Ruby – A Lightning Tutorial

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Whenever I’m learning a new programming language, I find it helpful to keep notes on what I learn. Ruby is no exception, except this is the first time I have tried compiling these notes into more of a tutorial.

You can see the first draft of it (or the Alpha version), over here.

Its style is based on the assumption that you can always find out about the practical usage of the language, its classes, functions, and methods, later. Lightning Tutorials (yes, I intend to write more) attempt to teach only the absolute essential parts of the language, its syntax, idioms, features, and gotchas. Because they do not explain anything but the most fundamental parts of the language, they can be very concise. However, you must already be a relatively competent programmer to understand them. I don’t explain what terms such as “instance variables” or “classes” mean, as they are not intended to be an introduction to programming, but rather a quickstart guide for experienced programmers who wish to get up and running on a new language quickly. After all, you can always read the language docs later.

Adobe CS3 Announced!

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Adobe has just announced the imminent release of Creative Suite 3. This will be the first version of Creative Suite to run natively on Intel macs (like mine). It is also the first new version to be released after the Adobe/Macromedia merger.

The Web Premium bundle includes Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3 Professional, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3, Fireworks CS3, Acrobat 8 Professional, Contribute CS3, Bridge CS3, Version Cue CS3, and Device Central CS3 (in other words, all the software you could ever possibly need for web development, besides Textmate of course). Better yet, the educational version only costs $499!

Also, if my understanding is correct, you are now allowed to use educational versions of CS3 for commercial use, which you wasn’t the case under the old Macromedia licensing scheme.

Updated, Finally!

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

In case you hadn’t noticed, I finally updated my blog to use the current version of wordpress, along with a new theme I created. Now that I’ve updated, its probably safe to say that before I was running wordpress v 2.0.4 (which is about 6 months out of date). Thank goodness no-one tried to hack my site!

I’m going to attempt to be posting more regularly now, as one of the main reasons I didn’t post before (or my excuse at any rate) was that I needed to update this blog before I used it.

I hope to publish a review of my experience with Mac thus far in a few days, although I need to get some tournaments up and running first.

Feel free to comment on any parts of the new design you love or loathe 😉

Mac Graphing Calculator Story

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

This story is hilarious! It gives the history of the graphing calculator built into mac since version 8.0. Apparently, the project had been canceled, but two developers stayed on for free at apple for over six months to finish developing it. They would sneak into the building by tailgating other employees through the entrance, and hijack empty offices. Each of the two developers said he was reporting to the other one, so they were entirely autonomous.

All sorts of different employees helped them accomplish the task. In fact, the story says they probably received more aid than they would have had they been on the payroll. Eventually, their project was discovered, but by that time it was advanced enough that apple decided to include it on new macs.

Its a fascinating read! The Graphing Calculator Story