Irgendwie gab es heute morgen um 6:00 Uhr auf sämtlichen Regenradarbildern eine Anomalie.
strange.
Wüsste gern was da passiert ist.
My favourite Ruby (on Rails) Books
I’ve read a couple of Ruby and Ruby on Rails books now and for those who wonder which book is right for them, I want to give recommendations.
Ruby Books:
My favourite ruby book is the “The Ruby Programming Language” from O’Reillys shelf. It is written by David Flanagan (author of Javascript, The Definitive Guide) and Matz himself. This book is like a Definitive Guide but its not as heavy as the Javascript version as it is “only” 430 pages thick.
The big benefit of this book is that it covers all the new stuff from Ruby 1.9. I also like that it completely leaves out any kind of tutorial like part. It’s really all you need to know. Well written and reference like.
My second favourite book is from Addison Wesley and its called “The Ruby Way”. With 888 Pages this is even more like the definitive guide but there are some minor things that I don’t like about this book. So minor I won’t even mention them. If I had to chose between the O’Reilly book and this one I’d choose both.
The third book I can recommend is the Pragmatic book. This one is more for beginners as it starts with a tutorial that gives you a somewhat playful insight into the world of ruby. But once you’ve read this book and want to know more you will put this book aside and consider the previously mentioned ones.
Rails Books:
Same here. I’d highly recommend the Addison Wesley book “The Rails Way” because it is more like a reference to Rails and covers each aspect with way more details than the famous Pragmatic book which again starts with a tutorial that takes up half of the book. Its a very good and easy start for early Rails developers but it leaves so many questions open that you will definitly need another one. In this case – take the Addison Wesley one.
One of my ideas became reality – without me: Port of the Processing language to JavaScript and Canvas
A couple of semesters ago, when i was still enrolled ad UdK I’ve had the idea of porting processing to javascript. I wanted to use SVG instead of canvas but at that time canvas wasn’t really that big. I’ve never had the time to pursue that idea because I was busy with lots of other things but today I’ve read on that someone had the same idea and actually realized it. See here:
Port of the Processing language to JavaScript and Canvas
The results also look pretty cool – not sure if I would’ve been able to get it to this level. Thumbs up for another project that uses web technologies completely out of their initial scope of use cases.
Updates, really
I haven’t forgotten my weblog. It’s just that if you have lots of stuff to blog about, you don’t really have time to do it. At least that’s the case here.
On monday for example, I booted my very first computer. I was kind of late though so its a pretty decent machine compared to what most of my friends had. It’s a Apple Macintosh Performa 6200 with a stunning, Pentium smoking 75 MHz PowerPC, 24MB Ram and 500 MB HDD. I got this thing 1995 I believe, so it’s 13 years old and it was running almost every day since because my dad was still using it after I got a new computer. He used Filmaker 3.0 for writing bills and keeping track of customers. He ran it until last monday when I was at my parents and thought that it might be a good idea to finally transfer all his sensible data to another machine. The HDD would fail some day and I wanted to prevent an emergency call. But there was a problem. This machine had almost no useful interfaces to retrieve the data. There’s no USB, no Firewire, no Ethernet – nothing! It has a SCSI connector but I don’t have any SCSI capable machines anymore. So I took my computer to the CCCB in order to remove the HDD and plug it into a new machine. The Performa 6200 was one of the first Macs which got an IDE HDD instead of SCSI. I was hoping that I could simply put it into an old G4 desktop in order to copy the files. It turned out though, that at the time they shipped the Performa, Apple was formatting the HDDs in their factory in a special way. This was changed late but appearently my disk was special because no modern computer I connected it to was able or willing to show me the files. Meanwhile I was thinking that I might destroyed the filesystem by putting it in the G4.
I didn’t bring the 15″ screen, the ADB Mouse and Keyboard with me, so I couldn’t boot it. After I got the missing pieces from my parents I connected everything and my Mac booted as it used to be:
It was like christmas. Or my birthday when I got my Mac. I went through all my files, played F/A 18 Hornet 2.0, Cyclone II and Rescue and was smiling all over my face.
Then I connected my old Syquest EZ 135 Drive with 135 MB cartriges via the SCSI port to backup my dads files. A friend then retrieved the files via his old mac which had a 10 MBit ethernet port. Now Filemaker 9 Pro was even able to convert the 3.0 database files and everything went through successfully. Now I can keep my first computer and play F/A 18 Hornet with it.
By the way, if someone out there really wants to make me happy – buy me this game: http://www.graphsim.com/games-fa18-oif.html
After all these emotions I have to say that this computer still looks nice on my desktop. Imagine a 13 years old PC box! The Performa case is well designed. Doesn’t look like it is that old. I can even connect a TFT display so everything looks real crisp.
The machine never had any problems. The battery faded out but it can be replaced. It was really worth the money.
Flickr
Flickr works as a community. You upload photos, people find them and ask you if they can use them. You get feedback without advertising them or something like that.
Sometimes however people use your pictures without letting you know. This happens of course when you attach a proper license to your photos. This happened to one of my 24c3 photos. The german newspaper »Die Zeit« used this one on their website in this article.
I think flickr is amazing in many aspects as it is one of the few web communities that are useful.
