Getting information into the Transmogrifier In our last episode, we transmogrified data from one format into another. Now you need to get data into it using the transmogrifier. We could hard code the file names in there but that will come back…
Continue Reading…One of the things computers are good at is moving data. When you have to migrate data from one type to another, I have found that Ruby makes my job a lot easier. A while back I had this a task that…
Continue Reading…We have seen a lot of rankings in our lives, not only in WebApps but also in different media. Often the ranking is part of a gamification feature. But, is it being really effective? In fact, the majority of ranking implementations are…
Continue Reading…In the last couple of years, I became quite fond of Ruby. It was so refreshing to simply get things done without caring too much about typecasts or memory management. The magnificent expressiveness of the language, the ease of use of the…
Continue Reading…Have you ever noticed Ruby doesn’t include support for linked lists? Most computer science textbooks are filled with algorithms, examples and exercises based on linked lists: inserting or removing elements, sorting lists, reversing lists, etc. Strangely, however, there is no linked list…
Continue Reading…When I first started working with computers, one thing really amazed me. You can literally print out the code for something like the Morris worm (a malicious bit of code that wreaked all sorts of havoc) and it was quite harmless. But,…
Continue Reading…Hello everyone. I recently began to dig more deeply into Ruby 2.0. The most interesting feature to me is the addition of real keyword arguments. As I searched for information on how other languages implement and use keyword arguments, I realized how…
Continue Reading…I vaguely remember the first time I had to use the command line. It’s a scary step for any would be developer. You leave a safe, friendly, graphical environment for a bleak and unforgiving landscape. It’s just one of those things. After…
Continue Reading…Method chaining is a very handy technique for invoking multiple methods at once. Not only does it improve the readability of the code, but it also reduces the amount of code needed when interacting with a class or an instance of a…
Continue Reading…A while back I had a long weekend to kill and was in the mood for some just-for-fun hacking. The weather was predicted to be awful and I remembered that I always wanted to build a robot. Of course, I had built…
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