DigitalHobbit

Why the lucky stiff, who brought us the fabuolous “Why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby”, just released this new awesome web application:

Try Ruby

Try Ruby is a web based, interactive Ruby tutorial, sort of like IRB on steroids. If you are curious about the kinds of things newbies and script kiddies are trying out in the console, [...]

Firefox 1.5 has been released. You can grab it here. Some of the new features are improved popup blocking (I am curious about this one, now that some sites have figured out how to circumvent the previous version’s popup blocker), drag & drop tab reordering, noticeably faster navigation using the Back and Forward buttons, and [...]

I just had a chance to catch up with the tech news from the past week or so, and I almost couldn’t believe what I read about Sony’s trojan-horse rootkit that was shipped on over 50 CD albums. Apparently this malware searches your computer for illegally downloaded music and reports this to Sony. And not [...]

Over the past 5 years or so, the hype around web services has grown continuously. At the same time, the complexity of the relevant specifications has steadily increased. Just think of all the buzzwords like SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, etc. Now it seems like many developers are taking a step back and thinking of simpler [...]

The Rails based Typo blog engine has been gaining a lot of traction lately, and I’m seriously considering switching from WordPress. Don’t get me wrong - I love WordPress. It is a very solid and full featured blog engine that has never let me down. But I can’t deny that there’s a certain attraction to [...]

Not all that unexpected I guess, but in yesterday’s vote, the Kansas Board of Education actually approved the teaching of Intelligent Design in Kansas schools.

Damn, I’m glad I live in California. Still, this is a blow against all sane people in this country. Looks like we are slowly going back in time towards the Dark [...]

As much as I love the Flying Spaghetti Monster movement, this one poses some serious competition: Church of Reality.

The website contains an abundance of very well thought out pages. A lot of it is sarcasm, but there seems to be some deeper and honest motivation as well. They have actually managed to be recognized as [...]

It sounds like a new book might need to be added to the list of must-have Ruby books: “Enterprise Integration with Ruby”, written by Maik Schmidt and published as a Pragmatic Bookshelf title, is currently in beta. As with all Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, you can purchase the beta PDF now and receive the full PDF [...]

One of the Java programming questions I like to ask in interviews is: “Is Java pass-by-value or pass-by-reference?”

A surprising amount of Java developers get this wrong, generally because the variables you mostly deal with in Java (other than primitives) are actually references to objects, rather than containing the objects themselves. Most developers blurt out something [...]