I guess it is too early to write any more systematic opinion about the language you know less than 10 days, but after reading the Programming Ruby 2nd edition (thank you, Safari Books) I have found out that I actually do like couple of Ruby features a lot. Your mileage may vary - what speaks here is my Java/C#/C++/C/Python/Perl background and bias. Here there are my favorite Ruby-isms (so far) in no particular order:
Today I have started the walking season 2007. I did some gentle preparation during the week - few short, 4-5 km strolls around the neighbourhood, but it was today when I really started. It was beautiful day in Ottawa - sunny, temperature around 8-10, so I took off and did 12 km loop through Westboro, down south and around Dow's Lake up to downtown. Just fantastic. The companion on the road were Security Now! - I was behind few episodes, but I managed to listen to almost full 3 episodes.
Man lernt nie aus - as the German say - one never stops learning. Thanks to comment found on my blog I found out that there is very nice solution problem of disappearing emails (after you download it with one POP client, other POP client would not get it). It is even documented in GMail help:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47948&topic=1556If you're accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail's recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.
As Murphy said - you cannot do just one thing. Thanks to JDK 1.4 entering end-of-life support period (and 1.3 being unsupported for some time), we need to move few applications happily running on these antique Java platforms to at least Java 5 and gain few more years of uninterrupted Sun-supported life.
Upgrading the applications was as expected, piece of cake - as long as you have solid build environment with build scripts and everything - which we certainly do. Ant runs on Java5 exactly as well as on 1.4 (maybe faster, but I did not measure), Tomcat was the same no-brainer thing and switching the Eclipse required only selecting different JRE in preferences window. Codewise, the only change required inside the application code was renaming few identifiers to something else than enum, which happens to be keyword in Java 5.
After almost two years of uninterrupted C# and .NET development, I have got back for few days to Java world. One of our old customers asked us to do few enhancements and changes in the application we wrote. And because we always stand behind our work, always do answer the call for help and do support our customers as long as they want to be supported, I have squeezed-in few days worth of work into pretty packed schedule. So here am I on a short detour into world of class files and jars ...
There are few technical books which you enjoy first time you read them, remember the experience and keep coming back. One of such classic books is The Pragmatic Programmer - from journeyman to master - by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. If you have not read it, get it, it is worth every cent. Since the book was written - ages ago, back in 2000 - it did not loose anything of its freshness and value - which one cannot say about most of technical books written earlier than 2-3 years ago. Inspired by the success of their initial creation, Dave and Andrew started the website and continued writing whole Pragmatic Programmer series of books.
Since yesterday, I made nice progress in solving my issues with content creation for PRS500 and it's readability. There are several ways how to proceed:
The simplest is to download Book Designer. It is free for non-commercial use and current version 5.0 Alpha does the job very well. It allows you to load source in text, HTML, Lit, PDF, PalmDoc (prd/prc), rb and few other formats and process them into native LRF format - plus few others I do not really care about. The result is nice, readable LRF file with three sizes, nicely formatted, with metada. As added benefit, because the author is Russian, the program does not assume that English alphabet is the only one in existence and allows to select encoding. The result is quite good - most of the extended characters from Czech/Slovak are there, some are missing and displayed as space (namely ř,ě,ľ ...) but it is readable. What is maybe better option is that with English as language and default encoding, the software "downscales" the extended characters to closest English pairs: ř -> r,ě -> e - which results in familiar computer Czech/Slovak. I am very comfortable with option 2, and will work on getting correct font for #1.
After few weeks, I have got back to actually using my PRS500 again and I have finished the books loaded on the device. When I have connected the reader, first the CONNECT software as well as the PRS500 downloaded the updates. The firmware in reader is up to version 1.0.02.0130 from 1.0.00.21081 and should bring longer battery life and stability improvements. It better does, because so far the battery life is nowhere in the proclaimed range of 7000 page turns ... Time will show.
Now this is something really interesting: as found on Adobe Labs site, their technology codenamed Apollo is approaching Alpha status. What Apollo is - in a nutshell - is another virtual machine, similar to Java runtime or .Net framework, with few minor twists: it is multiplatform (as Java) as well as multi-language (as .Net) at the same time. Before flame wars start - I am aware that JVM is capable (more or less) to support multiple languages beyond Java and also that .Net is (more or less) capable running on non-Windows platforms (e.g. Mono project), but that is not the point. The point is what is different about the Apollo compared to JVM or CLR.