Coding and consuming

I’d been meaning for a while to learn me some Ruby, the hot new programming lingo. Rails, the popular web app framework, is behind a lot of Web2.0 efforts, and Tim O’Reilly says Ruby books are outselling Perl books. And the recent bit of coding I’ve done at work has boosted my confidence a bit and made me nostalgic for web coding.

So for a learning task I ported over the script I run every week to search through the upcoming comic book releases for stuff I’m interested in. While I was at it, I modified it to run off of Diamond’s list directly rather than the New Comics Releases List; the latter has been improved to the point of unusability.

Anyway, I’m liking Ruby. A few odd quirks to get used to, like actual typed literals, and that expression interpolator — I’m used to having Perl handle that stuff for me. But man, that Date class was easy to work with, much easier than Perl. And of course object-oriented stuff is easier. Anyway, my program came out shorter and easier to read than the Perl version, despite actually doing more stuff. Nice!

Other new discoveries:

Derwent has a new line of watercolor pencils out, the Inktense line. I know, embarrassing name. But the pencils! The idea is that these are link colored inks in pencil form — bright, strong, transparent colors, and once you’ve wet them and they’ve dried, they’re permanent! I picked up a 12-pack at Dick Blick today, and tried ’em out, and they seem to live up to the hype. I’m going back for the 24-set over the weekend. And maybe a book on watercolor technique. I’ve been slacking.

I also stopped off at Paragon Sports and picked up an extra-light Gripmaster and a Dyna-Flex Pro, to exercise my hands and wrists. The Gripmaster is a nice bit of design — light, portable, and amenable to a bunch of different exercises. The Dyna-Flex was a minor mistake, since what I’d actually been thinking of buying was a Powerball (similar product from another company), but hey, as my strength improves I’ll need to move up to another model anyway.

More comics links

¡Journalista! is back! This is Dirk Deppey’s comics blog, originally hosted by The Comics Journal; now it looks like Deppey’s hosting it on his own domain. The old stuff is there too: if you scroll down the front page, you can see three recent articles, and then one from November 2002. Found via Warren Ellis’s del.icio.us account. (And I’ve got one of my own, too. Pretty handy.)

Through Deppey, I see that Dave Sim is doing comics again! His new project is called Diary of an Actress... Siu Ta (So Far), a serialized strip about a struggling Asian actress, published online.