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 …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Kayak and PinPoint Changing the Face of Online Travel
A couple years back, I helped Orbitz.com redesign their shopping process. During that time, if you wanted to book travel the major players were Expedia and Travelocity, with Orbitz aiming to be the more usable, better-looking alternative. Today, those three players are equally mature and equally less than compelling. They don’t capture all airlines and …
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More Gets You to Better
As I mentioned in my interview at Podcast411.com, I had an art professor who believed everyone had 5,000 bad drawings in them. Five thousand drawings bad drawings before the good ones could come out. This perspective is re-iterated in Throw More Pots over at Crossroads Dispatches. In this same token, I’m a firm believer every …
Spring Cleaning at the Work Better Weblog
So we’re back. My apologies if you stopped by over the last couple days to find us not here. I was working on a new visual presentation for the website and the CMS ended up not cooperating. Everything is mostly back to normal now. Though for the next few days, if you hit the site, …
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What Price Garbage Avoidance
We’ve got a Rainbow Foods just south of us and a Cub Foods just north of us. Both are just on the border of walking-distance away (that’s a different story). At both stores, I’m struck by how much of we don’t see, how many aisles we don’t walk down, and how much crap we don’t …
Learning Ruby – Day 6
Day 6, How to deal with files and other data streams. What’s a reliable way to get the last item in an array? ask for the -1 item, i.e. array[-1]. Finally, a logical reason to start arrays at 0 rather than 1 – so we can count backwards. Looks like the “then” part of an …
Learning Ruby – Day 5
Day 5 is all about objects and their methods. Remember a few months back when Apple introduced the Shuffle? Everyone was up-in-arms about it’s lack of screen and how it was useless an mp3 player without a screen is. When in-fact, the lack of screen simplifies and improves the device a great deal. Ruby is …
Learning Ruby – Day 4
Day 4 – Iterators. First, all chapters in programming books should start with quotes from Steve Martin (t). Second, what’s a language without a convoluted loop syntax to geek out on? Geeez. I thought the purpose of learning to program was the same as learning Arabic from the Defense Language Institute – “because you can’t.” …
PodSafeSound and the SpaceShots Rock
Tonight, listening to my “Getting Things Done” playlist while going through Day 4 of Ruby, the Spaceshots’ tune ‘I Promise the World’ came through the headphones. I picked up that tune last November, while subscribed to BlogDigger’s mp3 feed (which I highly recommend for 2-3 days at a time). I search for ‘spaceshots’ at iTunes. …
Don’t Make a Plan B
Related to the previous Thought of the Day – One Foot Forward, Repeat – today’s thought is: Don’t Make a Plan B Then there isn’t an out when Plan A gets tough.