Learning Ruby – Day 2

Day 2 starts with one of the most valuable programming exercises. What can I do with an object? Just ask it: self.methods With ‘self’ being the current object, the above question returns a list of all the questions ‘self’ knows how to answer. Every object in Ruby can be asked this question. So many languages …

RSS is Advertising, Not a Channel for Advertising

(originally published at MNteractive.com) This afternoon, I was listening to an interview on RSS advertising. Overall, it sounded like Pheedo is shoehorning the dying interruption-based ad model into the relationship-based world of RSS. There are a number of companies trying to make RSS measurement more accurate (Pheedo, Feedster, FeedBurner). This is excellent, RSS feeds are …

Learning Ruby – Day 1

Mark Slagell’s writing style is conversational and educational. I’ve gone through a number of software language tutorials. I found Slagell’s first chapter a comfortable mix of background info, simple examples, and experiments. On the outset, Slagell states Ruby is based on the: Principle of Least Surprise: “If you don’t know how to do something and …

Punch Pizza No Knock Out

Last night Jen, Jer, Sam, and I went for a leisurely dinner at Punch Neapolitan Pizza. Punch Pizza is continually declared the best pizza in the Twin Cities. The City Pages included Punch on their Best of Lists in 2003 and 2004, the Mpls.St.Paul Magazine also ranks it highly. On this particular Saturday night, the …

Podcasts for Learning Foreign Languages

Last fall when I was just getting into podcasting, I was enamored with the idea of using podcasts to learn a foreign language. I even commented on it in First Crack #6. If you’re following my ThingsToDo list, you see I’d like to get my tongue around Dutch and bring my German back up to …

How long does it take to build a website?

A year or so ago, I had this ‘Website-in-a-Weekend’ idea. Walk a group of people from nothing to a nice looking, easy-to-update, custom website in a weekend using WordPress. Something like this; Day 1: Install WordPress (t d), define categories, pages, generally get everything in place. Add some images and text. Day 2: Edit the …

Learning Ruby in 3 Weeks

A year ago I dropped REALbasic. Since then, I’ve struggled to get my head around Cocoa and Objective-C. With the recent hype around Ruby on Rails, I started looking at Ruby and found a Ruby/Objective-C bridge. To me, this means there’s a huge potential to have tightly-integrated desktop and web-based applications in a single, easy-to-maintain …

Fake Data to See if Anyone’s Paying Attention

When putting together a prototype for usability testing, it’s best to use realistic data. If you’re evaluating the readability of a search results screen, put in the actual results. If you’re evaluating a check-out process, make all the information throughout the entire process real. Then, after, tweak the data just slightly. Make it humorous, make …