Yeah, I'd Give Greg Brown Sixty Bucks

And I'm not being sarcastic, either. Maybe it would just be a vicarious pleasure because with 3 kids, a year oold Honda Minivan and overpriced Skokie house there is no way in hell I could live on $2000/month. Or maybe because there's a bunch of cool Python (non-web) libraries that should be ported to Ruby. If I'm willing to give Obama $50 I'm certainly willing to give Greg Brown $60 To work on Open Source

I find myself in a rather unique situation: Single, living alone in a small studio apartment, only taking a class or two here and there, and basically living off of small contracts. It’s not that I’m not offered big gigs, or that I couldn’t go back to school full time if I really wanted to, I just find I enjoy living a simple lifestyle that lets me spend a lot of time on community oriented projects, especially Ruby stuff.

Finally Something Interesting from Gregory Brown

Continuing on a theme, Gregory Brown actually has a nice tutorial called How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord, although I confess I have no idea what his opening sentences even mean:

If you're coming into Ruby via Rails, you've probably noticed that there is a whole lot to learn within the framework itself. In fact, the integration between Rails (the framework) and Ruby (the programming language) is so tight, that it might be tough to easily see where Rails ends and Ruby begins. In terms of productivity and learning curve, this is a great feature. It means that you can learn both at once without encountering the chicken and egg problem you might find elsewhere.

So Struts (the framework) and Java (the language) is not so tightly integrated? And Django (the framework) and Python (the language) are not so tightly integrated? And this is a feature?. I'm confused.

Maybe this is like the "Red Hat Linux" phenomenon where folks thought Linux was RedHat and RedHat was Linux.

Why are there no Awk Jobs?

My buddy over on OReilly Ruby Blog posed the profound question why there are no Ruby jobs?.

Although I was shocked that Dice (for Chicago) just brought up 32 hits. Amazing, far more than the last time I checked. Compared to 41 for Python, 202 for Perl, 784 for Java, and 351 for C#. And don't forget awk. Five whole jobs in Chicagoland.

To quote:

I guess it could be a lot of things, any of the below or a combination might be to blame:

• Lack of good marketing for non-web oriented Ruby
• Assumption that Ruby is not general purpose as a side effect of the success of RoR’s marketing
• Technical issues that I can’t think of that make it an inferior choice to other languages
• Ruby adoption might be in nature slower than Rails adoption, but on it’s way
• MRI isn’t robust enough for the ‘enterprise’, so companies are waiting on JRuby

Shitty documentation. Lack of decent built-in APIs. Rubyforge sucking big-time compared to CPAN or Cheese Shop. All the Japanese? Everything starting with R. Not coming default on Real OS's (OSX doesn't count, spare me). Being cute? Not being used in the application infrastructure of any Real OS's. (FreeBSD is an anomaly in that it doesn't require Perl, all the other distros I can think of Require at least Perl and some like Ubuntu, Python). All the crap about programming being fun? A significantly large number of Ruby-ists (or RoR-ists) that use OSX? Should I go on?

Alls of these equate to non-ENTERPRISE.

Waiting for JRuby? Please. That is so rich I almost spit my fruit bar onto the screen. And I think JRuby is cool. Maybe that nobody does any "real work" (meaning the pays $$, blogging doesn't count) in Ruby. Well, except maybe Matasano.

Death, Rebirth, and yet another Ruby Blog

I deinstalled (yes, FreeBSD is assimilating me) the ports version of Ruby on my 12-inch Powerbook (still the best damn laptop, ever-Intel Macs may be fast but they are flimsy, hot, and noisy!) this afternoon due to all the pain of getting trying to onigurumu installed just so I could do named group regular expressions like in Python (more on that later).

But sometimes it is good just to clean house and start a new page. So except for the Rails nonsense, I did pretty much everything here. You know, installing libreadline, a fresh new install 1.8.6 tarball, etc. Except I'm starting from scratch with everything in /my.

But enough procrastination. Why the new blog? Why another Ruby blog? Well, the manifesto (oh, yeah, and that I'm spending too much time on Ruby on BlogFranz) is below. I hope you hold me (or us, should anyone else agree to the spirit, if not necessarily the letter of this effort) to it:

Back to the Basics - I happened to look at the README during the build and the non-hyped description of Ruby (obviously back before Ruby was cool) was:

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, and extensible.

Unfortunately most of the stuff I try to do (which is simple and system-management-ish) that I could achieve with a blink of an eye in Python (because it just works and is in there) does not work (or is not built into the standard library) with Ruby. I guess everybody is doing web development in Ruby except me. Or the various OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD boxes I do work on with Ruby are so hopelessly broken. I assume others are in this boat as well.

Which leads me to #2.

Rails-free - This is a timewarp. We go back to 2001 when I first encountered Ruby and it was just weird and Japanese and the socket APIs were crappy, before Metasploit 3.0. Before BaseCamp (yes my previous company actually used it for a while, and it was "allright" if a bit sluggish). Back when my wife owned the only Mac in the family. Bottom line, if its' related to Rails you won't find it here. Period. End of story. No exceptions.

Mad as hell - The "happy-ass-ness" (yes, a psychological term) of Ruby (packaging bliss, instant enlightenment? fun programming?) is maddening to me. Vomitus negro. I loathe OReilly Ruby blogs and in particular I don't like this guy or anyone else that that does "math for fun." What you find here will be hard, critical, and hype-free. No advocacy. No fanboys. Just blogs on (or references to other blogs) on how to get shit done and solve problems. A lot of this began over on BlogFranz where I talked about sloppy documentation, insecure implementations, YAML, API comparisions, and other fare that was getting way too much attention there, where I want to focus more on security, Linux, and BSDs.

JRuby - You think Ruby is bad. Try Java? But sometimes there are Java APIs you just have to use (or abuse). Jython is obsolete and what is the point of something like Groovy?!

So there you have it. I've decided to use it with UbuntuTrinux and we're using it a work. So I have to be make the best of using Ruby. So let the fun begin. And yeah, I'm not really mad. Just a blog persona.