ander's blog

Ruby Koans

2012-04-17T00:00:00Z

Just went through EdgeCase’s Ruby Koans. The koans are composed of total 280 unit test like parts that you have to fix in order to learn Ruby. I did them in two days.

Simplicity

2012-03-26T00:00:00Z

John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity is a nice book about simplicity in desígn, technology, business, and life. I’ve had it for a while now and read it a couple of times.

The book defines ten laws and three keys of simplicity.

Ten Laws

REDUCE The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
ORGANIZE Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
TIME Savings in time feel like simplicity.
LEARN Knowledge makes everything simpler.
DIFFERENCES Simplicity and complexity need each other.
CONTEXT What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
EMOTION More emotions are better than less.
TRUST In simplicity we trust.
FAILURE Some things can never be made simple.
THE ONE Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Three Keys

AWAY More appears like less by simply moving it far, far away.
OPEN Openness simplifies complexity.
POWER Use less, gain more.

All in all, it’s quite a light and entertaining read. There’s also a web site lawsofsimplicity.com.

Story

2011-12-20T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently read a few books about storytelling. They are:

Story by Robert Mckee,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell,
and The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

2011-09-16T00:00:00Z

Just got my copy of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks from Amazon. The languages it features are Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot…

Ignore Everybody and Anything You Want

2011-07-06T00:00:00Z

I just read these two books: Ignore Everybody by Hugh McLeod and Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. Both are quite quick and interesting reads.

They go right beside A Whole New Mind and Linchpin in my bookshelf.

A nice stack of books

2011-01-02T00:00:00Z

Concerns in Rails 3

2010-12-14T00:00:00Z

A pattern you see around in Rails 3 source code is

module Foo
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern
  # ...
end

Concern

solves a problem of module dependencies piling up on the host, and
provides a pattern for extending the host.

Piling up dependencies becomes a problem when you have a module A and module B, and B uses methods provided by A at include time. Usually, host class C needs to include module A before module B so that needed methods are available at include time, i.e. piling up dependencies.

With ActiveSupport::Concern you can include A to B and just B to host C, cascading dependencies.

module A
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern
  # ...
end

module B
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern
  include A
  
  included do
    # use methods provided by A
  end
end

class C
  include B
end

A concern module has a modified Module#included which can be passed a block to be evaluated. It also automatically extends its ClassMethods module and includes its InstanceMethods module to host, if present.

See also documentation in the source code.

Habits

2010-12-13T00:00:00Z

Habits is an experimental habit tracker.

Habits tracks habits in weekly cycles (i.e. status of each habit is cleared weekly). Each habit has a day or days associated with it. Habits expects activity on the habit on those days. If no activity is registered, habit goes first into yellow zone (e.g. 20 hours before deadline), then into red zone (e.g. 6 hours before), and finally into missed state. Transfer into each zone/state can be used to trigger commands.

To install Habits, first gem install habits. After that, you need to call habits whip regularly every hour to update status of each habit. You can do this by adding line

'0   *   *   *   *   /usr/bin/habits whip'

to your crontab. Just put that line in a file and call crontab <your_crontab_file>

Here’s a list of commands:

gammak:~ ander$ habits ?

Usage: habits {command} arg1 arg2 ...

Command        Args                                Description
  create       TITLE DAYS                          Create a new habit.
  delete       TITLE                               Delete habit.
  do           TITLE [HOURS]                       Add activity to habit, hours optional.
  hold         TITLE                               Put a habit on hold.
  join         TITLE [OTHER_TITLE]                 Join habits. First one is kept.
  list                                             List habits.
  rename       TITLE NEW_TITLE                     Rename habit.
  show         TITLE                               Show activity of habit.
  split        TITLE                               Split a habit into days.
  unhold       TITLE                               Unhold a habit.
  whip                                             Use the whip.
  zones        TITLE YELLOW_ZONE RED_ZONE          Set habit's yellow and red zones.

Habits is currently tuned to be used with OS X, but you can use it on any platform by changing the dialog method in your whip_config ($HOME/.habits/whip_config.rb) to alarm properly.

Repo

PKD

2010-11-13T00:00:00Z

I’m a big fan of Philip K. Dick (a.k.a. PKD), the science-fiction writer. He has written the original stories behind movies like Minority Report and Blade Runner (based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”). There’s also the movie A Scanner Darkly, but I didn’t like it so much.

IO9 had a nice post today pointing to some of PKD’s works available on project Gutenberg. I know what I’ll be reading for a while.

I also own the 5 Great Novels compilation and follow the Total Dick-Head blog.

Portable Fretboard

2010-11-03T00:00:00Z

I’d like to have a portable guitar fretboard (standard Stratocaster would be ok) with following features.

Selectable samples per “string”. There would be no actual strings, just some sort of button for each fret/string combo.
Stored strum and arpeggio patterns
Beats per second and time selection
Alternative tunings (in samples)
Save after play
Rechargeable battery
Output to headphones

Basically, you could just try different chords and tunings with different strum or arpeggio patterns with a highly portable device. It would probably need some sort of right hand wrist band to attach the high end of fretboard to.