Silence

Introspective week.

[Now Playing: "Square Lamp" by esem... damn, what a fine track this is.]

I've been thinking a lot this week. About work, about quality, about ruby, about miniatures, about drawing... the whole shebang.

Work: I want to write more code. That's the long and the short of it. I'm weak at detail-oriented stuff, and I'm good at algorithms and problem-solving: I should be writing more code. I asked my boss about this today, and he supports the idea; we'll see where that goes. (To be honest, my experiences with such requests are usually taken quite seriously.)

Quality: I went to a local conference regarding the Bladridge criteria yesterday. I rather enjoyed it, though I would argue that I didn't learn anything, really. Rather, it was great idea-fodder, and allowed me some "blocked time" to contemplate how to make use of the criteria at work. ...I also considered working on a "personal criteria" for self-improvement.

Ruby: As I've mentioned, I've been pushing for it at work. There has been surprising support for it, and the lead programmer just asked me to try writing a web-page for a new project using ruby. ...My reflex was to say "no", because I wanted more time to learn it and discover best practices, but I think working on it would be an excellent way to explore the language. The first thing I went looking for was a DBASE-format library... and the first page I stumbled upon was an argument of why the writer had switched from ruby to python. ...And it's a recent article; a well-informed one. His reason, of course, was the robustness of the Py libraries out there.

Of course, this is something that will change with time. ...Or will it? ...I wonder if ruby will really be the last popular language. (Errr... last to rise to power, anyway.) I'm not terribly willing to write new libraries that are missing... I wonder if those who are willing are a dying breed. With the vast libraries available for Java and C++ on the low-end, and Perl and Python on the high-end... It will take a massive force of will to build ruby up to that level. I shudder to think how insurmountable an obstacle that will be for the languages of tomorrow.

Of course, MS has the weight to throw .NET out there, and the world will eat it. (Thank you, MaSter, may I have another?) But that's an exception.

Perhaps that's why DSL's are so popular these days... it's only in the small world of Doman-Specific problem sets that new languages have the ability to emerge.

Of course, the idea of "Very High Level Languages" may be the next big thing. Frameworks on steroids: programming languages built on today's languages. Imagine Rails, but without DHH's "convention over configuration" as a limitation: a meta-language smart enough to look at your database and figure out the schema.

Perhaps I've been drinking the MS water too much lately, since that sounds like "Visual Rails" to me.

Miniatures: Yes. Since playing miniatures with my son a few weeks ago, I've been contemplating building up my own collection. A lot. ...Obessing, really. I've decided to beef up my collection of Star Wars driod miniatures, and for D&D, I'm considering a "Devils and Blues" pool of minis... "blues" being Blue dragons. (The teams in D&D, called "Warbands", are alignment-specific, and blue dragons are LE, like Devils.) ...I'm also big on druids and constructs... but I can't quite come up with a Warband concept that seems solid enough to warrant investing in.

Strangely, my wife doesn't seem disturbed by this, and suggested I just build a collection over time, $20 a month or so. [shrug] I guess I will.

...I tried to stay the urge by installing Neverwinter Nights... but found it didn't scratch the itch.

Drawing: Okay, not much to say here. I've just thought about it a lot, lately. ...I haven't actually drawn much, however. ..A little. Enough to claim "I haven't stopped". But still, it's one of those frustrating situations where you know you should stop thinking and start doing... but something stops you. A Human curse.

Weekend Update

Three things to report:

My son and I played three games this weekend. The first was one called Heroscape, and it was the most age-appropriate of the three (we played the "simple" version). I won, but just barely. The second was Dungeons and Dragons Miatures. ...The rules were a little too hard, but he did quite well. And I have to admit: he was faster than I was with the math! He kicked my butt. The third was Star Wars Miatures. He mauled me.

Anyway, this is newsworthy only because I've long felt guilt about not spending enough time "playing" with my son. This was a good start. I have to say I was impressed... he lost the first game very gracefully, he learned the rules fairly quickly, and he didn't do anything overtly "stupid", tactically speaking. He did get overly excited about the game, especially the last one, where he was really wiping the floor with me. ...but that's him: he can't sit still and can't stop talking. ; )

I had a medical "slip" this past week. Last week, the doctor upped my dosage of Levothyroxine from 100 micrograms to 125. ...I had been having these occasional episodes of lightheadedness and chest "weirdness", that I couldn't quite describe. After the dosage changed, I started having them all the time. (Well, okay, several times an hour.) I noticed that if I took my pulse while these were happening, my heart-rate was all screwy. So I looked up cardiac arhythmia on Wikipedia and, lo and behold, this is a symptom of hyperthyroidism.

But it didn't stop there. Since I work with a dozen pharmacists, I asked around about it. I also work with six people who either have a thyroid imbalance or their spouse does... and I learned that the way my doctor was giving me my medication was prone to heart palplitations: this is why people normally start at very low levels of thyroxine and titrate up to the levels they need.

Anyway, I called the doctor--we was out--but another doctor at the office told me to go back to 100 micrograms, and to make an appointment for when my regular doctor gets back. I did both. The heart palpitations are completely gone now (three days later). All is well again.

It looks like I really will be using ruby at work! On Thursday, I had a meeting with all the other programmers about a new web-project that the center will be doing, and I argued for heavy use of Ajax. I showed my own code as an example--they were all very impressed--and then I showed the programmer who will head the new project how I was accomplishing it with Cold Fusion. I went on to explain a lot of the leg-work I was doing in CF was built-in to Ruby on Rails, and he was totally sold. We will pilot Rails next week, doing some pair-programming.

Not only that, but the center's lead deveopler asked me to schedule some sessions with the other programmers to teach them Ruby (and Rails), so we can all add it to our arsenal.

(I don't know if I logged this or not, but we recently switched from Visual Basic to C#, and have started pair-programming in it: it's insanely fun. Ruby will only be an improvement.)

With RubyCLR coming to maturity, and Ruby in Steel another option, I can't think of any reason why we wouldn't use it. A lot.

The lead programmer and I have already been joking about using IronPython (their main site isn't up at the moment). I wouldn't mind that. ...Though I admit, I've got a bias for Ruby at the moment. ;)

Perl is beautiful, and I will always love it... but I have come to admore "real" OO programming, and while it's possible in Perl... it's hackish.

Perl 6, of course, will be a god-send. ...But I am not holding my breath.

Ruby is, IMO, currently the most ideal scripting language. Java's bulky, and C# is... well... Microsofty (but I do enjoy it). C++ still reigns supreme in terms of speed and capability... but I'm a high-level programmer. ...But, most importantly, Ruby is fun, and has an amazing community. And Rails is pretty slick. : )