beginning ruby by peter cooper

A couple of months ago I rather rashly announced that I wanted to learn Ruby in the New Year. For those of you who don’t know, Ruby is a free programming language, and it is used for all kinds of things, but most notably these days in the web framework, Ruby on Rails (ROR).  It was a stupid resolution, because although I have knowledge of other programming languages, such as VB and Python, I am not a natural programmer. I work in IT, and have for many years, and have coded a lot of stuff, but I’m an artist at heart and find programming hard work. But I wanted to find out more about ROR, and to do that I needed to learn Ruby first.

Well, here we are nearly three months later. How did I get on? Well, I’ve got to say it, after learning Python a few years back I was convinced that it would be the language of choice for me, the mother language that I would always reach for when I had a problem that I couldn’t solve any other way. Now, after reading Peter Cooper’s book Beginning Ruby, I wont go back to Python again.

What made me change my mind? It has got to do as much with the effectiveness and good design of the Ruby language itself as the brilliant way the Beginning Ruby book is written. I have read several "how to" and introduction to programming books over the years. My problem with them is this, they start out easy. Great. Then they get a little harder as they progress. Fine. Then BAM! They hit you with a barrage of unintelligible stuff, and you think, "How did we get to here?"

Well Beginning Ruby isn’t like that. Yes it starts out gentle, although it does introduce object oriented stuff very early, which it has to considering Ruby’s got it built in everywhere. But it doesn’t then dump you floundering about in a mire of complexity. It slowly ramps up, explaining and showing as we progress. I think it is the best "beginning" programming book out there. The examples are fresh and completely usable. And it doesn’t feel "dated" like some programming books I have read in the past. This book is a breath of fresh air in programming languages.

Now as I’ve said, that might be the outcome of having a modern, well designed language to work with, but I have started books and been to several web sites that have tried to explain Ruby to me before, but they didnt succeed. So I have to assume that it is down to the writing and explaining skills of Peter Cooper that I have to thank for my new excitement with Ruby. I haven’t quite finished the book yet, but I’m getting there. A recommended read.

Disclamier: I am not an avid fan of Ruby JUST because I live in a street called Ruby Street. But that is a cool coincidence.

my online strategy for 2008

Well, it’s actually going to be my overall strategy for 2008, but anyway, here goes. 2007 has been an odd year for me, with the defining factor being that I haven’t had enough money to get by. That means all kinds of things I wanted to do I couldn’t, or had to cut back on. Like photography. I haven’t had a 35mm film developed since April. And the SX-70 has not been out of the cupboard all year. That is a crying shame. I had to drop my Flickr pro account. And this blog nearly went out the window, until I shuffled some stuff to keep it online. It is still costing me too much but it is such a central part of what I do know it would be almost impossible to give it up. So its stays. But even though the financial situation hasn’t improved, I am determined that it is not going to alter my ability to plan for the year ahead. With the above in mind, my strategies for next year will be:

1. More art. I let my creative side dry up a bit last year, mostly because of lack of cash for materials and lack of time to do stuff in. Not in 2008. I am going to find the money from somewhere. Art is part of how I define myself, its part of me. I find it hard to stop being creative and if I don’t make something, anything for a while I start to lose it a bit. So I am going to spend more time taking photos, drawing, making sculptures, looking at sunsets, daydreaming and generally doing all the things I haven’t been doing. I am now Chair of the South(bank) Bristol Arts, so I suppose I ought to be producing some art. I have started working on a sculpture. And I ought to do some more work on that book I started drawing for.
2. I want to develop this blog so that it is more personal. I think it need more of me and my life here, it seems a little impersonal sometimes. So it will get a makeover sometime soon, with a new focus, me, possibly a new name and a new identity. I want to blog more so expect more of a story here about what goes on in my life.
3. Social networking. 2007 saw me using Twitter and Jaiku and Pownce and Facebook and Ning, and, well, you get the message. Seemed to be a tidal wave of social networks. Some have fallen out of use somewhat, but Twitter and Facebook seem to be very important. So I will continue to use social network tools, although I feel that I ought to cut back a bit. And I need to concentrate again on Ning. Going to further develop my microbrand!
4. Technology. Going to continue working on SharePoint 2007 at work, and I expect that is going to grow even more in the next year to take up even more of my time. I don’t want the technology to take over so much next year, so I am going to play down the tech side in my life, although will still blog about it here to get it out of my system.

So that’s it. More talking, more art, more focus. Seems easy, but as a wise man once said "no plan survives contact with the enemy" so it might get watered down somewhat as the year progresses. Happy 2008 to you.

learning ruby

I have wanted to play with Ruby on Rails for a while, but always shyed away because of my lack of Ruby skills. I am determined to set this right, so I am going to spend some time learning Ruby. I have given myself until the 1st of January 2008 to get up to speed and feel comfortable with hacking around in it. I don’t intend to be an expert, just learn enough so that when I look at RoR I wont be totally lost. I have some basic programming skills. I created two versions UWE’s PC build system, mostly using VBScript and VB. I have also some Python experience and some basic PHP. I wouldn’t, however, describe myself as a programming diva. It’s all basic hacking and sticking code together. I have seen several online tutorials that look good, http://rubylearning.com/ by Satish Talim is one that I am looking at right now. There is also the Pragmatic Programmers Guide. And my Twitter friend Peter Cooper says that he has a book that he can recommend

Death of email

Been reading a lot today on various blogs about how teenagers are shunning email and don’t see it as being relevant. It’s certainly true for my oldest one (he’s 19 now) he hasn’t checked his email for weeks, probably months. It’s not that he doesn’t spend any time online, far from it, he spends every possible waking moment online either chatting on IM or playing WOW or even Hells Gate London or whatever it’s called. But the one thing he doesn’t use is email. Email is just a way of getting an IM account to use to chat with. Email isn’t cool, it’s not even close. It’s boring, like writing an essay or something. Apparently.

So my experiences tie up with what I am reading around the blogs. Thomas Hawk has a fine article on this subject. As does James Robertson on Smalltalk Tidbits. People are turning away, slowly, from email. Hell, I even wrote an article about this a few months ago, Replacement for email. As people have said, it’s interesting that as older people are just getting into email, the young are turning away from it to social apps like Facebook and Twitter.

To make things feel even odder, today in work I was teaching a group of academics how to use SharePoint MOSS 2007. It was about half way through when I realised that they didn’t know what a blog was. Or a wiki. Or indeed what RSS was or how you could read RSS feeds, or what RSS feeds were. They knew about email. In universities we’ve had email a looong time, way before most people had it. But people in universities are not adverse to writing the odd essay! But all students know about Facebook and wikis and blogs.

We’ve recently has a lot of ex students (alumni) coming out of the woodwork and asking if they can keep their old UWE email account or have one of the new Microsoft Live UWE accounts. Our marketing people have asked us if we can provide emails for students for life. Why? It wasn’t so they can send emails. No. It’s so they can sign up for the UWE Facebook group and keep in touch with old mates from Uni. So now we have a social networking app controlling our corporate IT strategy! That is the power of social networking in action right there!

mac vs. pc follow up – hardware

A few months ago I wrote about my experiences with two laptops, a Macbook and a HP Compaq nc8430. At the time I did a quick rant on which one I preferred, namely the Mac. The full article can be read here. After that time, the Mac unfortunately had to be returned, as it was on loan. So I was left with the HP Compaq. Have my thoughts changed at all? Have I softened to the HP’s charms or is it still a stormy relationship with wistful glances back at the Mac ex?

Well, at the time I mentioned that the Mac was clearly a better designed product. And having struggled through for the last seven months I can honestly say that I am still right. The HP Compaq is built for a particular buying sector. The buyers in that sector are constrained by tight corporate rules and budgets. Those rules and ever decreasing budgets mean that the product, the laptop, is always going to be a compromise in some form or another. In terms of hardware, some of the compromise is going to be on design. Some on materials. It’s evident to anyone picking up the HP Compaq nc8430 that it is a brick. The overall design is fairly bland, innocuous, black. That is what the buyers in these corporate markets prefer. They dont want something that is going to look out of place in a meeting room. It screams – I conform! There are features, its not an underperforming processor inside, the graphics card is quite good. The problem is that it’s all been squeezed in as small a space as they can get it into. The result – its hot. Not in the nice sense. Woe betide the person who uses it on their lap without a cushion or book to protect their legs. This baby get’s very warm. The exhuast from the vent on the left hand side attests to this. Dont block it! Also don”t expect to be able to chuck the 8430 into a small bag and go. It’s heavy, and with the power supply you are looking at a fairly hefty load.

The keyboard is fairly useable, although I have had problems with some of the keys. I initially had problems with the touchpad, as my thumb kept brushing against it and causing it to jump the cursor. The Mac keyboard seemed to be better and more responsive. The screen is OK, but not as nice as the screen on the Mac. So, what am I going on about? Well, the thing about the Mac was, it was so light and portable, you really didn’t need a heavy case to carry it around in. The power supply was small enough, and the lead clipped magnetically to the side of the Mac, ready to flip away if you tripped over the lead. Which is something that has happened weith the nc8430, almost causing the thing to fall of the table onto the floor. Battery life on the 8430 isn’t that great, you really need to be near a power supply if you are going to use for a long time. The Mac, in comparison, had a much better battery life. The 8430 has to power the video card, then power the fan that keeps it cool. That battery will let you down if you depend on it. To sell the laptop to corporate buyers, it’s got a fingerprint scanner. Oh, that doesnt seem to work in Vista, just XP.

So, it’s heavy, it’s hot, and its a series of compromises. Yes, I still prefer the Macbook. It came into my life and turned it upside down. Then left. I am left with the HP Compaq nc8430, a longer term partner, less fun, but still here. Both are miles better than a desktop PC.

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camelot! – no, wait, test from flock

Flock 0.9.0.1 is out, and it is now quite possibly far and away the best browser out there for built-in features, certainly the best for people who “socially network” and like to hang around web 2.0 sites and blog about their experiences. There might be slightly too much information to take in at one glance, but at least you have the choice what to use and what to turn off. All in all a really good product. Its a shame they don’t have the render engine out of Safari or Opera (if they did I’d be ecstatic) but that said it renders much better than IE. Check out Flock and see what you think, especially if you have a blog and write articles often or have Flickr and regularly upload pictures.

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Tags: flock, browser, web,

sba ning thing

sba ning thing

I created a Ning? Whats a Ning? It’s a site (http://www.ning.com) that allows you to create your own social network sites. Social networking being the hhot thing out there I created a Ning site at http://sbaweb.ning.com to act as a backup and a focus for networking for the Southbank Bristol Arts organisation. Ning looks good, it has a wealth of features and crucially for the busy non-tchnical people who just need to get something up and running quickly it doesnt need you to be a web guru. They claim you can get a site up and running in minutes, although I guarantee that you will spend longer because its actually quite fun to play around with. If you do want to delve deeper they expose all of the source code to you, so if you do have more experience or you want to do something a little bit more you can get under the hood and customise. Ning has some pre-made widgets for you to try out, and even has a wizard to allow you to expose your ning content in other sites like Facebook. If you want to spend some money with them you can buy more storage and add your own domain name. Of course if you are serious about it then I recommend that you do buy the extras. All in all a good product. Invite your friends. We are at http://sbaweb.ning.com.

google maps broken

Actually I think it’s more of a bug as they’ve just introduced the new functionality. But according to Google maps there’s a fantastic property available in LA, which unfortunately has moved to just south of Birmingham, UK. Given that we’ve just had one of the dreariest and wettest summers ever here in the UK I am sure that the resident’s of LA will be none too happy.

replacement for email

There’s an excellent discussion on Facebook – Declaring email bankrupcy about email overload and how the message is getting less and less relevant.
Is email broken? I think most people would agree that the situation with email is at best uncomfortable, and at worst downright unusable for some people. I have been using email for about 20 years now, as I had an email account (via packet radio) way before the web was around (the Internet predates the web, anyone remember Gopher?). And at Universities we’ve had good email for a long time. I am lucky, as here at UWE we now have several levels of spam filtering that can be deployed, and I have my own at the client level as well. That means I see very little of the spam that some people get. I also use Gmail, and the spam filtering in that is excellent. But, for the majority of people, its a downright mess. Looking at my inbox this morning, I have received one email that contains something that is actually relevant to me. Its not an email to me, just to a group of people, and I am cc’ed in for informational purposes. So this morning I haven’t received any email that is actually to me and nobody else. In my junk mail folder I have 40 junk mails. Remember before it gets to me it has been blacklist and greylist filtered as well as had bayesian analysis applied to it. So there’s probably the same amount again has been rejected before I get it. So that is, what, 1.25% of my email is useful. So 98.75% is spam. Well, when its gets to 99%, I’m outta here. I wont bother with it at all. So what are the alternatives?

Well, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think I have a mechanism that would work, but it would need some development and agreement. And for me to describe it means you have to take a leap of faith, and turn the problem, and some technology, on its head. The technology that is here to save us, the web. And I dont mean webmail. I’m talking about blogs. Or rather, blogging software, such as WordPress or Typepad or ….(insert favourite blogging platform/software here. So, how is it going to help. Right. What we have in blogs is a robust, distributed system of messaging, its just not fully developed yet. The comment system with its associated RSS feed mechanism is just ripe for being stripped out of the blog and used as a messaging system. Stick with me on this one. Turn blogging on its head. You write a post, and its generally available. It doesnt have to be, you could restrict the view of that post to a subset, those people or oragnisations that you have a trust relationship with. Then there’s a comment. Think of a comment as being a post to you. The person who is posting has to have either logged in, or has somehow gone through a mechanism that deters spammers (at least they do on my blogs). Using Captcha and Akismet I deal with all spam. Nobody can post until a level of trust has been reached. I can make that comment visible to just me or to a group of people. That is instantly more flexible than email. And I can reply to that comment, or post. And make that visible. Or not. Up to me. Person who send it needs an RSS mechanism to see when I have replied, but that is not rocket science to implement. If people want to send me a message, they have to establish trust FIRST. Before they get to send me anything. And I can revoke that trust at any time. And If I need something more immediate it is possible to plug in some kind of IM or Twitter to this.
Now to do all this at present I need a domain, or a sub-domain to host my blog/blogmail system, but most people have such a thing now so we know it can scale. This system gives ME the control, it distributes email away from centralised heavily spammed systems and also requires little or no software for the person sending. They need a web browser at least, with RSS built in. Maybe to tidy it all up we need to agree on some protocols, or someone might even come up with a microformat to deal with this. I really believe that this is a viable alternative to email, we just need the commitment to build prototypes and test the theory and work out best practices. They we can finally say goodbye to the man in Nigeria who wants to send me 1.2 million and the other idiots that are trying to sell me stuff.

technorati tags:email, replacement, blogmail, bms

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apple safari 3 available on windows

Well, it appears that the (in my humble opinion) excellent browser from Apple, Safari, is now available as a beta download for Windows. http://www.apple.com/safari/. Lots of criticism out there about it, people saying it is slow, buggy, badly rendered. Are these people testing a different version from me? I have downloaded it and installed it on two different systems, and it is quite simply fantastic. Rendering is good to excellent. Speed is the same if not faster than the other browsers I have (IE, Firefox, Flock, Opera). Seriously, some of the things I have read today quite simply are the result of rampant bigotry. Everyone has a favourite browser, and nobody’s going to stop you from using it. Me? I think it renders fonts very well. I will report back after testing it some more.