Dave Thomas's Blog, page 2

Yet another piece of music

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 

Another piece of music…

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

The Passionate Programmer

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...

Amazon Tighten Their Grip on Kindle Distribution

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...

Displaying Code on the Kindle

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...

Twitter Should Move Away from Ruby

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...

Using comments as rake task descriptions

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...

Shipping the Rails Book

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...

So I need a symetric coroutine example

I'm getting close to wrapping up the new PickAxe. One of the last things I need is an example of symetric coroutines for the standard library section on the Fiber class.

I have lots of asymetric examples, but I'm struggling to come up with something decent for symetric coroutines (which use transfer to pass control between themselves.) I've coded up Conway's line squeezer, but it works better using asymetric coroutines. I've tried to come up with puzzles that are best solved with symetric...

Rails Studio Early Registration ends soon

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I love doing the Pragmatic Studios. Nicole, Mike, and Chad are all good friends, and that creates a really relaxed and fun atmosphere for what could otherwise be a pretty intense three days.

The next studio is in Denver at the end of January, and I'm really looking forward to it—living in Texas, I relish being able to see mountains and snow. I just wish I was a skier so I could have an excuse to take an extra day or two to head on up to a resort.