Delicious News?

6/14/2005

Why aren't popular del.icio.us links popular news stories? This is something that Technorati not only enables me to find but promotes on the front page. I find it discomforting that important news stories and breakthroughs that are global or industry based never make it to the top half on the popular links section (on the other hand, offbeat news articles tend to make it on there now and then). I assume that we aren't as concerned with news as the media wants us to be or we get it from different sources.

Things to Get Serious About

6/12/2005

Here goes a list of things that I want to do in the next few months:

1. Evaluate source code control packages and implement one for my new project. I am between CVS and Subversion, which represent the well-known options. Subversion seems like the new cool thing, which may be the tipping point. Why bother learning older tech?

2. Drop Perl and do more Python. From the way it's turning out, a lot of my projects look like they'll run just fine in Python. Sure there are some semantic and lots of syntactic differences...but I'll be in a more comfortable environment. I've been reading "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" and been beating myself up for not ever reading this before. This may eventually lead me to Ruby. But for now, I'll stick with Python - maybe because I've already done tons in it before.

3. Move a lot of junk, I say that jokingly, from my PC to my Mac. I need to do it now. I'm starting to feel the crunch of constant data transfer.

Vacation Books

6/02/2005

My vacation starts tonight. I've got tons of books that I'm planning on reading. The list, in no particular order, goes as:

1. The Pragmatic Programmer - I've been clamoring to get a copy of this. I didn't have my wallet at Barnes last time, so I couldn't do it. I plan on consuming this in one sitting. No joke.

2. Programming Ruby - I've heard tremendous things about Ruby. It may be my replacement for Perl. I've already taken the plunge in installing it locally (/usr/bin/ruby/)

3. Ruby/Rails Beta Book (really excited about this) - While successful in making several small Rails apps, I feel I need a book. Some hard resource, even if it is in beta, that will guide me to create a "solid" app from start to finish. I've heard great things in various forums. A lot of CF coders I know are switching languages based on the framework.

4. The Google papers on MapReduce and the GFS - I don't think I need to explain myself on these ones.

There are so many other things that I want to read. This is just the short list. Let's see what actually gets done.

Kryptonian Transliteration Guide

6/02/2005

View the current transliteration guide for encrypting/decrypting Kryptonian, the known language of Krypton used by Kal-El, aka Superman. I submitted a feature request to Google to search for things in Kryptonian. I'll post more details here as they develop.