I’ve just seen this great blog post on Digg, it compares many programming languages to types of women!
Here are the “women” I’ve “dated”:
Ruby on Rails. The new girl in town. Everybody is talking about her. Very beautiful and sexy. Only daring men, because she is till new, have the guts to ask her out. She is modern and sophisticated. Already a lot of myth is surrounding her with regards to her ability. She is not talkative but looks rather very intelligent.
C - A lady executive. An avid jogger, very healthy, and not too talkative. Is an good cook if you like spicy food. Unless you double check everything you say (through LINT) you can unleash her fierce temper. Her daughter C++ is still quite young and prone to tantrums, but it seems that she will grow up into a fine young woman of milder temper and more sophisticated character
Assembler - A female track star who holds all the world speed records. She is hard and bumpy, and so is not that pleasant to embrace. She can cook up any meal, but needs a complete and detailed recipe. She is not beautiful or educated, and speaks in monosyllables like “MOV, JUMP, INC”. She has a fierce and violent temper that make her the choice of last resort.
C# - The pimp from next door! She likes copying everything, from recipes to makeup to fashion. She is never original and likes to still other women’s ideas, then go about shouting that the ideas are hers. Those who are not aware of her source of ideas think she is very intelligent. She is very talkative and showy. Sometimes she is very good at perfecting what she has copied.
The perfect way to choose your next language (which surely has to be ruby!) see the full list here.
As you may have noticed Teabass is sporting a few small changes. Notably it looks and works a lot better in IE6, still unchecked in IE7 but I would guess it’s ok if someone can confirm that for me that would be great. The other difference is the Delicious sidebar widget, I’ve started using it a lot more, all of the cool stuff I find gets saved there.
Perhaps more important than that, the mysterious project I’m involved in at work is soon to become a lot less mysterious. I’ve been putting a lot of things together and we are getting close to slotting everything in place, if we don’t have any major hiccups then we are still on for a January release and that means we’ll be looking for beta testers very soon
I’ve put my Ruby shoes again and have been catching up with Rails, pretty damn quickly too. I’ve re-read a number of books I have on it as well as reading into pure Ruby to provide myself with a better of Rails and how it works.
It definitely helped me grasp the concepts of Rails better and since then I’ve created some cool little things now that I can do relationships and login stuff its all coming together very quickly. If i can work out a good way to get a rails app running on a live web server (it’s not particularly easy) then I will show off what I can do.
I’ve got a couple ideas in the pipeline that I think would suit rails down to the ground and with the help of “Getting Real” by 37signals, my latest purchase and new favourite book, at least until I get the new “Agile Web Development with Rails 1.2“, all about fast, lightweight web development.
It goes hand in hand with Rails and has this strange power to fill me with ideas and enthusiasm every time I read it, what more could you want from a book. You can read it for free here, I wouldn’t suggest buying it tho, they use a ‘print-on-demand’ service from Lulu.com which is quite frankly pants!
Lulu.com not only took over 2 weeks to get the book to me, it was poorly printed and the put the wrong postcode on it so it when to the wrong house as well!! Get the PDF instead.
So i’ve had my Macbook for a few months now, and the call of gaming is very hard to resist. We all know that the most popular big name games don’t make it to make, DirectX killed that off long ago, but there are alternatives.
Even if you have low-end graphics card in your mac like me there are lots of options for fun games that don’t rely on the latest shaders and effects to make up for poor game play.
You can also get pretty good performance on windows games if your running Bootcamp, although the Macbook’s graphics are capable of doing the very modern stuff. Here is a good example of HL2 running on an iMac, and a tutorial for using Crossover.
But by far the best experience I’ve had with Mac gaming has been going back in time to the classics with a little thing called an Emulator.
Your best place to get them for the Mac is on The Emulator Zone, there is a nice selection there for the SNES, MegaDrive, N64 and even Gameboy advanced.
The next step is to find some ROMs, these are like virtual cartridges to plug into your virtual consoles, but there is a snag…
The next bit gets a little hazy, these games are obviously copyright but they are not for sale in shops anyone (except for those cool few that have every console ever!) so your going to have to be a little sneaky to get your ROMs. That is where our good friend Mr. Bittorrent comes in.
Grab your favourite Bittorrent Client, I like Xtorrent on the mac and its free too.
And then bounce off to Torrentz and get searching. Something like “Snes ROM” should find you some good stuff!
So I’ve been drawing again, this time for a friend’s re-design. She liked the style of Farrington’s and so I’ve gone for a similar design but a bit more natural.
I’d love to be able to tell you all about the interesting things we are working on, it’s all start to come together. We will be starting testing soon so keep an eye or RSS reader on the ‘Bass for some cool stuff coming within the next few weeks.
Grab your favourite Bittorrent Client, I like 
