Keith’s Blog

I’ve been messing around at work trying to make some automated scheduling charts (basically Gantt-like) in Ruby. I’ve implemented it a couple of times using SVG::Graph, which is close to what I need, but I end up having to rewrite a lot of methods whenever I really start using it. It occurred to me today [...]

I just started reading the second edition of The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton and came across this gem:
We can’t avoid complexity, but we can push it around. We can bury it out of sight. This is the old “black box” principle at work; a black box performs a complex task, but it possesses simplicity [...]

There’s been some recent discussion on ruby-talk about “literate” programming after the new O’Reilly title Beautiful Code was announced (Matz has written an essay for it). Matz’s response made me listen to all-things-Knuth, so I was pleased to read Philip Wadler’s post today on Three ways to improve your writing, which includes a PDF link [...]

Well, I finally caught up with the crowd and got JRuby running on one of my dev boxes. The reason I’d been interested in it from the getgo was because Ruby lacks any support for internal XSLT processing. All those system()s were starting to get me down, especially as I’m trying to get a DocBook->PDF [...]

I gave a short talk at the first North Bay Ruby Users Group last Thursday (Feb 15, 2007) about my recent work implementing an Atom Publishing Protocol library in Ruby. Here’s the presentation:

I’m pleased to re-announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group.
Our first meeting is this week; February 15th, 2007 at 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us a place to meet, so we’ll be holding the meetings [...]

My O’Reilly colleague Andy Bruno has just written a pair of posts on converting FrameMaker’s MIF (link may be old/die) format into XML (henceforth ‘MX’). I’ll be writing a few posts outlining the ways in which we’ve leveraged MX at O’Reilly.
[Update: Series continues here with getting back into MIF, and reading bookfiles.]

I just spent a few minutes enjoying Mongrel and SVG::Graph while helping Rob visualize his Amazon Sales Rank for his book.
The code is available here with a running (maybe) example here. If all goes well, that should show you an SVG graph (thanks, Firefox) showing the changes in sales rank over time.
Rob’s code [...]

I’m pleased to announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group with a first meeting on February 15th, 2007 at 7:30pm 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us their meeting space, so we’ll be holding the meetings at [...]

So, I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately in the Ruby community about BDD and rspec. Like this person on ruby-talk, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. However Dave Astels’ great Google Tech Talk video (worth watching in full rather than just a part, thanks James Britt) has at least [...]