Improvements to the layout/styling of this blog

A couple of things that were the default way the template for this blog were not working well at all when I included snippets of code or documents.

Fortunately, I fixed that this morning by making some changes. I am gradually making these changes across all by blogs on Blogspot.com.

For one thing, I have added support for decorative dashed-line boxes around code snippets that I include. Normally, I make that a dashed blue line, because that seems to be a convention. Here I use a dashed green line, in keeping with the basic color scheme of this blog and its theme.

I also widened the blog. If you have an old 800x600 display, you are going to have to horizontally scroll a little to the right in order to see the whole sidebar. Sorry, but I want to be able to show source code for either documents or programs - and I needed to widen the body section of the blog by 200 pixels.

Last but not least, I am highlighting the Technorati tags area that is at the end of some of my posts with a nice little three-dimensional inlay effect. I think it looks pretty cool. It kind of indicates that these tags are metadata, not part of the actual content itself.

Hope you like these changes. My goal is to make the blog as readable as I can. I also want to really stretch my CSS skills as much as I can. The line between the disciplines used in programming, publishing, web design, and technical writing is really blurring in this era of the World Wide Web and the technologies it has spawned.

Programmers are having to become more multi-disciplined than ever. Personally, I am not trying to buck that trend.

Technorati Tags: blogging, css

Songs tagged as ruby on Last.fm

Everyone needs music to inspire them.

We Ruby programmers are no different! We are men (and women) - not code monkeys.

Investigate some of the songs with a Ruby theme at Last.fm.

You need culture. You have not heard the last of it.

Take note.

Oh, dear.

I hope I have not opened a Pandora's Box.

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Ruby In Steel.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

I think I also read about a an Iron Ruby project or product out there somewhere that integrates Ruby with .NET. Not too sure though.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Iron Ruby.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

hreview - Microformats

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a ton of books.

I was just reading about the new hReview Microformat and it really caught my interest.

Reviews, to me, are very handy. I use them to choose what products to buy, what software is worth trying out, what movies I want to see or rent.

Also, they can be a handy way to quickly select what books from my own collection I should look at when researching a particular topic. I am pretty good at remembering what is in what book. But a couple of times in the past several years, I have been surprised when a particular technology was thrown in as an example in a book I had not expected to delve into that subject.

I own four Ruby books at this point. I have my eye on one or two more. I have looked at several others at Borders and decided not to buy them. They just did bring add enough new knowledge to me in the case of the latter.

I also picked up a copy of the July 2006 Linux Journal the last time I was at the bookstore. I would like to write a reviews of that when I finish reading it. It is a pretty fascinating issue for someone who is into Ruby programming.

Microformats:

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.

Technorati tags: hReview, microformats, reviewing, metadata, xml, rss

Mondrian Ruby IDE

There is another Ruby IDE out there. This one is called Mondrian Ruby IDE.

Mondrian is built on top of the SciTE framework, which is designed to support programming-language aware text editors. The Ruby code uses the FOX GUI toolkit.

Mondrian's Ruby-specific editing logic is written in Ruby itself.

The authors admit this does cause it to run slowly when loading a large Ruby programming. But they point out that the process of editing a Ruby program is pretty lag-free, after that initial delay for loading.

They also call attention to the fact it runs identically on MS-Windows and Linux.

A couple interesting wrinkles to this tool:

1. UML designer
2. dynamic object browser

Features like these, just five years ago, would boost the price of a C++ IDE from the below $500 price range to a lofty thousand to two thousand dollar price range.

Programming tools have taken a huge turn for the better in the past decade. A lot of this seems to have sprung forth from two things:

1. Apple's ushering-in of object-oriented and GUI-style programming a quarter of a decade ago, with the Apple Lisa and then the Apple Macintosh
2. Richard M. Stallman's insistence over two decades ago that a lot of important software be written as free, open source software.

If those two things did not change the world of software-for-programmers more dramatically than anything else, I do not know what did.

Here is more info, from its home page:

Mondrian Ruby IDE:

Mondrian is a cross-platform project-manager and editor for the Ruby language. Written in
100% native Ruby using the FOX GUI toolkit, Mondrian has the familiar look and feel of a modern IDE
while remaining dedicated to the uniqueness of the Ruby language and its community.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, software, uml, designing, oop

jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin mini-reviewed by bact

Bact has blogged a screen shot of a pretty nice-looking Ruby plugin for jEdit in operation.

Go take a look at it here:

bact' is a name: jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin

I am pretty impressed with how far jEdit has come. About half a dozen years ago, it was a good text editor with an excellent architecture.

Now it is a massive, highly productive community of developers and plugins: far more than just a project or a piece of software. The power inside and polish on the outside of these plugins is really impressive.

Here is the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit home page.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming

SQL On Rails demo screencast

The SQL On Rails website is kind of a dig on the Ruby On Rails website, and the whole RoR phenomenon.

Poking fun at the numerous Ruby On Rails demo screencast QuickTime movies out there - this site includes its own: SQL On Rails demo screencast.

It is pretty hilarious.

You have to watch a bunch of RoR screencasts in order to get it. But if you have, then you will.

Take it with a grain of salt and try to have a sense of humor about it.

I have activated backlinks for this blog

I have gotten one or two requests to activate backlinks. I did not realize at the time that Blogger/Blogspot added support for banklinks at the time. In fact, I barely knew What backlinks are and how they are used.

I was lucky with this weblog. With my oldest one I had to manually add backlink tags to my blog template. It was not too bad. However I do not really like mucking around in there for a few reasons.

Anyway, it is up and running so if someone wants to link to one of my posts, it is now possible to do so. Likewise, I can link to my own posts too - from other posts in the same or different weblogs.

By the way, I have been reading Blogging - Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone, published by New Riders.

It is about the best book someone could write about the Blogger/Blogspot weblogs. It covers a few other of the popular ones too.

This book covers everything from writing your first blog, to customizing your templates, adding CSS and Javascript, and even making money with your weblog.

I did not see backlinks in the book, which are a pretty new feature. The book is several years old, though. My impression is not a lot of stuff has changed in the past couple years, but the backlink thing is one new addition to those original Blogger features that were there when Google bought it.

Oh, mobile voice blogging is a new feature too. I kind of doubt that is in the book either. The rest of the features seem to get decent coverage.

Technorati Weblog: Introducing Microformats Search and Pingerati

Technorati announced some pretty exciting developments on their weblog just over a week ago, on May 31.

The big news is that they have added support for Microformats. Microformats included metadata about the information contained in a document, or entry in a document, directly into the internals of the document itself.

While obviously, this further mixes content with presentation to a certain degree, it is sort of a special case. The information itself, is generally not so much data as metadata. It describes the content, it is not the content per se. Further, what it really does is provide context about that content.

It is knowledge of that context that Technorati, the popular blog indexing/searching/tagging service, has now been enabled to read and exploit for the benefit of its readers. That in turn, will be a big help to the authors of the blogs it harnesses.

This assumes their goal is to either become popular, which being helpful to a readership certainly does - or if they just want to be able to organize their own writing for their own use.

After all, many weblogs are simply journals in the diary sense, not in the publications sense.

Speaking of context, this is taking place in front of the backdrop of the development of Firefox 2.0. That version, expected out later this year, will introduce a feature called Microsummaries.

Microsummaries will scrape the content and or anything else in the page, including information in Microformats, and display it in a consolidated presentation in the browser. This will save browser users from a lot of hunting around and possibly even math or sorting effort. Other uses will probably arise too.

Technorati Weblog:

This afternoon Technorati introduces a technology preview of microformats search for contacts, events, and reviews. Available now in the Technorati Kitchen, I invite you to come take a look at this first of a kind realtime microformats search engine, see what the team has worked very hard to build for you, and let us know what you think and what you want from microformats search.

If you are (or will be) publishing with microformats in your blog, and you're already pinging Technorati, then you are all set. Our new microformats search will index your microformats.

Technorati tags: microformats, xml, blogging, searching, metadata, technorati

IBM plays XML card in effort to beat Oracle - Builder UK

IBM is putting some muscle behind its SOA philosophy this month.

The company just made an announcement about the new version of DB2, version 9.

It sports better integration with the IBM WebSphere server, which is based on the popular open source web server from Apache. It adds XML support.

And, it introduces close integration of Ruby on Rails.

That sounds reminiscent of the successful efforts by IBM, Oracle, and other companies to add Java integration into their servers, ushering in the golden age of application servers.
ZDNet UK Builder:

Formerly code-named Viper, the XML capabilities will greatly improve the speed of applications that use XML, he said. "There are 68 patents alone in Viper, and it involved 750 developers over five years," Picciano said. "This is something no one else has and will take years to get here."
DB2 9 will also have a storage mechanism, enabling corporations to reduce their hardware storage needs by about 40 percent, he said. The data server will be optimised to run with SAP's packaged applications and have close integration with Ruby on Rails, Picciano said. He predicted the release will lure in Oracle customers and defend IBM from open-source alternatives, which are increasingly viable for corporate customers.

Technorati tags: ibm, db2, sql, soa, rubyonrails, xml, database

Linking to Ruby books to find them at local libraries

There is a neat website called WorldCat that web pages can hyperlink to for information on a given book.

The benefits of doing this is that the page linked to will provide the user with quick access to the local library catalog information on that particular book.

While many pages on the web will provide links to sites where the user can buy a book, this

The best, not to mention most comprehensive, book I own on the Ruby programming language is Programming Ruby, 2nd ed. by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt (ISBN: 0974514055).

The URL for the book at Worldwide Library Cooperative is:

  http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0974514055

The syntax of this URL is very simple:

  http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/ISBN_number

Here is a URL that links to the 1st edition of the book Agile Web Development with Rails:

 http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0-9766940-0-X

Generated web pages could easily embed these links for books that are cited in the text.

Some Wikis allow defining custom tags which get translated to URLs. They support string substitution of parameters passed to the markdown tags into a position indicated by a placeholder in a URL template. If they do, a markdown tag named something like LibraryBook could be defined.

There is a web page with more information on how to Link directly to an ISBN/ISSN in Open WorldCat

In the meantime, you can see if the books above are at your local library!