April 16, 2010: The cover is uncovered, at least for me...
Top Story and Book Update
I have sample cover designs. I don’t think I can show them yet, but I’ve got ‘em, I like them, and hopefully we’ll have picked one to show shortly.
Tab dump
Not a whole lot today:
Here’s a look at the current status of using a non-blocking MySQL driver with Rails. The promise here is for significantly faster database access.
Two stories that are related to projects that I worked on back in my EdTech days:
Version 1.0 of Pharo has been released. Pharo is a fork of Squeak smalltalk aimed at, as far as I can tell, a more modern UI and setup. Pharo is also the reference implementation for the Seaside web framework. A lot of Ruby and Agile ideas came out of the Smalltalk community. I’d definitely recommend trying Smalltalk if you are looking for a new language. For years, I’ve given impromptu Squeak demos to show off what’s cool and what’s hard about Smalltalk. Check it out.
On a less encouraging note: Scratch, which is the current MIT media lab project to teach programming ideas to kids, had their iPhone app pulled from the app store yesterday. (The link is to Mark Guzdial’s compututing education blog – Hi Mark!) This is probably collateral damage in Apple’s war on interpreters, but there’s no way to put a good face on – it’s a disappointing decision and I’m sad I didn’t know Scratch was there to download before it was pulled.
Finally
Part Two of the 8-Bit Dr. Horrible is up – when you start the flash player, you have the option of clicking into act two, which I mention because it took me too long to figure out on my own.