October is Ruby Month for me. September was kind of Ruby Month too, but the past is past. Read more for descriptions of Dave Thomas’s Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Bruce Tate’s Ruby on Rails: Up and Running. I think they’re both fantastic books for intermediate programmers discovering ruby and rails.

Getting a Little Organized I’m mostly a self-taught pogrammer, so I tend to cite books as influences. One book that has influenced me a lot is Test-Driven Development By Example, by Kent Beck. Beck is a big proponent of XP, and in this book he walks his readers through the process of writing tests first, […]

One of the challenges of our exile from New York City has been our consternation with the street grid (or lack thereof) in our new neighborhood. We’re basically one big cul-de-sac off Route 1. Furthermore, instead of a rational system of straight (and continuous) streets running along cardinal directions, we have something that resembles a […]

At breakfast this morning, I asked Elizabeth what her impressions of Rosecroft were. I hadn’t felt like my own thoughts, expressed in the previous post, were either perceptive or interesting. Not surprisingly, she had excellent points to make.

My wife’s uncle is in the DC area this weekend. He doesn’t travel much at all outside Florida, where he retired early some time ago. But he comes up to DC at least once a year to visit his longtime G.P. and to attend the horseraces at Rosecroft Raceway. Elizabeth pointed out we’ve moved to […]

Background: A Screen-Scraper I’ve posted about how I needed to build a little app to scrape product pages for information that could then be summarized and presented in an easy-to-copy manner. I’ll write a little about that, and then I’ll get on to the related Ruby project I’m now undertaking. So our ideal solution was […]

In my last full-time gig, I automated a recurring management task: looking up the “official” names of a client’s products when said products were included in a promotion. This client was actually a holding company — it didn’t own or manage most of its products — and the actual corporate entities that did manage the […]

Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions — unless he gives them proper vent. -Sterne, Tristram Shandy Your author, gentle reader, is Michael Harrison, mostly self-taught computer programmer and sometime wordsmith. This is his blog, in which he will (hopefully) write informative and incisive posts about technology, writing and […]