Another new Ruby e-zine is getting started. Joining Artima’s Ruby Code & Style is Red Letter: The Ruby Journal. They are currently searching for writing contributions of all types and sizes, and the most important part is that they’ll pay you for what you contribute. Column-length stories start at $350. Ruby, writing, and money? I’m all there.
Category: General Interest
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A hamster and a snake, best friends?
This is a cute article I thought I’d pass along. It just goes to show that even the most disagreeable of companions can get along if they really try hard!
“Gohan and Aochan make strange bedfellows: one’s a 3.5-inch dwarf hamster; the other is a 120 centimeter-long rat snake. Zookeepers at Tokyo’s Mutsugoro Okoku zoo presented the hamster to Aochan as a tasty morsel in October. But instead of indulging, Aochan decided to make friends with the furry rodent, according to keeper Kazuya Yamamoto. The pair have shared a cage since.”
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Table saw won’t cut off your finger
Noticed this digg today and immediately thought of a software parallel. The saw constantly monitors its electrical state for changes and shuts down when one is detected. Isn’t this just like Continuous Integration?
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Wireless broadband hits Greensboro this year
A friend pointed me to Clearwire a couple of days ago. They currently offer wireless broadband for much of the West Coast and a few other areas of the United States, but what excited me was that they plan to start offering service in Greensboro sometime this year. I wonder when Raleigh might get coverage?
Clearwire uses cell towers to provide Internet service to devices throughout metropolitan areas. This sounds very similar to what Nextel tried a year or so ago. Does anyone else have news on other wireless service providers who may be setting up camp in North Carolina soon?
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Think video games are just for the young?
Read about a 69-year-old grandmother who has two passions: cooking and… gaming. Yes, gaming. There are 17 game consoles in her residence. Just goes to show you that no matter how old you get, you can always find a good creative way to waste extraordinary amounts of time!
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An incredibly geeky display of Christmas lighting prowess
Someone just sent me a link to this video. How amazingly geeky. Yet another case where I’m wondering why people like this have so much extra time on their hands. There has to be an explanation!
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From Wikipedia to Wikibooks
Wikibooks is an online repository of textbooks that can be accessed, copied, edited, and distributed for free. Co-founder Jimmy Wales says that his service aims to make it possible to get the textbooks needed to study any subject (including software development) online for free.
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Wiki on your thumb
Yesterday I began getting irritated with my Instiki install on my PC at home. Don’t get me wrong, I like Instiki itself, but having to start it from the command line was getting annoying and I haven’t yet had time to figure out how to set it up as a Windows service. Add to that the fact that I want to have access to my Wiki from other computers and yet not open up my home network to the world, and you’ll see the dilemma I was facing.
The ideal thing for me would be to store my Wiki on my USB thumb drive. Instiki’s data files could theoretically be stored there I suppose, but where would that leave me if I wanted to update my Wiki on a different computer which didn’t have Instiki installed? My thumb drive is too small to host a copy of Ruby/Rails on it. In desperation, I ran a Google search for “wiki on usb drive” and, behold, TiddlyWiki appeared.
TiddlyWiki is an experimental “micro-content” Wiki designed by Jeremy Ruston. It’s written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript… and that’s it. No web server whatsoever is required to run this thing. It’s basically a self-updating HTML file. Clever! And useful. I can store the HTML page on my thumb drive and access it from any computer with a reasonably up-to-date browser. Theoretically, I could even go a step further and embed the Firefox browser itself on my thumb drive, complete with a custom profile and bookmarks.
I highly recommend you check out TiddlyWiki if only for the novelty. The install is dead-easy (just save a file to disk) and I found the non-linear navigation structure based on “tiddles” (small chunks of information) to be quite logical. I haven’t seen something this cool since I was first exposed to AJAX!
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A new beginning
Hi there and welcome to my blog! My name is Matthew Bass. I’m a software developer at SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina. I’m relatively new to the concept of blogging, but have been doing it internally at SAS for about a month now. I found it to be such an effective (and fun) way of sharing information that I decided to “go public.” Some of my work posts will be reprinted here. I’ll try to provide some original material as well. I personally despise posts that are books and I don’t like reading blogs which don’t provide me with immediately useful information. This blog will be my attempt to avoid falling into both of those traps. Thanks for reading!