Musings on technology and more…
Amusing quote by Sam Ruby speaking to a group of Java developers:
- Rails is the 80/20 rule applied twice
- 64% of the function for 4% of the complexity
- What about the “other” 36%?
- If anybody here doesn’t believe that J2EE has 36% fat, I’m talking to the wrong audience.
Bruce Tate’s article on alternatives to Java mentions many of the aspects of ruby that I’m growing to love.
It wouldn’t make sense to repeat them all here, others have stated ruby’s strengths far better than I.
However, I would recommend giving ruby a shot. I gave this language a cursory look a couple years ago, after seeing a /. posting. At the time I thought “Hmmm… it just looks like a slightly better scripting language”.
In some ways I feel I was right, ruby offers evolutionary improvements over other languages. But in many ways I was wrong, because the sum of all its improvements make ruby stand out compared to its peers.
What I like the most about ruby is its intuitiveness. Whenever I learn a new programming language, I always feel that I’m stumbling around at first, stringing together keywords thinking “I bet this won’t work” because I haven’t internalized the language’s ideosyncrasies yet.
Well, in ruby I’m finding to my surprise that my bets are wrong, things do work the way I think they should. A language that intuitively makes sense is worth cherishing.
Here are some resources to get people started:
I played with the Keyhole client a long time ago: it allowed users to roam the earth viewing satellite images, zooming over my house, checking out where I worked, tilting the view so I could the images rendered on the contour of landscape (very impressive). It was all going so well… And then my 30 day free trial expired.
Though I enjoyed it, it didn’t seem worth the $30/year subscription. I mean, it was just a toy right?
Fortunately for everyone, a few months ago Google (having acquired Keyhole) decided to improve and make the entry level client free to all. However altruistic Google is, I suspect they also believed that the free version of (the now-rebranded) Google Earth was the best advertisement for the commercial version.
So is it worth trying Google Earth?
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Most definitely yes! And not just for the pleasure of flying over your neighborhood. Playing the virtual tourist is a ton of fun, esp. when all you do is type “Paris, France” in the search box and you’re wisked off to Europe (in my case zooming out from North America, flying over the Atlantic, and zooming down on Paris). And once you’re there, why not check out the Eiffel tower?
The software’s real strength, as you’d expect from Google, is in the way it leverages the internet community. The Google Earth bulletin boards are filled with lots of destinations (double-click on them in the browser and they’ll direct your Google Earth program to that spot, usually with notes describing what you’re seeing) and overlays (imagine being able to see hurricane Katrina’s before and after impact on New Orleans, or viewing storm forecast models).
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My favorite is the National Geographic coverage of Africa and the data they’ve set-up for Google Earth. There are over 4,000 high resolution pictures that you can zoom in on, each represented by a little plane icon. Click on the icon once and you get a callout with a low-res picture and description of what there is to see. Double-click on the icon and you zoom into the picture. Check out the elephant family I found… And this isn’t even the full resolution.
Very cool!
Being very late to this party, I nevertheless thought it would be fun to start a blog. Since technology is what I spend most my time immersed in, technology is what we’ll mostly be talking about.
So, by way of introduction, here’s what this site is running on (as of the time of writing!):
Props to dreamhost.com. In setting up a friend’s account and dealing with the hassle of moving domains & registrations around, as well as installing & configuring this blog and another one (HearingBooks.com), I’ve found their support to fast and reliable, and the functionality they’ve written to painlessly set up MySQL databases and software packages (such as WordPress, Gallery and MediaWiki) is excellent.
Plus, they support Rails. What more could you ask for? :-)