λwill.paul

Apr 6, 2015 ∣ LinuxDev Business and Legal Ruby rtasklib

It turns out that one of the reasons Ruby was popular before the advent of Rails was because it was so easy to integrate with 3rd party tools through subprocesses. In fact Ruby has at least 7 ways of executing processes either in the core or the standard libraries and many more user implemented varieties. Since rtasklib is at its core concerned with interacting with a subprocess having a solid understanding of the available options is important. Below I summarize the results of my research for several of Ruby's subprocess methods.

Apr 20, 2015 ∣ LinuxDev Business and Legal Ruby rtasklib

In the Ruby world the most common way to generate documentation is with Yardocs. It basically generates documentation by scraping the code comments and provides a structured API for writing comments that it can interpret. For example to annotate that a parameter of a certain method is a duck type that responds to #to_s (to string), you would simply make a comment above the method definition that says: # @param parameter_name [#to_s] a parameter that responds to #to_s.

Sep 8, 2014 ∣ Vim Processing

So I started writing Processing for one of my classes (Interactive Media Development) and unfortunately the default development workflow they want us to use is tightly bound to the IDE that it ships with. In general I'm not a huge fan of IDEs anyways, but the Processing one is especially terrible. It's obviously been designed to abstract away programming concepts to make the barrier to entry really low (I think it was originally made to help artist make procedural art), but in the end this makes for an annoying experience for those of us with a bit of experience.

Dec 10, 2014 ∣ Ruby Config

Setting up a Ruby environment is deceptively simple. Easy to do, hard to maintain. The two major players, RVM and rbenv, offer more than the typical user needs or can possibly understand. Here I walk you through my setup using tools that do one thing and do it well. Coincidently all these tools that I use were written by the same guy/girl who goes by the handle Postmodern.

Feb 5, 2015 ∣ LinuxDev Business and Legal Ruby

For my Software Development in Linux class we are making one large project over the course of the class and then packaging it up for distribution at the end (probably Debian, RPM, and AUR). This is a little bit of a paradigm shift for me personally, as for most of my projects distribution means pushing to a Heroku instance, so I've had to brain storm some new non-web-based projects. I've come up with two basic trains of thought either a better time-tracking/Freshbooks integration for taskwarrior (the current ones are all bare-bones) or any number of music/analytics ideas for the music players, specifically MPD.