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11 June 2009

Who added every Nashville building to Google Earth 3-D?

09 June 2009

It's gorgeous.  It's worth downloading Google Earth to fly over Nashville alone. About 2 years ago, I played on Google Earth for fun.  I would always checkout Nashville to see if any of the buildings had been made 3-D like they were in New York or DC. 

I never saw one building in 3-D Now, every building of note, and hundreds that are 'below of note' have been sketched-up in 3-D in Nashville.  And with amazing detail. I've done some short research on who did the work with nothing found yet. How those buildings work is that Google Earth has aerial photographs of the

Earth that it splices together to cover the planet and adds in GPS/survey based altitude data for hills and valleys.  For buildings, they can't become 3-D from aerial photographs, so Google built/bought a program for creating 3-D architecture called Sketch Up.  With that an artist/designer can create buildings by hand using computers. It's a decent amount of work to do one building well.  I'm so happy because someone has done all of downtown well.

Hashrocket presents their Agile coding practices

08 June 2009

I really benefited from this series of videos on Rails and Agile and Extreme Programming from Hashrocket presenting to a college class in Jacksonville.

http://www.vimeo.com/4159365

It was great to see them talking about their real life practices in writing code, working for customers, what tools they use, and why they love it. The series is about 10 videos of about 2 minutes each or so.

East Nashville

05 June 2009

What's so great about Nashville?

02 June 2009

What's so great about Rails?

02 June 2009

It clearly organizes the mess of a web-application.  It's real easy to have a few giant code files that show the html and do the processing of a web application in the same file.  They are unreadable--it's like trying to extract a recipe out of a novel. Rails puts each type of file in an appropriate place given it's function; forces you to keep like methods together, and makes finding methods in other peoples projects predictable.

It automates stuff I don't need to know.  I don't know a lot about database calls, web servers, or the mechanics of email sending/receiving; but I can do all those in readable Ruby because of Rails.

It has easy plugins for new functionality.  Rails is open-source (free, and community improved) and so when programmers build something that can be re-used from project-to-project they frequently make a it a plugin that anyone can use. For example I need to interact with Google Maps, or Paypal in my application.  Well I can use someone else's code who has already done it without having to write and test those functions personally.

It reads so well

class Verse < ActiveRecord::Base

  belongs_to :chapter

  validates_presence_of :number, :on => :create, :message => "can't be blank"

end 

Summary.  What Rails does is takes web services and web applications and turns them into something that entrepreneurs, thinkers, designers, students, and business managers can build without going crazy or giving up.  That's huge.

What's so great about Ruby?

02 June 2009

I'm not a veteran of a lot of programming languages, but here's a few things that make me choose Ruby. It's so readable.

It's readable enough that I would feel good writing a program in Ruby, printing it out, and going over it with someone who has never used it.

Principle of Least Surprise.  When I see how Ruby implements a feature, I commonly think "oh, that makes sense" and not "that's hard to remember".

Minimal punctuation.  Other languages can be militant about the appropriate use of ( ) ;'s.  That can be frustrating when each attempt to run code has at least one (needless) punctuation error one the first try.

Everything is an object.  That's geek speak for every 'thing' in the code that you can do something to comes with a set of methods for playing with it.  For example, anything in Ruby can have ".to_s" attached to it and it turns into a string (string = letters and words).

Fun and productivity.  Those are the first priorities in Ruby, and that's my main reason for liking it. Code snippets borrowed from Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby, a quirky book that introduces the Ruby programming language with odd stories and cartoons.

Outnumbered, Awkward questions about Jesus

23 May 2009

"Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?”

1. Is that not what Paul thought of himself as? "For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it."
2. But later Pauls says of Jesus, "who loved me and gave himself for me".
3. And "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”

What Happened to Me, 5

16 May 2009

What Happened to Me, 4

15 May 2009