thoughts.on.code

Sometimes you just need a little perspective:

Thanks to Mike for blogging this and subsequently turning me on to it.

One of my favorite reads is Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, a monthly newsletter revolving around the security/cryptography world. And of that newsletter, Bruce’s “Dog House” article is consistantly my favorite. It always makes me simultaneously laugh in amusement of the stupidity on display, and shake my head in disgust at the con-artistry/lack of integrity.

This month it is Krypto’s, who’s site it absolutely hilarious. I am not sure I understood all of the words in the broken-english machine translation from German to English, but what I did get: they are full of crap… and Hilarious!

I had a great time talking with everyone about Rails last night at Omaha’s Dynamic Language Users Group. A big “Thank You!” to everyone who showed up! We had a record ~25 people there.

Thanks to Matt Payne for anticipating the crowd, and getting us a sweet room at UNO. The room had built-in cameras which allowed us to videotaped the whole thing. I must say it was kindof strange to be mic’d and videotaped… a new experience for me. Than you to Bob the A/V guy at UNO for making that all happen!

I have not had a chance to look at the tape yet, but I am hoping that one of my lucky-bastard friends with a Mac might be able to do a little post-production work on it and then I will push the video out on the site… or to be more Web 2.0-is YouTube.

But meanwhile, here are the slides, available in the following formats: HTML, PDF, and OpenOffice (ODP).

The HTML and ODP formats have the notes, where the PDF is just the slides.

Also, thank you to Harish over at BusinessWorks/IdeoLogicLLC for the kind words! He has also posted a few links that should be of interest if you want to persue Rails further.

Michael Feathers has some very wise words about being a professional. This was a welcome piece on Google’s feed reader today. Great stuff.

So, I noticed on Artima (via google’s feed reader) this morning that a new web-app langauge has hit 1.0: HaXe (link to post here).

So, I decided to take 15 minutes and look at it. That literally is all I’ve looked at it so ar, so bear that in mind. It looks interesting at first glance, but I think it will have a hard time up against Rails. And the reason for that is simple: from what I can see, there is no dynamic support for new methods/functions. Without that, I think it will be very hard to make a DSL as simply as Rails does. For instance, it does not appear to support the ability to reflect against your database to dynamically build your model, which I find to be one of the most powerful aspects of Rails.

In fact, it appears that they have borrowed from Java to do reflection, a poor choice in my mind. Java’s reflection api is very usefull, but pales in comparison to method_missing/mixins/etc in Ruby.

One of the interesting things about it is that it can compile down to flash, which could make it very handy as an absraction for that, though my hunch at this time is I would use Flex or OpenLaslo for that if I ever have the need.

But, since I failed to take Rails seriously the first time I saw it, and I want to learn from that lesson, I intend to take a closer look at HaXe sooner than later. If I find anything interesting I will be sure to write a post about it.

Update: There is a brief Ajaxian post on this as well: http://ajaxian.com/archives/haxe-web-language