Dave Thomas's Blog

So now I own part of a karate school!

My son Zachary has been studying karate for 5 or 6 years now. He got his black belt, and now he's teaching others while continuing to learn himself.

He used to go to a tremendous studio. What made it so great was a particular teacher, Teresa Paup. She's one of the most natural teachers I've ever met: strong and disciplined, but at the same time very open to the individuals under her care. Which made it all the more upsetting with the studio got into...

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When we started the Bookshelf, we wanted our authors to share in the success of their books, so we set our royalty rates to between 40% and 50%. That is, an author will receive between 40% and 50% of whatever gross profit we make on a book. We felt back then, and we still feel, that this is the highest overall royalty offered by any technical publisher (most publishers offer something in the 10–18% range).

But it isn't always easy to compare different publishers, because the definitions of...

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In my ongoing quest to keep myself honest, here's another piece of music I wrote. This one I started over a year ago, but then put down for a while. I think it really wants to be a lot longer piece—maybe one day.

the mp3 file (thanks, Mike Springer)
the music 

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In my ongoing attempt to keep myself honest, here's another piece I wrote, again played by Mike Springer. I'm not sure how to categorize this one—I wanted to play around with 7/8, and ended up with what I think are some interesting patterns. Anyway...

And here's the music

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I've known Chad Fowler for almost ten years. He's a seriously good guy: musician, developer, leader, and friend. So when he came to me some years ago with an idea for a book, I jumped at it. I was hoping for something good, but what we got was something truly great.

Andy and I wrote The Pragmatic Programmer over 10 years ago. It was a book full of advice on the job of programming, from low-level coding to teams and projects.

Well, Chad had written the companion book. Where our book looked...

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I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with my Kindles. The original was not much more than a toy, but the Kindle 2 was a more usable device. It still needs work in the formatting department (hopefully the Lexcycle acquisition will help with this—I very much hope to see epub support rolled in to the Kindle at some point courtesy of the folks who brought us Stanza). But the distribution model is a good one. If you buy a book from the Amazon store, it gets delivered over the air to your...

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So, I'm in a quandary.

Having used one now for a few months, I'm slowly warming to Amazon's Kindle 2. Sure, it
still feels a bit cheap compared to the Sony 505, but it's fast, and the ability to download over their wireless network is a bit plus. (Stay tuned for an announcement from us about that...)

But my biggest issue with the Kindle is the markup it supports. Think 1995 browser, minus the <blink> tag. It is very, very limited.

I pride myself on the look of our books, so...

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Oh dear. The chattering classes are at it, talking about how the Twitter folks are dissing Ruby by announcing the replacement of some Ruby code with Scala code.

Please stop.
At the kinds of volumes that Twitter handles (and with what I assume is a somewhat scary growth curve), Twitter needs  to improve concurrency—it needs an environment/language with low memory overhead, incredible performance, and super-efficient threading. I don't know if Scala fits that particular bill, but I know that...

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Over lunch at Scotland on Rails, Jim, Chad, and I got talking about the way you use desc to document tasks in rake.

desc "Remove intermediate files and other work products"
task :cleanup do
  ...
end

This has always been an interesting feature of rake—the idea that you have a kind of temporal coupling between one method call and the next. It works well, but somehow it's always struck me as a little obtrusive.

So, during the afternoon, I hacked up a quick change to rake that looks for a single-line...

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Last week we completed our largest direct shippment, as we sent out the preorders for Agille Web Development with Rails, Third Edition. We had tons of books delivered, and bought tens of thousands of dollars of shipping supplies and postage, but despite the volume everything went well (apart from the inevitable paper cuts). I even learned where the big boys go to the Post Office (which turns out to be a pretty impressive facility right next to DFW airport).

So I thought I'd share just a...

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