Categories
Uncategorized

Off for the Holidays

The aftermath of a Santa/U.F.O. collision with Santa filing a report and the cops hauling an alien away

It’s Christmas Eve and I’ve got a lot of family stuff to do over the next couple of days. You never know, I just might get the chance to sneak in a blog entry or two, but I’m going to play it safe and say that Global Nerdy (and its bigger, older brother blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century) will return on Monday, December 29th.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyous Festivus, Happy Holidays – however you choose to spend the next couple of days, stay safe, enjoy yourself, and I’ll see you soon!

Categories
Uncategorized

Ruby on Rails and Merb Merge!

The Merb/Rails rivalry could’ve gone as depicted on the cover of the science fiction “classic” shown below…

the_human_bat_v_the_robot_gangster

 

(I think Merb would be the Human Bat and Rails would be the Robot Gangster.)

…but instead, the two projects have merged! The result will be the upcoming Rails 3.

The merger is commemorated on a “plaque” page on the Rails site titled The Day Merb Joined Rails, which I’ve excerpted below:

Merb was started two years ago by Ezra Zygmuntowicz as a tiny framework to serve ERb templates from Mongrel. This quickly grew into much more and carved out a niche as an alternative Rails stack. Merbists focused on among other things a small speedy core, being ORM/JavaScript agnostic, and having a rigorous API for extensions.

Along with the expansion in ambition came the fact that Merb and Rails started sharing more and more of the same ideas and even implementation. This lead to a fair amount of unnecessary duplication on both sides of the fence and lead to some paradox of choice. When do I choose one over the other and when?

Rails 3

On December 23rd, we decided to end the duplication and the paradox of choice. That was the day we declared our intentions of bringing the best ideas of Merb into Rails 3. That was the day we announced our commitment to work together.

It’s nice to see this sort of thing happening. It’s more common to see projects forking over the tiniest disagreements, a la “The People’s Front of Judea” in Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

It’s a win for both projects, as well as the users. Rails gets some much-needed optimization, the ability to shed excess weight for speed, framework agnosticism and an API that won’t break with upgrades, and Merb gets a much bigger development community and mindshare momentum that Rails enjoys. Better still, the merger now has both teams’ big brains working on the same project, and isn’t that what the spirit of the DRY principle is all about?

Congratulations to both the Merb and Rails teams! And hey, congrats to all you Ruby/Rails/Merb developers out there too! 2009 just got a little more interesting for all of us.

Links

Categories
Uncategorized

O’Reilly’s “Head First” Books Now Available in PDF

head_first_books

These days, I try to get the PDF version of a computer book when it makes sense. When it comes to more timeless books — say Code Complete (the book from which Jeff Atwood gets the name for his blog, Coding Horror) and The Pragmatic Programmer – I think I’d still prefer a dead-tree edition. For books on a specific version of a language, platform or tool, which have a limited lifespan, I would argue that the PDF version is the better choice. I used to hate reading PDFs onscreen, but in these days of LCD screens with resolutions at least 1200 pixels wide, and especially with a dual-monitor setup, I find them pretty readable.

One book series that I wished was available in PDF form is O’Reilly’s Head First series. A co-creation of Kathy Sierra, who knows how to communicate knowledge and passion at the same time, this series features lively prose, story-telling and pictures aplenty to create some of the most comprehensible and enjoyable tech books out there. Consider the original “Gang of Four” book on design patterns and Head First Design Patterns: while the former is considerably meatier and more rigorous, I consult it rarely, and only as a reference work. The Head First book? I pick it up every now and again and re-read it just for kicks, and it’s the book I send people to when they ask about design patterns. It’s that way with all their books; when I was taking a project management course, Head First PMP was the only book that didn’t anaesthetize me.

O’Reilly has just announced that the entire Head First series is now available in PDF form – even the books that aren’t available in dead-tree format yet, namely:

The PDFs are all priced around US$30, which is about $10 cheaper than the print editions. These prices seem a bit steep compared to the PDF editions of Pragmatic Programmers books, which hover around US$20, but then again, the Pragmatics’ print books are also $10 cheaper than O’Reilly’s. Still it’s nice to have the Head First series available as PDFs. If you’re doing some last-minute Christmas shopping for a geek friend, you could always give one of these PDFs (especially for one of the not-yet-in-print books). If you’re feeling especially generous, you could give it on a USB key.

Categories
Uncategorized

HoHoTO

hohoto_logo

What happens when Toronto geeks decide to throw a party on short notice to raise money for the local food bank, using Twitter to put forth the initial idea and as a way to publicize the event? HoHoTO happens, and 600 people show up and over CAD$20,000 gets raised!

To find out more, go read my article on the HoHoTO on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Categories
Uncategorized

Taking Windows 7 for a Spin

windows_7_ultimate_installer

I had my first look at the next version of Windows – Windows 7 – at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in October, a week after I joined the company. By the powers vested in me as a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, I got my paws on an installer for a recent beta edition and a spare machine – a Dell Latitude D830 with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and 4GB RAM — on which to take the new operating system for a test run.

The installation of the Windows 7 beta went considerably better than my experience installing the Windows Vista beta back in 2006: this time, it worked.

setup_is_preparing_windows

Over the next little while, I’m going to spend some time – perhaps a day a week – doing actual daily work on the Windows 7 machine in order to really experience it. It’ll also give me a chance to try out some “developing for Windows 7” example code. I’ll post my observations here on Global Nerdy – at least as much as the non-disclosure rules allow.

Links

Categories
Uncategorized

“Raving Rabbids” Cookies

Thinking of doing some baking for someone with a Wii? How about cookies shaped like “Rabbids”?

raving_rabbids_cookies
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Categories
Uncategorized

IronPython 2.0 Released!

Python icon

Hot on the heels of the release of Python 3.0 (a.k.a. “Python 3000”) comes the release of IronPython 2.0, the .NET implementation of the Python programming language. Some quick facts about IronPython:

  • It runs on the .NET 2.0 SP1 redistributable
  • It’s compatible with CPython 2.5 with a few differences
  • It’s fast: it runs up to 1.8x faster than Python 2.5 on the standard PyStone benchmark
  • It can call on most standard Python and all .NET libraries

If you want to get your paws on IronPython 2.0, head on over to its page on Microsoft’s CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site, where you can download the IronPython 2.0 installer and code samples.

I’ll be posting IronPython tutorials and sample code…watch this space!