Category Archives: learns_to

One fact of life is: every technical community has its own recurring bugaboo, an unshakeable criticism that dogs it through its greatest successes, enduring in spite of furious defense and fact marshaling by supporters. Linux? Won’t work on the desktop. … Continue reading →

Last night, I took an unexpected jacknife into the underground wellspring of C-code that burbles beneath the calm surface of Ruby. As part of some preliminary research for a super secret and incredibly exciting project I’m planning, I learned about … Continue reading →

If it hasn’t yet skittered across your radar, Twitter is a tiny web app that works a little like a universal IM away message. Created as a side project by Ev Williams and the gang at Odeo, Twitter lets you … Continue reading →

(Arduino Serial Ruby on YouTube) For the last month or so, Brett and Marcus from Tables Turned and I have been meeting weekly to teach ourselves Physical Computing, the use of micro-controllers like those found in cell phones and Roombas … Continue reading →

One of the great hopes you might have in beginning to learn about technology and computers is that they will save you time and effort. This is such an obvious expectation that it almost goes without saying, but, in my … Continue reading →

Last night, I started working on putting together a Ruby-wrapper for the del.icio.us api. I need it to execute this little idea I had recently (more about that when it’s done) and I was surprised to find that there wasn’t … Continue reading →

Welcome to Part 2 of learns_to build Academic Archive, where I try to blog every last detail involved in building a Ruby on Rails application for publishing and peer-editing academic papers. As requested by Benjamin in the comments on Part … Continue reading →

At this year’s FOSCON, Amy Hoy issued a clarion call to the elite Ruby hackers in the room: help the newbies! With the spectacular recent growth of Ruby and, especially, Rails there’s a great and growing need for educational resources … Continue reading →

This week, the circus is in town. Well, not quite, but it feels like it. Really, it’s just OSCON, O’Reilly’s preposterously big, expensive, and prestigious annual open source convention. One neat side effect of this fact is that yesterday was … Continue reading →

Is it just me, or is it fun when you get to break basic rules you learned in school? And more fun the younger you learned them? Not sharing, not looking both ways before crossing the street, not eating cookies … Continue reading →