Bill

As you might know I dig on the science and I secretly hope that my kids will be intrigued by the world around them as they grow up to the point where they really want to investigate and try things out. Today I was turned to a fantastic site called Howtoons aimed at kids ages 8-12 (though, I think it could easily span a greater age range) that is designed to do precisely what I hope for - getting kids hooked on hacking the world around them. It's presented in a really cool format - a bunch of cartoons. Each cartoon has a story but within that story is a set of plans or a lesson on how to do something cool. The first couple cartoons alone get kids making mobius strips and stilts! I put a little video presentation of Howtoons up on a new part of the site I'm working on - check it out.

On the same note, but from a more computer oriented vein, comes Hackety-Hack - a cool little tool that will help kids learn to program (using Ruby). Even if kids don't want to end up being programmers I think learning a bit about it would be beneficial in this day and age as they will get a better feel for how computers work in general and they learn to think about things a from a more logical standpoint at times. The guy who made Hackety Hack, who goes by the moniker of "Why" writes all of his stuff from a pretty accessible level and he has a pretty good sense of humor - such as his Poignant Guide To Ruby which is suitable for pretty much any age.

So go on show your kids these cool sites and let them start to discover the world in some new and fun ways. Shannon will be seeing Howtoons tonight.

#Ruby #Commentary #Geekiness

Ruby, as I have mentioned before is a really nice scripting language. I made the "really nice" judgement long before I had actually written a single line of Ruby code. I just liked the way it looked. Well, it seems that my initial reading impressions are lining up nicely with my hands on experience. And, honestly, I have Rails to thank for that.

Rails is an web application framework for Ruby that is pretty darn phenomonal. You can actually create a very simple application to track todo items by typing 1 line of code. 1 LINE! Are you kidding me? Of course, that base app is pretty ugly and not very user-friendly. But it is fully usable. On top of that it only took about 100 total lines of code (including comments) to pop out a good looking todo app that is also highly usable. It was probably the easiest bit of coding I have ever done. It is pretty darn amazing.

It is going to be hard to focus on my Coldfusion work tomorrow when I have Ruby calling out to me to dig in and play around some more. The cool thing about these scripting languages that CF can't match is that I can actually build non web-based apps with them. However, I'm going to hold off on trying to do stuff like that until I get somewhere with Lootly!

#Ruby