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RedHanded

sneaking Ruby through the system


Hackety OrgMay 3 2007

Thankyou for enjoying The RedHanded Adventure Show. We have had the nth batmans galore!! I adore you. I will never forget you. I will especially not forget you if you follow me to Hackety Org.

Is this the first time a Ruby blog has closed?? No matter. There will three more by supper. I will enjoy those blogs as a plainclothes civilian. Tallyho.

Erring in Hackety Hack 0.4May 1 2007

I’m not sure if there’s any fixing the arcane parse errors of Ruby, but here’s a stab at it. I need to do some examination of other IDEs to see what else is being done to fix this.

Anyway, some screen captures from H-ety H 0.4.

This release has a lot of fixes to the bundled Try Ruby. (Problems with the cursor, browser crashes, tutorial loading time.) But the main feature is the new friendly and condensed error messages.

These same error messages are expanded into HTML in the program editor:

The next release will work on highlighting the line which threw the error and some links in the exception to help pages for any involved classes or error messages.

Here’s another nice feature. The bundled Try Ruby has a progress bar for page fetching. I want this console to be irresistible to you lot!!

Math (Eww?)April 30 2007

aparrish: How can you find fault in a programming tutorial that teaches you how to make a blog before it teaches you how to do arithmetic?

AtDuskGreg: So many people drone on boringly about how important it is for kids to learn computers, only to come up with curricula that focus on using a spreadsheet or writing a resume.

Paul Robinson: The first book I ever read on programming was on BBC Basic and was illustrated with pictures of robots in factories pretending to be FOR loops.

I have a solid four years of work ahead of me on Hackety Hack, which is in my mind a very primitive tool, but hey the discussion is igniting. And among people who I haven’t encountered before, yeahhh!! One common theme is: where do you start teaching someone? (Brian D. pointed out Constructivism on the HH mailing list.)

I’m not really sure, actually. Who really knows if H-ety H goes about things in a sensible way. I was a very bad student myself and am ofte

Hackety Hack Events and ThingsApril 27 2007

A few other H-ety H items you may be interested to hear of:

  • My friends Brian DeLacey, Eric Mill and Kevin Driscoll (all of the Original 50 Hackety Hackers) will be answering questions and catering to YOUR needs on Tuesday, May 8th from 7 to 9pm at 1 Broadway St, Kendall Square, Cambridge. I already checked: you have nothing else that night.
  • Also, Eli Brody has a blog. Eli was the leader in beating up HH and has a bunch of alterations to the chat program so you can send RedCloth and keep logs.
  • A good feeling is to see this on the Hackety Hack wikipedia entry: Developer: why the lucky stiff and 50 friends.
The Original FiftyApril 27 2007

Over the last two months, I have met a small group of friends online who helped me out with a new program. The fifty people in that group have made my life soooo wonderful!!

Brian DeLacey, who started teaching 3 of his kids to program and kept detailed notes on their good and bad times.

Leslie Wu, who has been all over FFSandbox and Hpricot. I am amazed by how she can look in any direction and then do exactly what she wants in that direction. I repeat: she’s been hacking the sandbox for me!!

RSL, who’s been a regular around here, was one of the 50 and I really like his Hacky Mouse kaleidoscope.

Harold Hausman, who started LittleCoder and hung out in the group to offer encouragement and ideas—we’re going to team up soon, Harold!

And I still gotta dig up some links for the rest of these folks. (Eli?)