I gave a lightning talk at RubyConf 2012 in Denver. Man was I nervous. Apparently I did an okay job though, and I'd like to thank all the people who were and took time out of their day to listen to me. Thanks! If you want to view the original talk, the video is here. Scroll to 10:15 to find me, but I recommend watching them all. A few people had more questions (I talked really fast since it was a lightning talk after all) and this was originally…

I was using treetop to do some parsing the other day and it got me thinking. Treetop is a parsing DSL for ruby based on the idea of a parsing expression grammar. This could get dangerous. lex and yacc (flex and bison) If you open up the ruby source code, you'll probably find a file named parse.y. This is probably used by bison to generate a parser. The parser is (probably) used in conjuction with flex to deal with parsing things. A thing could b…

Do you have a TODO list Sure you do. I bet you have all sorts of cool projects on it, like a better todo list application, a web spider for some RSS feeds, a search engine experimentation, a git backend built on riak, and a slew of other ideas you haven't got around to. I bet you also have some new programming languages you want to learn. Maybe expand your scripting language knowledge with some Python, break into functional programming with Cloj…

It's been a while, but I've been busy pwning n00bs at Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2, and buying a car, so life has been pretty busy as of late. Have no fear though! I continue the look at the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors with numbers 15 to 11. 15. Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions When you ASSUME things, you make an ASS out of U and ME. This is all about assumptions. You assume something will work, you assume …

I checked out Scribes this week, and I must say it has potential. It has a slick yet simple interface and look, and a few nice features. It has word completion and template support, so you can setup snippets, and tell the cursor to tab through sections, so for example, you can have a ruby snippet to make a do end block, which will create the code, put the cursor in the block variable section, then a tab puts you in the block so you can write the…

I found this a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far, away), and it's still up and still good. If you want to learn python, fly through this article and you should be good. Learn Python in 10 minutes