Tom the Architect’s latest posting details a list of languages he has coded in. I thought this would be a pretty interesting exercise, so thought I would throw one together as well:

1. BASIC (quite a few flavors from old school CP/M up to Windows)
2. xBase
3. DataFlex
4. C
5. C++
6. x86 Assembler (light, but still counting it)
7. Pascal (Turbo / Quick)
8. Unix Shell (BASH. KSH, etc)
9. Java
10. JavaScript (light, but I think it still counts)
11. Perl
12. Python
13. PHP
14. Ruby

You know what? That wasn’t a very interesting exercise. Thanks a lot Tom …

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After all of the talk in the podcasting community around Second Life, I finally decided to take some time and take a look at it. The first thing I did when I got there was look around for Adam Curry’s place, “Curry Castle”. The thing that impressed me the most as I was walking around aimlessly was how much things have developed. So many people have built up around the castle since Adam first started talking about it. It was interesting to watch the interactions among people, from people sitting on the couch on the top of the castle, to Comic Strip Blogger periodically bombing the castle, throwing newbie me into space not able to figure out what happened.

I only spent a small amount of time in Second Life, but I have to say its pretty interesting. I did play around a little with creating clothing using some of the Photoshop templates that they provide on their site and after some fiddling finally got the nice Bieber Labs Podcast T-Shirt you see in the picture. Its not the best, but it will definitely do for now and I think its an ok start after only spending ultimately an hour in the environment. The shirt has the banner of the podcast site on the front, with the URL on the back.

Unfortunately, I decided to mess around with the clothing stuff in the “newbie public area”, something I would recommend you do not do. There is something about the phrase “Congratulations, you’ve figured out how to remove all of your clothes” directed at you in a public area thats a little disconcerting when you are trying to figure out how things work. I did finally figure out how to reclothe myself and get my cool T-shirt on though.

Overall, I think Second Life is pretty cool. It would be cooler if I actually enjoyed IM’ing type of communities, but I haven’t really been into that kind of thing for quite a while. I’m not convinced that I will be keeping the account, but it is definitely something interesting to play around with, at least temporarily. I enjoyed just walking around and checking out the things that people are building for other people to come and socialize.

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Yesterday while at the mall I found Rebel Meets Rebel, the result of a musical partnership between, David Allan Coe, the late "Dimebag" Darrell Abbot, Vinnie Paul Abbot, and Rex Brown. The album is an interesting mix of country and Pantera / DamagePlan type heavy metal music.

I have to admit that I was skeptical that I would like the album. I’m not a big country fan. However, I have to say that not only is the music great, but it is so nice to hear Dimebag play again. I’ve really enjoyed his playing since starting to listen to Pantera in late 2004 shortly after his death and I think was in one of those “new fan” modes where I just wanted to hear everything he had played. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before I was out of new stuff.

Now, the posthumously released Rebel Meets Rebel gives Dimebag fans something to listen to. Dimebags playing is excellent on this album, and surprisingly the mix of the two genres of music works really well, so much so that I’m tempted to pickup earlier DAC recordings to see what the pre-Dime music sounded like.

Its too bad Dime is gone. Its obvious that he was starting to really branch out and experiment with different ideas. This album gives us a glimpse into what I’m sure was only a small piece of it. I think these guys were on to something.

If nothing else, you can hear Dime again. That in itself is worth the price of the CD.

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Over the last couple of weeks I decided to re-familiarize myself with the Ruby programming language. I was first introduced to it back in 2002-2003 at OOPSLA (or was it the Software Development Conference?) when I took a full day workshop with the Pragmatic Programmers, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt.

Back then I loved the language, but decided not to focus on it since the support in the form of libraries just weren’t there like they were for Python at the time. I wrote a few programs in Ruby, but left it to the side and focused on Python.

Well, those days are over. When I started with Ruby, I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails as well. Over the last couple of weeks all of my spare time has been focused on learning the Ruby language and this completely awesome framework, even at the expense of regular podcasts.

First off, I’m absolutely enamoured by the language. So much so that with Rails piled onto it I couldn’t imagine programming in any other language. For quite a while I’ve hated Java and the complexity that it brings to projects. There’s just too much work involved in doing Java development anymore.

Ruby combines complete object orientation with the flexibility of a scripting language. Some of the features it has baked into it, such as iterators and blocks make life so much easier.

Now pile Rails on top of it. Rails is an elegant MVC framework written in the Ruby Language by the folks over at 37 signals. These two things combined make for the perfect programming environment for web applications.

I’m still on the steep end of the learning curve. I’ve got the Programming Ruby : The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) constantly at my side as I pull my hair out trying to learn all of this stuff.

But the cool thing is, even with my unfamiliarity with the language I’m still productive. If that isn’t the sign of a great development environment, I don’t know what is.

I’m working diligently to become proficient in the language. Rails is a little complex and I’m still struggling to learn all of the conventions. However, I think most of my programming moving forward will be with these tools. Its just a lot easier to spend time thinking about the problems you are trying to solve and being able to express them eloquently rather than struggling with the complexity and code/compile/run process baked into Java development.

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Well, its been about a week since I received notification of my ability to use the beta of Google Mail for Domains. Once again, Google has outdone themselves.

I moved the domain over to Gmail for Domains on Monday or Tuesday of last week. I had some issues with DNS populating accordingly but after about 48 hours and one (yes, only one) email to the gmail support team, I had the domain up and running on the new service.

Setting up new accounts on your domain is a breeze, thanks to the simple UI design within the control panel. It really is a lesson in simplicity, with nothing in the admin pages that doesn’t need to be there. Its really the bare minimum to get someone up and running on an account. Its kind of refreshing to have something as large as an email domain to administer to have such a minimalistic, common sense user interface. I was quite impressed.

Each account on the domain has a standard 2G limit on space. According to the documentation, these accounts do not grow when you hit your limit. Quite frankly, even with the volume of email I get from mailing lists and the like, I’ve never hit my limit on my normal gmail account anyway, so I’m not too worried about it. Unlike me, most of my family keeps their inboxes pretty clean. I’m a pack rat and keep everything.

This is a nice service and I think I’ll stick with it. Its probably the best email system and easiest admin service I have used thus far.

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