Historical Political Drama Double Feature

Last night, Jen and I watched All the President’s Men, off the Netflix. It’s the screen adaptation of the Watergate investigation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward & Bernstein, or “Woodstein”. Considering the whole thing went down months before I was born, my understanding of Watergate is ethereal at best. The movie is …

Learning Ruby – Day 11

Day 11 – Program organization, Part 3 of 3. Today, Slagell clarifies the difference between classes and modules. As I mentioned back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, a ‘class’ in object-oriented programming is a noun, a Thing. Like a chair, a sweater, or Slartibartfast. Modules are like adjectives. All the nouns I …

Learning Ruby – Day 10

Day 10 – Program organization, Part 2 of 3. As an experienced information architect, I’m familiar with the challenges of declaring an organizational structure. Whether its for books, furniture, clothing, or software, every structure has it’s biases – somethings are easier, others more difficult. With this in mind, the goal is always to net a …

True Thai is Our New Thai Place.

Last night, Jen and I ate at True Thai down on the south side of Minneapolis. This was our second attempt at dining there. Attempt #1 was trying to seat a party of 6 on a Saturday night, without calling ahead = bad idea. I haven’t been real pleased with the Minneapolis’ Thai offerings. Sawatdee‘s …

Learning Ruby – Day 9

Day 9 – Program organization, Part 1 of 3. Back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, I talked about the difference between is a and has a in programming world. Dave was then kind enough to clarify. Today’s chapter was that. In practical, We’re-Writing-Code terms, rather than the abstract, This-is-How-To-Think-About-It way of the …

Learning Ruby – Day 8

Day 8, What are regular expressions? If you don’t know about regular expression matching, or regex, it’s basically a language to find the useful needles in haystacks of text and code. Think ‘find and replace’ turned to 11. I do just enough regular expression matching to forget how it works. I always end up googling …

First Crack 35. Honey Wine Tasting with Christopher Hadden

We’re tasting honey wine, or mead, with homebrewer-extraordinaire Christopher Hadden. We taste the Dry Mead from White Winter Winery and discuss mead’s history, brewing process, where you can pick some up. For more about mead checkout: About Mead The Complete Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine “this *the* modern reference on the art and …

Learning Ruby – Day 7

Day 7, playing catch-up. I’m continually impressed with how concise the Ruby language is. As I mentioned in Day 4, Ruby frowns upon loops. I’m getting the impression Ruby also frowns upon taking up 2 or more lines to describe an action. Slagell’s examples of doing something a traditional way take up multiple lines, his …