This morning I turned on my iPod after not having used it over the weekend, and I was surprised to find that it had been completely erased, as if I had restored it to factory settings using the iPod updater. It prompted me to select my language, I had to re-enter all my settings, and all my songs and podcasts were gone....

The Pragmatic Programmers have published another Ruby book: "Learn to Program", by Chris Pine. The book is intended for new or non-programmers and teaches programming from the ground up - variables, flow control, and everything. It's nice to see Ruby move even more into the mainstream, and this book looks like a great introduction for new programmers.

I just realized that it's been a little over a year since I pretty much permanently switched from Windows to Linux! I had been using Linux on and off over the past 10 years or so, but it wasn't until a year ago that I seriously ditched Windows in favor of Linux. On December 30, 2004 I blogged about my Gentoo installation, which I had completed the week before....

I just added another external hard drive to my Linux system, and now I'm wondering about a few potential issues....

Koders is a very cool source code search engine. It indexes many open source projects and covers a wide range of programming languages, including of course Java and Ruby, but also more obscure languages. Clicking on a search result brings up a very nice syntax highlighted version of the source code....