I'm still (slowly) getting up to speed on Ruby and various associated libraries and frameworks. Tonight I spent some time looking into YAML. I always thought that this stood for "Yet Another Markup Language", but apparently it actually stands for "YAML Ain't Markup Language". Essentially, YAML is a lightweight alternative to XML....

In his blog posting titled "Is Rails Ready for Prime Time?", Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers shares some interesting thoughts on how to introduce Rails in your company. He recognizes that Rails is not always the right solution, and some situations may very well benefit from using J2EE or other frameworks....

O'Reilly Network has posted an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It's an interesting read and covers some of the reasons for writing the Rails framework. Apparently David has done significant development with both PHP (which he calls quick-n-dirty), as well as Java (which he calls slow-n-clean). With Rails, he was aiming for quick-n-clean, and it seems like he's succeeded....

If you are a Java programmer and you're interested in Ruby, you should read this presentation about 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby. This blog entry also has some nice Ruby information for Java developers. About the most dangerous thing about Ruby is how more elegant and less verbose it is....

Google Adsense seems to be very sensitive to certain content. I have only posted two entries about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (this one and this one), and currently the main page displays these two posts among various others about topics such as iPod, podcasting, Ruby, Java, Cafepress, Spreadshirt, Xbox, etc. Still, as of the time of this writing the Google banner exclusively contains ads for websites on religion or spaghetti recipes....