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"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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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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Aside

nice marmot

By on June 18, 2009 in friends, technical

While this would have been bet­ter posted to bash, I present a snip­pet from Triple-Em him­self regard­ing an inad­e­quacy in the stan­dard I/O libraries avail­able to him:

1:37:20 PM Matthew Miller: Think I'm going to write an RFC with the sug­ges­tion that we extend the stan­dard 4 option I/O error han­dling direc­tives -- Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore -- to include a fifth: Fuck_It_Dude_Lets_Go_Bowling
1:37:31 PM Ryan McKern: i'll sec­ond it if you do
1:37:45 PM Matthew Miller: excel­lent. let's see what the experts group thinks.

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Text editing for fun and profit

By on June 15, 2009 in applications, editors, mac

In the attempt to stream­line the process of main­tain­ing the myr­iad scripts and con­fig files that I use day to day as part of both my day job and my droll hobby. I've used Text­Mate for every­thing, which I've pre­vi­ously dis­cussed (par­tic­u­larly using it in con­junc­tion with CSSEdit, which we'll come back to). But this has sort of spi­raled out of con­trol as I've spent more time work­ing with PHP scripts (such as Word­Press themes) and I've started to won­der about the newer gen­er­a­tion of all-in-one edi­tors. Con­tinue Reading →

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