Entries Tagged 'Blogs' ↓

I hate to talk trash publicly, but the Rails Talk List SUCKS for people new to Rails! But what’s worse, it sucks IN GENERAL. Continue reading →

Here are a couple of interesting wordpress themes that resemble
unix/linux command line
and
Comodore 64
of course these are done in PHP but I’d like to see these done in Ruby or Rails and perhaps one that looks like irb. Oh wait, _why has already half done that…

Somtimes the democratizing effect of the web is an obnoxious thing. There is a lot of crap out there. No better example exists than podcasting! Precisely, content-publishing in general, podcasting in particular, is an easy-to-do thing and a hard-to-do-well thing. Continue reading →

There’s a new (?) hosting service around that focuses on Rails hosting and does it by the slice. Continue reading →

“What Changes would make Ruby a better language without making it into something that isn’t Ruby?” Hmm… hard to say many things that would be definitive linguistic changes. My list has really three main things (and two lesser things) in order:

1. Full, native UTF-8 Unicode support.
2. Cleaner and easier installations of Ruby (and Rails)
3. An improved interface to irb.
4. Stop the growing rift between newby Rails enthusiasts and Ruby purists
5. Faster execution of course.

(1)
Unicode support is half baked in many scripting languages. PHP 5 handles Unicode pretty well, but… there are many buts! Many functions there barf on non-ascii text. Lame. Same happens in Ruby. Unicode should be pushed more. Windows, OS X, Linux all already implement Unicode well. OS X’s Cocoa development framework handles Unicode amazingly well. The trouble with Unicode is that lots of people still don’t know how or why to use it, so they keep using what they know already. The thing is, Unicode support should be largely brainless. That is, it should be implemented in a way that you don’t have to ask details too often. This would be great, but specific languages become trouble spots because the entire way to parse them works differently.

(2)
Installing Ruby (and Rails) should be easier to do. It’s getting there quickly. It’s kind of annoying that it’s easier to install it on Windows than on any other platform, even though Windows is pretty terrible for most software development. (biased? yes) I can say from experience Ruby is much easier to install manually than PHP, but it should be easier. Gem dependencies and the number of gems are also part of this. The number of gems is growing exponentially, but the tools to manage them needs improvement.

(3)
irb is already one of the cool and convenient features of Ruby. What could be better than asking an object or class about its capabilities? However, irb could be improved tremendously. Something closer to the view in a text-editor or the SmallTalk interactive environment would be great. Colors please! Yes, this is possible in *nix terminal windows and in DOS windows on Windows. The only trouble is that it would be at least a two-headed beast because of platform-specific implementation, but Ruby’s standard library already acknowledges and handles platform differences. Big deal. Not everything can be ported back and forth without effort.

(4)
All that said, there is a slight rift growing in the Ruby community. The Rails enthusiasts and the Ruby purists (and the vast normal majority who could give a toss, as always). It’s still a very small rift, but the sometimes irrational enthusiasm for Rails leads people blindly fumbling into Ruby groups asking (often uninformed) questions only about Rails. It clearly irks some folks who feel Ruby should be recognized as distinct from Rails. This could grow to be a bigger problem in the future, but no different from other, now traditional, geek feuds like the myLinux is better than yourLinux or C ! No, C++ ! No, [insert your favorite language here]! and so on. This rift needs to be addressed more publicly and smoothed over soon to prevent a new geek feud. The truth is Ruby does owe a lot to Rails and Rails owes everything to Ruby. They’re inseparable. Rails is all in Ruby. It just needs to be said more to the Rails learners that you need to learn Ruby to do this.

(5)
Let’s face it, Ruby could be faster. No bones about it. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is for the überest of über geeks to accomplish. The ones who are at MIT or Berkeley and have the ability to beat most people in chess.

Ruby has the best chance to continue to be more widely adopted if its feature set compensates for its occasional sluggishness. Content is king! Gladly, I see nothing but forward momentum for Ruby.

foo and bar should be forgotten. If you want to make examples of objects in object-oriented programming or variables in programming, use something realistic! What’s realistic? Continue reading →

If you are wondering about Rails and Ruby, stop wondering and dive in. While you’re at it, get a good editor and machine to work with. This means a Mac and TextMate. If you don’t have a Mac already, get one, it’s not the cheapest, but not the most expensive; just the most value for your moollah! Continue reading →

Data formats are important. Choosing how to structure data is the first thing one might do with it. Deciding how to present information is equally important. Web sites need to stop using PDF and Word documents as the ONLY option for available information. It’s Continue reading →

WordPress has been my friend now for almost a year. I’d known about it for a lot longer, but hadn’t gotten into using it. Of all the bloggin solutions out there, WordPress is probably the overall best. It’s focused on what web sites really mainly are: words. So if you’re looking for a photoblog, maybe this isn’t quite what you want. WP can do that, but there are plugins to make it more gracefully handle photoblogging. That’s fine with me, since most photblogs are really photglobs. Heck, most blogs are really globs when you stop and think about it. Continue reading →

DreamHost Site of the Month contest for DreamHost customers is funny. Many of those people take it way too seriously. Half of them are design school students who’ve fallen in love with Flash or video or those who are trying to make a web site look like a print production. The vast majority of comments are either reactions to recieved comments or simply expect everything to look like their idea of a good design. Unfortunately, most of these cats make mediocre, average designers.
As always, content is king. Less is more (read that as less design is more focused on the content, not on the thin-skinned designer’s ego)
A well-polished turd is still just a turd…

… and right now this one is starting to shine like Yul Brynner without his cowboy hat.