Shiny Things

Writing

Gotta link to my blog, though I don’t update it as often as I should.

I’m writing Emacs Mastery: Attaining Coding Supremacy. I’m considering making it freely available on the Web. Please vist the book’s Leanpub page, review the table of contents there, and let me know what else you think the book should cover.

The Polyglot Programmer, a talk given to the Connecticut CTO Club in March of 2012 and again at a Brown Bag Talk at ideeli the next month. These are raw notes to myself, not a polished slide presentation.

The talk Ruby on Rails – An Introduction was given to the New York City CTO Club in July of 2006. Hint: hover your mouse over the lower right corner of the slides for a control panel.

Building Applications with Berkeley DB Java Edition appeared in the September 2004 issue of the Java Developer’s Journal. See below for a link to the code that accompanies the article.

Unit Testing with OCUnit was published on O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter on April 23, 2004. See below for a link to the code that accompanies the article. There are some comments from readers at the end of the article. The article was picked up by OSNews. An update to the article: the latest release of TestKit supports XCode.

The discusson/talk Alternate Data Storage Technologies was given to the New York City CTO Club on April 14, 2004. (HTML only.)

Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X was originally published as the cover article in MacTech Magazine 19.3, March 2003.

A Ruby talk given to the New York City CTO Club on July 10, 2001. (HTML and PDF available.)

My old blog Shiny Things is here. I’ve decided to move everything directly onto this site’s blog instead.

Bride of Dark and Stormy

I entered a number of sentences into the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest contest in 1998. Two of them were selected and published in Bride of Dark and Stormy, compiled by Scott Rice.

The alien stared at Captain Veronica Saunders with a warmth not unlike that found on certain of Pluto’s outer moons, its black, scaly claws flexing in and out, in and out, its long powerful tail wrapped unmercifully around her curvaceous chest, pinning her arms to her sides, its two-hundred piggy little eyes peering into her very soul with a singularly steady gaze, and it found itself wishing in some dim portion of its tiny brain that this one wouldn’t scream so much while being peeled.

That sentence was featured on the front page of a local California paper the same year. Contest founder Scott Rice sent me a copy of the front page, for which I am eternally grateful. I lost it, for which I am eternally pissed off.

I had originally written “…wouldn’t scream so much whilst being peeled,” but it was changed to “while” in the book. I prefer “whilst”, but then I do tend to be a touch sesquipedalian.

The second entry:

Firmly, almost indignantly, Thornton Entwhistle straightened his toupee and checked his lapels for stray specks of lint as he stood in front of the firmly closed mahogany door and again rehearsed his request for a legal pad all his own.

Code

Here are links to the code that accompanies some of my writings.