Coding and consuming

[avram]

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.