Noel Rappin Writes Here

When you have a blog with as few comments as this one, you can give every comment the kind of personal attention it deserves. This one came through from an anonymous commenter: Noel, have you considred making a DVD video tutorial of your book? This will really help those who learn by watching videos. So what do you say? The short answer is not as any kind of official adjunct to the book.

Annnddd… This, of course, is what I get for posting anything about Wiley late at night without checking. Jim Minatel from Wiley added the following comment: Noel: I’m interested in getting Wrox authors to to videos related to their books…. I can tell you what’s involved and see what we can do. So, contacting in progress. Further bulletins as events warrant. Or as events don’t warrant, I think further bulletins are inevitable.

5 Things About: Doogie Howser, M.D. Why Doogie? Because the parody at the end of How I Met Your Mother a while back, plus a desire to wander through hulu.com. So I watched the Doogie pilot from 1989. And now I’m writing about it. I was really not expecting the show to hold up at all. It’s actually a pretty solid piece of late 80’s TV, despite the cheesy theme music and classic 80’s opening sequence.

Battlestar Galactica 4-1 “He That Believeth In Me” I’m relieved, frankly. Not surprised, exactly. I liked Season 3 more than a lot of people seemed to, and I’m optimistic that Ron Moore and his crew understand what the problems were and how to avoid them. Still, it’s good to see the show starting out it’s final season with a strong episode. This was basically the episode I was hoping for, with two extra plusses, and one kind-of minus.

(This one is also on the Pathfinder blog, but since it fits in here, I wanted the full text here…) Jay Fields, who has been posting a very nice sequence of nuts-and-bolts Ruby and Rails guidelines, pauses to talk about creating examples. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about here for a while, and this is as good a lead-in as any. Plus, I’m generally interested in how principles of software development apply or don’t apply in odd cases, and software being developed specifically for example purposes certainly qualifies as an odd case.

I’ve been meaning to do this sooner, but, wow time flies… Here are some brief comments about books I’ve read so far this year and would recommend. I think I’ll pass on doing negative reviews here at the moment, unless I can make a larger point somehow. Captain’s Fury, by Jim Butcher Book four in the Codex Alera series continues pretty much everything that’s enjoyable about the series. I particularly like the way Butcher continues to move the story along, as well as how he’s resisted the easy way to manage the hero and his lack of fury powers.

New post at Pathfinder on monkey patching.

I don’t know what this says about me, or anybody else for that matter… I’ve been a huge Tom Lehrer fan ever since my 8th Grade Social Studies teacher decided to warp all our minds by playing “That Was the Year That Was” during a reading period. (It was 1985, so it’s not like the recording was current or anything…) I was pretty instantly hooked, and a few years later when his albums were re-released on CD, bought them instantly, and have more-or-less memorized them.

One weird aspect of being a published writer is that you get very little information about sales. You see your own numbers (several months after the fact), but there’s no larger context, and no sense of what a reasonable expectation of sales might be. Which is why I love it when O’Reilly Radar puts up one of their periodic looks at the computer book market. I haven’t pored over stat line like this since I collected baseball cards when I was ten.

I’m trying to figure out exactly why I’m so psyched by the Apple iPhone SDK announcement. The basic announcement wasn’t a surprise, and I don’t even own an iPhone. I did, however, dig out my Cocoa programming book and start studying. Further thoughts: The tools themselves seemed somewhat slicker than what was expected – a lot of Mac developers were pleasantly surprised that Interface Builder was included (although apparently it’s not in the first beta).