Ben Kudria » Weblog

A whole bunch of cool Ruby tricks I didn’t know. Definitely worth a read!

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Tags: ruby, tricks, idiom, programming, for:blog

Seeing as how I’m going to be working for the Times this summer, I’ve put in a bit of thinking about the role of news, newspapers, and journalism in today’s hyperconnected world. The death of paper newsletters has been predicted for a while now, but strangely enough, they are still around. Wired Magazine, in their 15-year anniversary retrospect, highlighted one of their unfulfilled visions: “The Death of Media”. Wired called for the death of “Old Media” over and over again, but Old Media is still around, and rumors of their death are exaggerated…for now.

Whew! My final exam (Algorithms) is done, and the semester is over! It was lots of fun, (except for Physics) and lots of work (mostly, Physics), and I’m glad it’s over. Next semester promises to be lots of fun: highlights include Artificial Intelligence, Communication and Networks, and Software Engineering. That last one might be interesting. While I’ll have to draw endless UML diagrams, the Professor will also let use something other than Java (finally!) to write our web app, so I plan on using the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails. About time. Anyway, looking forward to next semester, but until then, I have the whole summer.

So, a while back, I applied to a couple of places, in search of a summer internship. I spoke with VMWare, Google, The New York Times, and a few lesser-known places. I applied to the Times’ Summer Internship Program, and after a great interview, I accepted - dropping midway out of the VMWare interview, and turning Google away outright (I might have went to Google if they hadn’t lost my first application, and the second later offer was as attractive as the first). So, this June and July I’ll be working with some talented people on the Platforms team for NYTimes.com, working on … something. They haven’t told me what, exactly, yet. But, I’m convinced it’ll be fun. As a perk, they are even paying for a place for me on Manhattan, in some NYU dorms. Future things I’m allowed to reveal about the internship and The Times will be found on the NYTimes topic page.

Hooking up Jabber and EventMachine for remote command queuing, IPC, and other distributed programming hijinks. Crazy, and cool.

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Tags: ruby, jabber, xmpp, smpp4r-simple, eventmachine, distributed, for:blog

I’m back to posting here after a long hiatus, mostly because I have something interesting to report. I’ve been avoiding/neglecting this site because I’ve been incredibly busy with schoolwork, but everything is getting more leisurely in a calm-before-the-finals sort of way.

Anyway, I have in front of me the thick (1k pages) 3rd edition of O’Reilly’s “Programming Perl”, graciously lent, because at some point, that’s what I hope to do. In preparation for this summer (more on that later) I hope to work my way at least partly through this tome, and in the process, hopefully post some reactions to the language as I go.

I guess I’d better be upfront about my prejudices and preconceptions: from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’ll like Perl. I have a distaste for extraneous punctuation (eg, I try to leave parens and such off as much as I can when coding in Ruby, and I consider Ruby’s @variable an offense to the eye and sensibilities), and from what I’ve seen from Perl, it has plenty of extra $(%]&*# to annoy the hell out of me. I imagine I won’t like the lack of turtles-all-the-way-down OO that Ruby has, and I think the general lack of cohesiveness and cobbled-together inelegant TMTOWTDI messiness won’t sit with me well either. But hey, I’d love to be shown wrong – two favorite languages are better than one!

So, in general, expect some more activity at this place, and especially some more Perl posts.

BBC interviews 10 prominent web community individuals for their reaction on the past 15 years, and their predictions for the next 15.

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Tags: web, www, internet, semantic web, for:blog

Applying the Cravath System to the IT Industry

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Tags: it, it industry, turnover, google, cravath system, cravath, for:blog