Memoirs of an English Major

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” - Neal Stephenson

Great book, Snow Crash. You all should read it. Anyways, on with the post

So I’ve been trying to learn Adobe’s AIR project and I’ve got to say I am impressed. It’s definitely interesting coding everything in HTML and JavaScript and making run-time apps. I’ll be working on a AIR app to help me with my new addiction of cooking, hooking up to Backpackit for lists and such. Though, I’m going to say I don’t know if this is actually a useful form of development. In fact, in the end it can be somewhat patchy, though I think if you keep the javascript code clean and separated from the HTML, I don’t see how this differs from an ASP.net implementation, except off line.

What I’ve really started to love is Ruby on Rails. As stated prior, I am learning Rails and I love it. I had always been a fan of Ruby when I first heard about the language. Just the concept of everything being an object sounded like the best way to code. It wasn’t until I started my Rails endeavors that I totally get why this framework kicks ass. I mean, it is simply easy to throw some good, clean, and fun code up, make em AJAX enabled, and all in Ruby. It’s really slick and I think that after this, I’ll go back to my PHP roots and learn some frameworks there as well. Anyways, this is somewhat of a short post mainly due to time. I’m going to make Thursdays my tech discussion days and try to give everyone updates on any of my coding and computing escaped. Anyways, till then, later.