Last page of Eloquent Ruby.
OK, today is a good day: Eloquent Ruby Second Edition just went to the copy editor, who will try to mitigate my crimes against the English language.
Almost there.
Jared titled this episode "Indistinguishable from Evil." He's not talking about me here, but rather quoting something I said:
Any sufficiently foreign programming language syntax is indistinguishable from evil.
At least I don't think he was talking about me.
This is turning out to be a busy week. My chat with Jared Norman on the Dead Code podcast is out! You can find it in all of the usual podcast places.
bsky.app/profile/dead...
Not everyone loves games. Why should programming examples assume they do?
@russolsen.bsky.social on using real-life, relatable examples that actually make code stick.
AI hates my writing.
The feeling is mutual.
Me, going on about the importance of technical explanations.
field15.com/your-most-im...
Image from an old magazine that reads "Electronic mail has a great potential for causing a megafold multiplication of junk mail."
I'm as fond as the next person at laughing at people who make predictions that are wildly off the mark. But every now and then they do get it right.
This is from the July, 1985 issue of Unix Review.
Note the cool new cover!
And (finally!) the paperback version of Overdrive is available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Overdrive-Li...
True story: As this was happening, a reporter asked one of the astronomers what all this meant for the average person?
The astronomer reply was something like: "The average person should be damned glad they don't live on Jupiter."
For scale, each one of those bright spots is about the size of the earth.
Redish image of Jupiter on a dark background. There are 5 or 6 bright spots along the bottom of Jupier.
In 1994 a comet hit Jupiter. And we got to see it happen. Originally a single giant dirty snowball, the comet broke up as it screamed in.
This picture was taken by a telescope in Hawaii and is in the near-infrared. The line of bright dots at the bottom are where bits of the comet hit.
Stack of 3 paperback books.
And it looks like the paperback version of my novel *Overdrive* will be available from Amazon on Dec 24th!
Kobo version coming as soon as it gets through the quality checks.
www.amazon.com/Overdrive-Li...
4 copies of the paperback edition of Overdrive
After many false starts and missed dates*, the paperback edition of my novel Overdrive will be ready in the next few days!
* It's almost like a software project!
For all of you who have purchased the beta copy of Eloquent Ruby, Second Edition, there is an updated version coming soon. The new version includes a ton of corrections and a newly rewritten chapter on Ruby implementations.
If you haven't gotten your copy yet, then now's the time
eloquentruby.com
Black and white image of the Moon IO with a strange circular shape in the upper left.
This is a navigation photo taken by Voyager 1 as it passed by Io, a moon of Jupiter. Engineer Linda Morabito wondered just what the the heck the round thing on the left was? Another moon behind Io?
It turned out to be a 300 km hi plume from the first active volcano ever seen outside of Earth.
So if I tell you *not* to put glue on your pizza, will I have a market cap of ten bazillioin dollars?
Just in case: Don't put glue on your pizza.
This is the Gemini 7 spaceship, photographed from Gemini 6. There were two people in Gemini 6 and two in Gemini 7, so four people total.
At the time (1965) that was the record for most people in space at the same time. Four.
This is Gene Cernan just back in the ship after walking on the Moon. Notice that he is more or less filthy.
I've read a lot of classic (pre Moon landing) sci fi, but I'm not sure anyone predicted that moon dust would be sticky.
If your current job isn't teaching you something new, or leaving you the time and energy to teach yourself something new, then you are the economic equivalent of an oil well: Valuable until you are exhausted and then worthless.
Don't be an oil well.
There is a story that the novelist Joseph Heller, when informed that some hedge fund manager made more money in one day than Heller's Catch-22 would earn in its whole history replied:
“Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . enough.”
Today, I am thankful that I have enough.
Spending hours with ChatGPT can save you minutes of reading the documentation.
And yes, that means that on the Moon landing missions one of the astronauts was all by themselves.
And when the orbit took them behind the Moon they were separated from the every other person by an entire world.
Apollo 11 ascent module, the moon and the Earth.
This picture gets me every time. This is the Apollo 11 ascent module in the foreground with the Earth in the far distance. There are 2 guys in the ascent module and several billion people on the little blue dot.
That's absolutely everyone, except the guy taking the picture.
In working on the second edition of Eloquent Ruby, I decided to add a bit of coverage of Sonic-Pi, the wonderful live coding music generation tool built around Ruby. Of course I had to install it again and play around with it.
6 Hours Later
Well, not a lot of writing got done today.
The fine folks at the Pragmatic Press, publishers of both Getting Clojure and the (so far) beta version of Eloquent Ruby (along with many others) are running their annual 50% off sale. So hurry on over and use the coupon code save50 on the checkout page!
pragprog.com
That is definitely one dead parrot.
Code for a function called "canary_is_found_dead".
In working on the Eloquent Ruby chapter on Ruby implementations, I came across this in wonderful bit of code in the MRI VM. I don't often laugh at a program for a full minute, but I made an exception here.
eloquentruby.com
The key thing about reality is that it doesn't need a PR staff.
Rule of thumb: If a company, particularly a large company, spends a lot of time and money telling its employees that something is true, that is prima faca evidence that it's baloney.
