discussions is a losing game. There are really multiple things going on: people discussing trade-offs in absolutes, personal vendettas being aired, missing tact filters and turf protection. If you’re lucky, there’s also some useful information hidden in the turd tossing.
Solution: don’t read too deeply, go do something useful instead.
Bonus tip: talking it out, face to face, over good drinks in a nice environment is “something useful”.
Think
The scene in The Blues Brothers where they are recruiting Matt “Guitar” Murphy is quite possibly my favorite of the movie. From the start of “Think” to the first “Freedom!” chorus, I get all sorts of musical tingles. I highly recommend it, if you have the means.
Since I can’t link to any video of the scene, why not listen to “Freedom” by Charles Mingus. It’s goodness.
The economic dashboard
What’s the state of the economy? - a stunningly brilliant visualization of where the economy has been (lagging indicators) and where it’s going (leading indicators). The explanations are excellent too. (Via Flowing Data).
Decoupling newspapers
My wife works for the local newspaper (thankfully, in their less layoff-prone online division). So I’ve been wondering about this whole newspaper business collapse would work out. Clay Shirky’s got an important point:
Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.It's not about the end of newspapers, it's about decoupling the core of journalism from newspapers. We'll see how that pans out. Let's just hope cable news doesn't take its place.
Underwater volcano go boom
I think one of the first things I decided I wanted to “be” when I was a wee lad was a volcanologist. I’d still love to go to an actual volcano, preferably active. Thusly, the pictures of undersea eruptions near Tonga from the Big Picture are, without a doubt, spectacular.
Pattern matching in Ruby with Case
Pattern matching, ala Erlang or Haskell, is a language feature near and dear to my heart. Dean Wampler has a great explanation of how to use the Omnibus Concurrency Library to play with pattern matching in Ruby, even if it’s a little odd.
The power of not knowing
It's a programmer's biggest strength when he knows what he doesn't need to know. And gaining (experience) in not knowing isn't as easy as it sounds.
Using Haskell for awesome
I’ve joked that Haskell is all about reading other people’s theses, but you can do practical things with it too. His quick explanation of monads is pretty good too.
Rubinius threads, for mere mortals
A no non-sense, non-academic introduction to how Rubinius' threading is structured. Having read a few papers on VM implementation lately, this is refreshingly direct and easy-to-read.
This is no former-Parrot
Hey look! Parrot went 1.0. Parrot is an open source virtual machine aimed at making it easy for dynamic languages like Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby to target the same VM.
I’m glad to see this is finally out. About six years ago, I thought it had the potential to be a Big Deal™. It’s been a long time in the tooth, but I’m interested to see how this plays out with the resurgent JVM and the general renaissance of language design.
On feeds: application posture
EventBox. It’s a great idea - roll all the social/distracting applications in your life into one app so you can close it when it comes time to focus. Yesterday, I decided to give it a go.
I quickly felt that perhaps it was not for me. I think it comes down to posture - how is the app intended to be used? I’ve been using Twitterific and NetNewsWire for quite some time (5+ years in the case of the latter), so let’s compare with their posture:
- NetNewsWire is meant to scan feeds, collect the interesting stuff, read it, repeat
- Twitterific is (beautifully) optimized for scan tweets, reply to a few, post occasionally
- EventBox seems to encourage scanning things, handling the occasional item in-situ, and sending the interesting stuff to your browser
I’m not saying that EventBox’s posture is wrong; it’s just different. I’m going to stick with it for a few days and see how I feel about it.
Making the pretty docs
When you really need to generate nice technical documentation, you would be wise to walk in Assaf Arkin’s footsteps.
A few promising Ruby libraries
From the hall of promising Ruby libraries: an FFI binding to Lua, Ruby to Lua, a neat framework for building Twitter bots, TwiBot and some sugar over the Cascading library (which is sugar over Hadoop) for processing large data sets, cascading.jruby