The hardest part of learning a new language...

For me the hardest part of learning a new language is figuring out what problem to try and solve. All of the books start with the "Hello World" examples, which are fine, but they really don't teach much more than the syntax of the language.
It's harder to find a problem that requires the specific characteristics of a language that differentiate that language from any other.

I've started looking over the RubyQuiz web site which has a series of programming challenges with solutions from different people. It's been interesting to read the problems, try to solve them, and compare what I come up with to what other people have done.

I might post one of my solutions to this blog if it seems interesting enough. I'm working on a problem now involving 'Happy Numbers', which involves a lot of math. I like the math problems, they remind me of the Martin Gardner's old Mathematical Recreations columns from Scientific American, I subscribed to that magazine back then just for those columns!

JEOS might not be small enough

I might have to look at other distributions to run on my VM with only 2GB of disk space. I definitely can't use apt-get to install much on the system I built using JEOS from the Ubuntu 8.10 server CD.

I just came across the instructions on the Psychocats web site about installing a minimal version of ubuntu and manually installing the windowing system packages. I'm going to make another attempt at installing bare bones system.

That's the great thing about snapshots in VMWare! I can try this out without losing any work if I want to go back!

Creating virtual development environment

I'm in the process of setting up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.10 server edition. This is going to be the system I setup as a Ruby development system. I created it with just a 2GB hard drive and used the jeos(Just Enough Operating System) options when I installed Ubuntu.

The trick is going to be installing everything I need without running out of disk space. I wanted the disk to be small so I could carry the virtual machine around on a usb flash drive.

I just tried using apt-get to install ant and it tells me that it needs to download 98 MB with 255MB being used when everything is done!

I just went to ant.apache.org and downloaded Ant directly. I think it might have taken up a tenth of the space it would have if I let apt-get do it's thing! Looks like that's the way to go!

I was able to get JRuby installed and running following the instructions in this blog post. Thanks Dermot!

It's funny how that post is over two years old! I guess I'm a little behind the times!

LOTY and TOTY

Another concept that was discussed multiple times at the NFJS conference was the idea of choosing a LOTY and TOTY, (That's Language of The Year and Technology of The Year.)

I had already decided that I was going to learn about the Struts Framework, so that's my TOTY.

I think the LOTY is going to be Ruby.

The first thing I need to work on is probably time management!

First Post, 2nd Day!

I wonder what the statistics are regarding blogging and how many people start a blog and then quit? A quick google search found this article from 2007 on the top-5-reasons-most-blogs-dont-last. I'll have to keep looking for information about how long blogs typically last. Something along the lines of 'if you blog at least 5 times a week you'll keep on blogging' or something similar.

I did register this blog with javablogs.com so I better start writing some Java posts as well!

Future? Reading list

There are so many books that I want to read it's getting hard to keep track. This is the beginning of a reading list:

• Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
• Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World
• Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Daemon
  

No Fluff, Just Stuff, Boston 2009

I just attended the New England Software Symposium March 20th -22nd. The keynote presented after dinner on the 20th was given by Jared Richardson. He said that everyone should have a blog and if they didn't they should start one that very night.

Doing my best to conform to non-conformity I went home and went to bed instead.

In Jared's book, Career 2.0, Take Control of Your Life, he talks about the fact that:

"When your catching crabs you don't need a pot with a lid. Once you get two crabs in the pot, none can escape. The one crab that reaches the edge, and freedom, is always pulled back in by the other crabs."

I need to either not be a crab at all or be the first crab that doesn't let the others drag me back in!