Majestic Sea Creature
Technical Ramblings from Gregory Brown (@seacreature)
About.com Fail
When advertisement click-through becomes more important than social responsibilities.
Stand and Be Counted
My short response to the call to "Stand and Be Counted" on the issues of gender, community openness, and other rough spots that are hitting the Ruby and Rails communities hard right now.
Help me build a collaborative blog at rubybestpractices.com
A while ago I registered rubybestpractices.com, but I'd like to do more with it than just redirect to a ordering page for my book. I am trying to get together some volunteers (maybe 5 or 6) to work on a collaborative, themed Ruby blog with me. If you're interested, read on.
HOWTO: Give a good presentation on Prawn
I stumbled across a slide deck this morning that essentially regurgitated one of my Prawn articles into Keynote so that it could pass as a conference talk. Since I think the community deserves better than that, and because I rather turn my irritation into something positive, I've put together a short post on how to give a good Prawn talk. Most of the ideas apply to talking about other open source projects as well, so if you're thinking of giving a talk at a conference or local user's group, check this out and let me know what you think.
What You'll Find in "Ruby Best Practices"
For the better part of a year, my book Ruby Best Practices has been operating in stealth mode. Though Rough Cut readers have gained access to the latest drafts as soon as they were ready for public consumption, only a handful of people have caught a glimpse of the full book outline. Now that I'm pretty confident in how things will turn out, I can finally drop the veil of secrecy. This post fills in all the juicy details, for those who've been wondering what to expect
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
I found out through Jamis Buck that the statistics I posted about the Ruby 1.8 vs. Ruby 1.9 comparison for Prawn were skewed by mismatching compile time optimizations. Here, I set the record straight.
Why you should use Ruby 1.9 with Prawn
In celebration of the first stable release of Ruby 1.9, I briefly talk about the benefits of using it with Prawn, including some basic examples.
Prawn 0.4 Released
Notes about what to expect in the 4th major release of Prawn, the most ass-kicking PDF library you can find in Ruby.
Mooch, a GitHub downloader / vendorer / thingie
I've made a quick and dirty hack that I'll probably work on over time that solves a trivial problem: Downloading and vendoring libraries from GitHub. Yeah, yeah, I know Rails folks have their plugin installers and whatnot, but us Ruby kids like to be lazy too.
[ANN] Prawn 0.2.2 Released
The latest Prawn release has just been pushed out to RubyForge. This contains a few bug fixes and a couple new features that have been added due to popular demand.
Solution to Project Euler #67
Jia and I have been working on Project Euler, using a combination of Matlab, Ruby, and Erlang. I wanted to share the solution to #67 because it sort of dawned on me by accident.
A Trivial Dow Jones Ticker
I've been watching the economic crisis, not because I've got any interest in stocks, but because of the spectacle. In this post, I show a trivial script that gives me up to the minute Dow Jones change listings.
Prawn's Second Release (0.2)
After putting it off for what seemed like far too long, Prawn has finally seen its second major release. Along with it comes bug fixes, new features, and the introduction of new bugs. There are also some interesting shifts in the development plan, so if you're interested in catching up on all things Prawn, keep reading.
ICFP Partial Scores Released
The results for the first seven heats of ICFP Contest 2008, and amazingly our team (Five of Six) has managed to stay alive! With nearly 300 teams starting and a little over 70 remaining, that puts us in the top 25% of those who entered a solution.
Webby, I wish I knew you a week ago
It looks like others have already solved the 'I'm too lazy for dynamic web pages' problem in a much more elegant way than I did. Of course, I already knew about a few of them, but I wish I knew about Tim Pease's Webby earlier, as it does pretty much everything I need.