"Learn code the hard way" is Zed Shaw's most awesome project to date

By on April 20, 2012 in books, general, literary, technical

Not a whole lot to say about it, but I think that the Learn Code The Hard Way ini­tia­tive is absolutely awe­some; it's prob­a­bly Zed Shaw's (@zedshaw) best work. I've used his Learn Python The Hard Way book (and snip­pets of Learn C The Hard Way, because some­times the Old Ways are the Best Ways) as ref­er­ence but they really excel when used lin­early to do what it says on the label.

This series uses example-based tuto­ri­als to explain and illus­trate con­cepts and new lessons build upon con­cepts learned from pre­vi­ous lessons and exam­ples. By the time you've gone through one of the books the most fun­da­men­tal lessons have been iter­ated over numer­ous times (but with­out beat­ing you over the head with them), and that's how these things stick. But hon­estly, my favorite things about these books are that they're priced to move (free & cheap, based on what for­mat you're look­ing for) and that they're open-source (the source code is up on Zed's Gito­ri­ous account) but they're edited; no wild-ass Wikipedia style mis­in­for­ma­tion, just peo­ple con­tribut­ing what they know where they think it'll do some good.

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Hey, here's another book I read recently: How to Count

By on April 1, 2012 in books, general

Steven Frank (@stevef), of Panic infamy has self-published the first vol­ume of an ambi­tious new series of tech­ni­cal books: How to Count: Pro­gram­ming for Mere Mor­tals, Vol­ume 1. It's a slim vol­ume, clock­ing in at approx­i­mately 70 pages (depend­ing on your e-reader of choice) but it's an excel­lent read on the fun­da­men­tal skill of think­ing about num­bers the way a com­puter thinks about num­bers. I will likely con­tinue to use the bits about con­vert­ing hex to binary long, long after I've for­got­ten every­thing else I read in here.

Long story short, it's inex­pen­sive ($2.99 e-book, $7.99 dead tree!), well writ­ten (as well writ­ten as the beloved Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby), and fun in a nerdy sort of "taught myself cal­cu­lus one sum­mer back in high school" sort of way. Did you teach your­self cal­cu­lus one sum­mer back in high school? If you did, this book is prob­a­bly beneath you. But since I spent my sum­mers in high school at the Warped Tour, work­ing dead-end food-service jobs, and swim­ming in creeks, I got a lot out of a sur­pris­ingly thin book.

If you're inter­ested in a gen­tle intro­duc­tion to pro­gram­ming, look­ing for a refresher on how com­put­ers do "The Maths", or just want to con­tribute a few dol­lars towards a noble cause (that is, con­vinc­ing Steve to write vol­ume 2) this is a worth­while pur­chase. Dou­ble word score bonus to the fact that unless we have a mas­sive quan­tum com­pute break­through within our life­times, the con­tents of this book should with­stand fac­tual atro­phy aston­ish­ingly well.

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My first month with the Grado Prestige SR60i's

By on March 31, 2012 in bragging, op-ed, opinion

The creepy mus­tache that is Jesse Thorn, of Put This On (the think­ing man's style blog) pub­lished a bit about good head­phones back on Feb­ru­ary 16th. When you think style blog­ging, you prob­a­bly don't think about head­phones (unless you buy gim­micky equip­ment like Beats Audio…) but he rec­om­mended the same head­phones that my musi­cian friends AND my audio­phile friends had both pre­vi­ously rec­om­mended. After a week of hem­ming and haw­ing, I broke down and pur­chased an entry level pair of Grado SR60i headphones.

I had up until that point used an old pair of open-back Sennheiser HD570 cans for all of my "stuff I want to enjoy" lis­ten­ing; they're noth­ing fancy but they sound clear and they've aged well over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so that I've owned them. I don't know if that's before or after Sennheiser sup­pos­edly over-extended their brand in order to get shelf-space in big-box retail­ers, but I really wanted to know how these would com­pare. Peter, at Nat­ural Sound of Fram­ing­ham (the gen­tle­man who sold me the Grado cans) said quite matter-of-factly, "I think you'll like these more than your Sennheisers."

After a month of near-daily usage, I will tell you flatly that Peter was right. Jesse was right. My audio­phile & music nerd friends were right. They are the best head­phones I've ever owned, and it was $80.00 USD well spent.

Sure, on first glance, they kind of look like the sort of knock-off junk you'd find in a swap meet in the park­ing lot of an Ari­zona hard­ware store. The plas­tic is flat and black, there's no gloss or glitz, they're sort of just hang­ing off these steel posts topped with a sim­ple plas­tic cap, and they have a cable com­ing off each cup instead of rout­ing it across the head­band like every­one else does these days.

You know why they look like that? Because every­thing that isn't essen­tial to mak­ing them sound good is effec­tively ignored: they're built for lis­ten­ing to, and they are won­der­ful. I had ini­tially toyed with pick­ing up the SR80i's instead, as a friend reminded me that they are sup­posed to be "mea­sur­ably bet­ter" but I'm not really an audio nerd -- I fig­ured, "I've got tin­ni­tus and I can't really hear any­thing higher pitched than a child's voice". A month later and now I'm con­sid­er­ing get­ting a sec­ond pair (maybe the SR80i's?) so I don't have to bring a pair back and forth to and from work every day.

TL;DR Any­one want a used but ser­vice­able pair of Sennheiser HD570 cans?

**BONUS ROUND**: The Audio­engine D1 USB/Optical DAC

I also picked up an Audio­engine D1 USB/Optical DAC to use in lieu of the rel­a­tively noisy head­phone out on my lap­top. Not worth get­ting into since most of the tech­ni­cal minu­tia is either over my head or beneath my con­cern1 but it was a solid, if unnec­es­sary purchase.

  1. Audio-out on this port appar­ently runs across a shared bus with a bunch of other inter­nal com­po­nents. It's a com­mon prob­lem, and most peo­ple will never, ever notice it. Really, not a big deal. ↩

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Literary beta testing: Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

By on March 21, 2012 in books, ruby

David Copeland (@davetron5000), author of GLI (Git-like Inter­face Com­mand Parser) has writ­ten a book called Build Awe­some Command-Line Appli­ca­tions in Ruby. I've been beta-testing the book while it was going through the pub­lish­ing process, and it is excel­lent. Of note: it focuses on writ­ing com­mand suites (like the rails com­mand or git) and stand-alone command-line appli­ca­tions (like rsync).

Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby

So like I men­tioned up there, I ini­tially grabbed the book around its sec­ond or third beta release, fig­ur­ing that while it was still in the process of becom­ing a Real Book I some­times feel like I'm still in the process of becom­ing a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a num­ber of devel­op­ers who only know Ruby in the con­text of the Rails frame­work (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an excep­tional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails appli­ca­tions. Command-line tool­ing has long been an area of inter­est for me as work­ing in oper­a­tions means often hav­ing to per­form a num­ber of repet­i­tive tasks which lend them­selves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts. More stray obser­va­tions after the jump →.

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Mark Wunsch, on Installing Gems

By on August 8, 2011 in ruby, technical

I have 3 or 4 queued up posts about Ruby but­thurt, and what Mark has to say is pretty in line with a lot of it.

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The iTunes 10 UI is an abomination

By on September 2, 2010 in apple, diatribes, op-ed, shit stirring

So, iTunes 10 looks like Apple's col­lege intern office bitch slapped the design together over the week­end while on a ben­der. What hap­pened to those LEGIONS of UI design­ers they employ? Let's Talk About That Icon…

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NNTP readers on OS X are built from failure

By on October 13, 2009 in applications, mac, op-ed

In the office where I work we use/maintain a news­group server with a vari­ety of inter­nal news­groups where every­thing from items for sale to com­plaints and has­sles are posted. Late last year I went pretty much all-Mac, all the time, with a Remote Desk­top win­dow con­nected to a Win­dows machine in the office which I used for Out­look (because we're an Exchange shop) and Thun­der­bird (to read the news­groups). Won­der­ing if I could cut ties a lit­tle fur­ther, I looked into NNTP read­ers for OS X.

A small bit of back­ground first: I'm using Snow Leop­ard and I'm unwill­ing to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, news­post, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cob­bled together from MacUpdate:

I had intended this to be a mar­gin­ally com­pre­hen­sive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all. Here's how it broke down…

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