In the Simpsons episode titled The Canine Mutiny, Bart uses his newly-acquired credit card to buy presents for his family. One of the presents he gives to Marge is a frying pan with a radio built into the handle.
The problem with being a satirist in this day and age is that reality often leapfrogs you. Case in point: this “MP3 Ready” George Foreman Grill, with integrated amplifier and speakers:
In the blog posting titled Judging Programming Languages by the Results, Alexander Rødseth comes to the conclusion that he should use Pascal for Linux desktop application development. My favourite part is in the comments, where a reader sums up the flaw in Rødseth ‘s thesis with a single hypothetical quote: “This book is great! I know — if I want to replicate its success, I’ll just use the same font!”
It’s the only time you should mix Ajax and beer: at Ajax Pub Night, which takes place here in Toronto on Monday, January 14th. Here are the details:
Here’s what Brent has to say about Ajax Pub Night:
We’re here to build a community around Ajax and create opportunities to meet face to face at events small and large.
Ajax is a unifying word that brings a number of technologies and techniques together to express one concept – a way to build compelling browser-based applications that comprise the foundation of the future of the web.
Let’s start with a Toronto-based Ajax Pub Nite, informal and unstructured. Once some community is established we can introduce evening Ajax Presentations and Demos and/or Ajax Workshops and build up to an eventual full-day Ajax Camp, perhaps inspiring people from different locales to join in here and set up their own events worldwide.
I’ve been to similar pub nights at the Rhino, and generally the ideas flow as freely as the beer. If you’re interested in Ajax development and are looking to get some new ideas, meet your peers and possibly land a job (it’s happened at these gatherings), come on down to Ajax Pub Night this Monday! I plan to be there.
“Post Knuth birthday article” was an item on my list of blogging to-dos that I missed yesterday. So I’ll just wish the Good Doctor a happy 70th birthday, point you to Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s article on Knuth (full of linky goodness) and close with this amusing thought: if someone wants to make a Knuth biopic, I nominate Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute in the American version of The Office) to play him…
Here’s one for the do-it-yourselfers who grew up on G.I. Joe cartoons: a photo essay showing how this guy made his own Cobra Commander USB drive.
ruby-debug in 30 seconds: “There’s good tutorial links on the ruby-debug homepage, and a very good Cheat sheet, but I wanted to give a bare-bones HOWTO to help you get immediately productive with ruby-debug.”
“If you’re still writing for loops, stop; there’s a better way.” In Ruby, for loops should be the exception. Make sure you know all about the functionality offered by the Enumerable module, which has methods for iterating through, sorting and searching arrays, hashes and other collection-type objects.