Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Dinner with Dave Thomas and a bunch of other Ruby users was good fun. The second meeting will be held next Sunday at Pizza Chicago in Palo Alto, where we’ll hopefully decide on a name for our motley crew.

Dave also came in to give a Ruby talk at Google today. I’m not sure how many people will now go away and play with the language, but I’d like to believe that one or two will be intrigued enough to try it out.

It was a very enjoyable talk and I’m very grateful to Dave for taking the time to come in and present it.

Ruby/Google 0.3.0 is now out. This version returns slightly different data structures to previous versions, so be warned. It’s not labelled alpha code for nothing.

I’m having dinner with Dave Thomas tonight, one of the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby, a.k.a. the pick-axe book.

Dave’s coming into Google on Tuesday to give an introductory talk on the Ruby programming language. I wonder how many of my colleagues will be inspired to give the language a try after his talk.

Sarah and I spent much of this weekend putting together wedding registries at some of the shops in Stanford shopping mall, a truly mind-numbing experience.

We still need to work out where we’re going to go for our honeymoon. Another short break in the meantime would be nice, too. Maybe we’ll manage to get away for a long weekend in Vancouver in May, although I’d still like to visit Amsterdam, too.

So many things to do and places to go, but so little time, as ever.

This week, I released my first piece of Ruby code to the outside world. Ruby/Google is a Ruby interface to the Google Web API that was released earlier this week.

If you haven’t already looked at the Google Web API, you should. It’s a great way to programmatically query Google for standard search results, cached pages and spelling corrections. You’re limited to 1,000 queries per day, but you can still do a lot with that. It seems to have created quite a bit of buzz on the Web.

United States: Je naait ‘t steeds

Coincidence? Toeval?

Allemachtig, nog maar 161 dagen tot de huwelijk.

My Ruby hacking continues apace.

I’m writing a system to write DSA keys into a MySQL database for account management purposes. This uses the Ruby DBI and is proving very educational. I could have written this much more quickly in Perl, but I took the opportunity to get to grips with an aspect of Ruby that I wouldn’t really use otherwise.

At home, I’ve written a simple whois client, just to try out some network programming. Perhaps I’ll even release that for the hell of it.

I hope to have my Ruby coding skills up to the level of my Perl skills within a few weeks (months?), at which point I’ll be able to code pretty much anything I need.

Friday tomorrow. Thank God.