December 24, 2007
| Up in the Air >>
Merry Christmas, Nerds
Peter’s right — we’re all nerds here. So here is a late-night Christmas Eve post brimming over with nerd-osity. (Like the White House, I try to sneak the embarrassing stuff out while everybody’s on vacation.)
- The New York Times is developing and releasing Ruby libraries on the side. That is such a great sign. Bravo.
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Slicehost is the hosting company of my dreams: $20 a month for a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux and that’s it. You have full root access and can do absolutely anything you want with it.
- I went ahead and learned Ruby on Rails a while ago, and liked the idea, but couldn’t shake this sense that it was just way too big and complex for everything I wanted to do. Enter Merb, which is like Rails lite: Same approach, same access to awesome Ruby resources (like the NYT’s new gem), but much smaller and faster. It’s like carrying around a wallet instead of one of those huge camping backpacks.
- Merb lets you plug in the ORM of your choice, and I found DataMapper a lot more intuitive and “right-seeming” than ActiveRecord (the Rails default).
Okay, I think I actually blew out my own nerd-fuse on that last one. See you in 2008!