Austin Ziegler's personal website and blog - thoughts on software development, open source, and technology
I recently released a GitHub Action written in Gleam so that I could learn more about Gleam and to prove that it could be done. I maintain a few GitHub Actions in addition to various Ruby and Elixir libraries. The simplest of these ( dependabot-automerge ) is a composite action, but others are written in TypeScript. For the most part, they’re easy to maintain with few code changes and mostly…
After a long hiatus, I’ve decided to restart my website and blog this year. I’m moving from Hugo to Tableau and from AWS to Hetzner. There are many excuses reasons. I was too busy with work and the rest of my life. I started a new job in 2014 and that took up a lot of my time. I preferred letting my code speak as I contributed to the projects I maintain (or not; a lot of those went by the wayside…
I recently finished reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks . As an exercise, I ported mime-types for Ruby to Io on September 17. mime-types for Io is both a library and a registry for type information (and reuses the JSON registry from the Ruby library). It works similarly to the Ruby version 1 : plaintext := MimeTypes["text/plain"] # => returns list(text/plain) text := plaintext first text…
Guy Decoux , an extraordinary Rubyist, died earlier this month in tragic circumstances. He will be missed by the community. _why has some of the best commentary on this. There’s already talk of a permanent addition to Ruby in his honour, $ABOUT.ts (“ts” was his email address), and Ruby Central is considering naming something (possibly a grant) in his honour.
This past August, my wife and I went out to Nova Scotia with my parents in their RV 1 . I’ll be uploading some of the better pictures I took to my Flickr stream in the near future. My parents tell me that they have wireless access in a campground more often than they don’t. Of the campgrounds we went to this summer, exactly three had any Internet access at all, and only one was reachable from…
So, as most of the gaming world knows, E. Gary Gygax died today. This begins John C. Welch’s paean to the more famous of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons . I haven’t read a lot of them, but I really liked John’s and really think it’s worth reading. Wil Wheaton also has some really cool things to say. Like many other geeks, I grew up playing D&D. I don’t remember exactly when I first played,…
So, I went back to the medical devices place to return the trial mask and buy the permanent mask. I had to wait a while, so I dug through all of their magazines. At first, it seemed that the September 1989 magazine I found was the oldest: A couple of minutes more digging yielded an older magazine, though, by five months. But I kept looking. Long before my appointment was ready, I found something…
Amnesty International condemned Canada as soft on the death penalty . I mostly agree with them, as the Conservative government 1 is back-pedaling. Canadians are still largely against the death penalty, and support the idea that we should not extradite criminals if they are to face the death penalty, and support the idea that we should request clemency for Canadian citizens facing the death penalty…
So, I went to get a CPAP device yesterday. While waiting in the lobby of the medical devices office in Mississauga, I flipped through their magazine stack. This is what I found: This is obviously old. The cut of the model’s blouse is not recent—I’m one of the least fashion-observant people in existence, but even I can recognise this. More obvious is the model’s hair style. Yeah, there’s a few…
In the fall of 2007, Ontario held a referendum on electoral reform alongside the provincial general election. The proposal was to adopt Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation 1 to replace the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. The referendum failed, but these were my thoughts at the time. 2007-09-21: Ontario Votes—Voting Format Referendum There’s a referendum going on in Ontario…
All about the girl who came to stay? She’s the kind of girl you want so much It makes you sorry Still you don’t regret a single day. Ah girl! Ffff…Girl! With John Lennon’s “Girl” begins Julie Taymore ’s latest film, Across the Universe . The film is visually rich, musically gifted, and utterly confused. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it. This movie is divisive, make no mistake. Rotten Tomatoes…
Derek Sivers, recently abandoned his CD Baby rewrite from PHP to Rails. This isn’t bad news for Rails or Ruby, nor is it good news for PHP. It’s good news for CD Baby. Anyone who reads it otherwise is missing the lesson. There are plenty of reasons to dislike PHP (although all of my criticisms have to be aimed at PHP4 right now, as I haven’t done anything with PHP5), but it is a useful general…
In Twitteriffic today, I hit the wrong button on a message sent by Nathaniel Talbott and it took me to his blog , which had his entry about handing off test/unit to Ryan Davis. It has taken me a long time to reach this point, but it has to happen: I no longer have time to maintain PDF::Writer and most of its support libraries. I need a successor. Over the last year (since RubyConf 2006), I have…
RubyConf 2006 was held in Denver, Colorado from October 19–22, 2006. This is a combined retrospective of my notes from the conference. Day 0: Thursday, 19 October 2006 I landed safely in Denver and managed to find the express shuttle to the Embassy Suites. Somehow, I didn’t manage to find the ticket desk for the express shuttle, but I was allowed on the shuttle and paid cash when we arrived. Both…
I was the mentor of Alex Bradbury’s ARIEL project, which was submitted as “Automated Wrapper Generation for Information Extraction” and was dubbed ARIEL (A Ruby Information Extraction Library) after some discussion. Alex was great. The program was great. The result he’s produced is great—and I’m not the only one that thinks so. Justin Baily said: Very impressive library! I remember when you posted…
So while I was in Europe, I gave a talk to the London Ruby Users Group , met with some German Rubyists in Potsdam and Munich, and Erik Veenstra in Amsterdam. 2006-07-10: London Ruby Users Group I spoke on a number of things at the London Ruby Users Group meetup, ranging from the Google Summer of Code, to the Toronto Ruby Users Group hackathon, to PDF::Writer. It was a much larger crowd than I…
A wonderfully easy vegan curry recipe with eggplants and zucchini. It's a variation on a ratatouille that I make, with a commercial curry paste and raisins instead of tomato sauce and balsamic vinegar. Whenever I've made this for a potluck, I've been asked to share the recipe. Serves 4 · 25 minutes vegan · curry Ingredients 1 tbsp cooking oil 1 medium onion, chopped small 1 large eggplant, sliced…
A perfect Thanksgiving dessert and it's far tastier than pumpkin pie—and easier to make, too. I made this for Canadian Thanksgiving and a work potluck, and have been asked for the recipe. Serves 8 · 75 minutes dessert · cheesecake Ingredients Crust 3 tbsp butter, melted 1 cup ginger snaps, crushed Filling 2 packages (500g) cream cheese, softened 1½ tsp vanilla 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp allspice ¼ tsp…
In an ideal software development project, the development environment (languages, tools, and libraries) will be chosen that best suits the nature of the problem domain and the skills of the professionals involved. In the real world, the development environment is dictated by any number of constraints—the most common being that the project is a modification to or enhancement of an existing project.…