tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54776882012-01-07T06:03:05.970-06:00Recording my journey along various programming-related paths...Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.comBlogger411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-31678595035903106582011-12-11T08:07:00.001-06:002011-12-12T05:10:41.680-06:00

(preparation time 40 minutes)This is what you'll need for 4 servings (though Anna doubles the recipe):4 slices bacon or salt pork 1/2 cup finely chopped onion 4 medium potatoes, peeled, diced 1 Tbsp. all-purpose flour 2 cans (6 oz. each) minced clams with liquid 1 cup bottled clam juice 1 cup half-and-half Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cup whipping cream (optional) 2 Tbsp. finely chopped parsley (

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-68735988660276499532011-09-22T23:34:00.000-05:002011-09-23T22:06:20.456-05:00

I was fortunate enough to help organize the Strange Loop 2011 conference, but this post is not specifically about that. During the conference, I had the privilege to talk to several of the speakers, and one stood out for me in a way I won't forget. Professor Gerald Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT and is perhaps best known (at least among the people that might

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-76409038850174773092011-01-01T11:18:00.005-06:002011-01-01T11:31:06.408-06:00

I wrote a piece on my employers tech article site about learning programming languages by fixing broken unit tests meant to expose little nuggets of wisdom. The article covers projects that provide programming exercises for 3 languages: Ruby, JavaScript and Clojure. Please read and let me know if you like it: http://sett.ociweb.com/sett/settJan2011.html

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-5590084946684179512010-10-16T08:46:00.005-05:002011-02-11T07:24:15.913-06:00

Opening Talk: NoSQL in the Enterprise (Billy Newport) Came in halfway through this talk but really enjoyed what I heard. The talk pointed out how NoSQL datastores aren't a clean replacement for relational databases and that their use must be considered carefully because of inherent complexities that come with schema-less distributed data storage. This talk was video taped, look for it online

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-63743536114409900262010-10-15T06:43:00.005-05:002011-02-11T07:28:17.065-06:00

After a great lunch with Jeff Barsciezski, Luigi Montanez, and Yehuda Katz, I listened to a standing room only talk on civic hacking which covered many examples of companies that build up around serving public (government collected) data. Next talk: mobile HTML 5 (Michael Galpin) Mobile browsing is being done on many different platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry). Frameworks like PhoneGap &

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-79198213231246370042010-10-14T11:39:00.004-05:002011-02-11T07:31:34.967-06:00

Hilary Mason starts the day with a talk about machine learning and how the technology has evolved. Among the advances that have made machine learning accelerate: Algorithms On-demand (elastic) computing Access to large amounts of data Analyzing large amounts of data to find either patterns or to identify data trends requires algorithms to disambiguate data that is contextually unrelated

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-59591491099659541732010-10-02T15:52:00.003-05:002010-10-10T15:56:17.374-05:00

Autotest spoiled me for immediate feedback during the development cycle. So as I was going through the Relevance functional koans for Clojure, I had a little Watchr script continually re-running the tests from the exercise at every file save. This is what that script looked like: There's barely anything there. All it does is run the "run.sh" script that comes with the koans whenever a ".clj

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-19011094146824165762010-10-02T08:32:00.004-05:002010-10-02T09:09:57.990-05:00

I am learning Clojure and I like it. Following the ThinkRelevance functional koans has given me a really good interactive playground for learning this language. Reading through examples in a book cannot compare to actually having to write code in order to solve a problem and in the process learn syntax and the rules of a language. What a concept! I came across something in the sequence

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-9741391728327370002010-09-19T14:47:00.006-05:002010-09-25T05:47:16.176-05:00

Yesterday was the St. Louis Code Retreat and I wanted to capture my experiences and observations. I hadn't heard of Game of Life before reading about Corey Haines' code retreats last year. My field of study in college was life sciences so I missed out on things like Conway's game of life that mathematicians and CS majors are probably exposed to. In prep for the event, I gave Game of Life a try

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-39142551893260199122010-07-18T16:04:00.006-05:002010-09-21T20:45:02.746-05:00

I recently discovered a feature of Ruby that surprised me. Really, I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it before (for as long as I have been a fan of the language). module_function can be used to make one or more Module methods accessible as type-scoped methods (in the same way that declaring them as self methods would). For example: In this form, the methods of the module must be

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-52960788960747214642010-05-15T17:31:00.006-05:002010-09-21T20:47:00.771-05:00

I had the need to figure out how to parse a string and pull out any words that didn't contain "Foo" in them. After a lot of cursing, I came up with something that works. For the string "Which BarFoo Is It Foo Bar": Yields: "Which", "Is", "It", "Bar" Regular expressions are diabolical.

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-48677446055561099082009-12-27T16:53:00.007-06:002010-09-22T06:31:24.905-05:00

Among the things that make me ga-ga for Ruby testing libraries is the ZenTest gem, which includes a super handy utility called 'autotest'. Autotest is meant to be run from the top of your project directory and it will search through your /test directory and run all test files it finds there (and report passes/failures on the console). My own development preference is writing specifications for

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-70097735899176024572009-11-08T17:01:00.003-06:002010-09-22T06:34:30.252-05:00

Just as a follow-on, I went back to the Calculator Kata and applied a functional Ruby approach with the rule of no mutable state allowed. I was inspired by Tom Stuart's Thinking Functionally in Ruby talk. This time I create a reusable Proc for scanning the expression according to the regex that extracts [left_operand, operator, right_operand] arrays. I evaluate the expression with reduce, using

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-83935313929306612512009-10-26T06:23:00.007-05:002010-09-22T07:53:27.170-05:00

A funny thing happened to me on Friday. I was scheduled to present at one of the Strange Passions events for the first Strange Loop conference. Earlier in the morning, I practiced a code kata I was planning on showing when it was my turn to present. The kata was an exercise I use when I do tech interviews of prospective candidates for developer positions at the consulting firm where I work.

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-88272723368717488722009-08-22T09:07:00.004-05:002009-08-22T09:16:46.876-05:00

I just discovered a little feature in RubyMine that I think is very cool and useful. Editing a view file causes a little overlay to appear in the corner of the editor pane showing icons for Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Clicking any of these will open the currently edited file in the browser of your choosing (assuming you are working in development mode and have a server running). Neat!

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-5400332511522219752009-07-26T06:44:00.002-05:002009-07-26T09:59:01.838-05:00

As a Scrum Master, I do code reviews. Recently, someone on my team asked whether what I look for in a code review was documented anywhere. This post is my starting point for documenting what I look for. I am hopeful that someone reading this may point out things that I haven't thought of that would be good to add to the list. Backed by automated test This should be self explanatory. No

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-68475256332302227342009-02-18T08:57:00.006-06:002009-02-25T11:41:49.463-06:00

I have been a fan of Git since starting to use it regularly and am going to give a talk on it at a tech lunch for my company in April. For the last two weeks, I have been using Git as an SVN front-end (my company has a backed-up SVN repo that I am using for SCM) while developing for a Windows target platform application. So far the experience with Git from cygwin has been a bit mixed. Another

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-74843485463910740422009-01-10T07:57:00.001-06:002009-01-10T08:01:02.033-06:00

I began learning the Ruby programming language by using a problem I had already solved one way and rewriting the solution in Ruby. Taking a domain that I had great experience in and fitting Ruby into it made the process of exploring the syntax and rules of the language a comfortable one. To use a sports metaphor, it gave me home field advantage. I blogged about it. In fact, the blog entry was

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-61820811848537186922008-12-27T13:32:00.004-06:002008-12-27T14:28:38.815-06:00

Christmas Eve has always been the most special day of the year for me. Memories from my childhood include Noche Buena dinner parties full of family and friends dressed very nicely and a house permeated with the smells of a Cuban kitchen. Sometimes ham, sometimes pork, always black beans and rice, yuca, some vegetables, desserts, and lots of booze. A joyous occasion that usually ended with

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-26772319550337655632008-12-23T21:05:00.004-06:002008-12-23T22:25:59.421-06:00

Battling rotten weather this afternoon, we travelled out to Kenricks Meat Market to pick up our Noche Buena pig. My Dad brought the biggest cooler he had for taking the pig from the market back to my house. Once back home, the Yak Shaving commenced. We had to clean the pig, find a big enough plastic container to marinate it in, wash a bunch of things to mix the brine with the mojo we had

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-9431096079145296482008-12-22T22:07:00.005-06:002008-12-27T14:30:43.943-06:00

In preparation for the most important dinner of the year (the Noche Buena pig roast), I decided to test the cooking performance of the Caja China that we bought recently. I used self-starting coals to get the grill hot, though didn't use enough coals to cover the top of the box (mistake #1). After the coals were white-hot, I added Kingsford charcoals using roughly the same amount I had started

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-42132901093101117212008-12-20T17:13:00.011-06:002008-12-20T20:36:45.247-06:00

My Dad and I have split the cost of a Caja China so we can do a tradition Cuban extravaganza for Noche Buena (Christmas Eve), the most special night of the year for Cubans. Here is what the box looks like setup in my garage. We have the pig on order from a butcher in Arnold, MO., for pickup on 12/23. If you are looking for a friendly place to eat surrounded by happy people eating the most

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-65420285673590232952008-12-11T04:27:00.002-06:002008-12-11T04:38:08.065-06:00

Since August, I have been working with the highly-talented development team that supports LimeWire, a P2P file-sharing application that leverages the Gnutella network for passing bits around to other clients. While LimeWire has been around since 2000, it has been our efforts in this latest release (which just became publicly available yesterday, albeit as an alpha build) that has finally given

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-29822415269176384462008-12-07T10:36:00.002-06:002008-12-07T10:50:17.042-06:00

Following on from Eric's blog post about Grizzlenuckles, here is a recipe for a pecan mini-tart dessert that my Mom has made at Christmas time for the last thousand years. These little things are crack, big time! Pecan Tarts 1 stick unsalted butter 3 oz. cream cheese 1 cup flour, shifted Mix ingredients until well blended. Make an oblong ball and wrap in wax paper. Put in refrigerator for at

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-52783185339331819012008-11-28T05:12:00.001-06:002008-11-28T05:22:01.181-06:00

I attended an excellent talk Eric Burke gave last week on developing for the Android platform. The first half of the talk has been posted on YouTube. Enjoy!

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-15359941887468554572008-10-14T05:30:00.001-05:002010-09-22T18:13:55.900-05:00

Last night, myself and the local Ruby group started down the path of preparation for the Ruby certification exam (after being inspired by Fabio Kung to go for it). One of the things we covered was here docs, a facility for creating multi-line strings in Ruby. We came across two funky cases (or at least I thought they were funky) that seemed good enough for quiz questions. Given the following

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-48683641385901538282008-10-03T22:17:00.006-05:002008-10-04T06:31:29.909-05:00

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth) Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with your picture Carrying on from Dave

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-38416504473478241472008-09-26T05:17:00.000-05:002008-09-26T05:25:24.240-05:00

I've got to say that Rails Rumble is one of the things that I LOVE about the Rails community. Ultra time-boxed web application development is a great way to demonstrate enthusiasm for the technology as well as what can be accomplished in a short time by truly gifted developer/designer teams. Respek!

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-30779293042188733122008-09-03T05:50:00.000-05:002008-09-03T05:54:54.005-05:00

Do not watch this video. I implore you!

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-215261025280610502008-08-10T07:45:00.002-05:002008-08-10T08:08:54.008-05:00

I am in a state today. Out of necessity, I added a third GB of memory to my MacBook Pro last week because (IMHO) there is a memory issue in Leopard. This screenshot shows what has become the normal state of affairs memory-wise since I upgraded to Leopard. Uploaded with plasq's Skitch! I may find myself working away with the usual cadre of programs running on my desktop (Mail, Twhirl, iChat,

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-90500591486629872302008-08-07T06:26:00.001-05:002008-11-21T21:20:25.188-06:00

I have been asked more than once by friends and associates about what applications I use or recommend for OSX. I am sure this is not an uncommon occurrence for folks who enjoy sharing the positive experiences they have had on the Apple platform. This morning I remembered a site I came across many months ago that allows people to track the applications they use (and I believe it also notifies

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-52870769193288662062008-08-02T08:10:00.003-05:002008-11-21T21:18:14.207-06:00

Sadly, Alex Miller's instructions for getting Java source files for Java 5 didn't work for Java 6.  Apple has cleverly hidden the Java 6 source/docs on the ADC. Many thanks to Eric Burke for knowing which nook this resource was hidden in.

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-75700232081716147482008-07-28T12:06:00.002-05:002008-11-21T21:18:47.952-06:00

Over the weekend, I finally upgraded to Leopard. The upgrade experience was very good; it sucked my backup files (that I had created using SuperDuper) from my attached USB drive and created all the appropriate accounts. WIN! Apart from the impression that since the upgrade I am seeing greater memory consumption than what I saw with Tiger, the Leopard experience has been pleasant. Java 6

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-34422284174667454502008-07-21T09:03:00.002-05:002008-07-21T09:18:14.219-05:00

I had a debate with friends over the weekend about whether rednecks outnumbered non-rednecks in the United States, which unfortunately ended inconclusively. So in the interest of gathering more data, I would like to pose the question to anyone with an internet connection. The following is a two-part poll (asked as one two-part question because the free polling system I am using distinguishes

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-50516125537091030452008-07-01T17:01:00.000-05:002008-07-01T17:05:37.251-05:00

Over the past year, I have been working (in my free time) on a screencasting site that is finally out there: http://screencastic.com. My intention for the site is to offer high-quality screencasts on par with the great stuff coming out of Railscasts.com, peepcode.com, and elsewhere. The initial content includes JRuby/Swing screencasts, one on the Cheri library for JRuby and the other on

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-32108953025546480152008-05-23T20:40:00.003-05:002008-05-24T12:14:21.650-05:00

With a "just go for it" attitude, Nate Neff and I took a road-trip on Thursday to attend the first Polyglot Programmers meeting at the Obtiva offices in Chicago's financial district. Well worth the trip! Dean Wampler gave a very evenly balanced and informative overview on the history and concepts of polyglot and poly-paradigm programming. He has made the slides for the talk publicly available

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-18853279355624343492008-03-06T04:55:00.001-06:002008-03-06T05:06:41.928-06:00

The trifles that most of us call computer programming pale in comparison to the awesomeness that is Phun. You can download the engine and waste your day by following this link.

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-16320991589345005482007-11-23T17:38:00.000-06:002007-11-23T17:39:44.293-06:00

Giles Bowkett: Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't) Hooahh.

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-1162298200046514392006-10-31T06:17:00.002-06:002008-11-21T21:19:18.710-06:00

I have written a macro for JEdit that allows you to jump around from one related file to another in your Rails project. The behavior mimics some of the capability of the TextMate Rails bundle. This screencast shows the macro in action: ***Update - 07/04/08*** At long last I have finally decided to post this macro to a highly-available public repository. For the longest time, I have been

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-1154178604091899822006-07-29T08:06:00.003-05:002010-09-22T18:18:05.081-05:00

Being new to Ruby, one of the first things I wanted to do was figure out how to apply the testing style I am comfortable with in Java.  Several years ago, Bob Lee and I wrote an IDEA plugin to generate stub-object source files from interface definitions.  For a given interface: The stub generator would create a class that looks like: The generated stubs are useful in testing because I

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5477688.post-1143636858681354132006-03-29T06:35:00.000-06:002006-03-29T06:54:18.723-06:00

Last night, I attended a meeting of the St. Louis Ruby User Group. I was impressed by the size of the turnout. There were easily 30 people there in the empty, nondescript office space. Though the space was crappy, it felt more community-like than the Java SIG that is held every month in the much nicer CityPlace auditorium. As well, the attendence at the few JavaSIGs I have been to in the last

Mariohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09735459767789832285noreply@blogger.com0