Pelargir

I live in North Carolina and our new state-sponsored gambling program… I mean, our new lottery… opens today. At work, I’ve already overheard several hallway conversations in which lottery ticket purchases were mentioned. For my fellow North Carolinians who are considering a purchase, just remember that a dollar can buy you a tasty hamburger at McDonald’s. Oh, and burning your money will at least keep you warm.

“Common sense is just as good a critic of the lottery as any statistical breakdown.” — Hunter Baker

“Motherhood will never be an Olympic event: they don’t feature extreme sports.” — Wendy Kay Donnahoo

A visual and textual warning to those of us who toss our junk mail out without properly mangling it.

“Better fare hard with good men than feast it with bad.” — Thomas Paine

I received my access code for the Krugle beta by e-mail last night. I immediately tried it out, of course. Here are my initial impressions.

The goal of Krugle is to make it easy for software developers to search for technical articles and code samples. Let’s face it: Google is a fantastic search engine, but it’s sometimes difficult to locate good code samples with it. Krugle changes all of that by allowing visitors to search specifically for source code, not just across web pages, but within project files from sites like Sourceforge as well.

After executing a code search, two panes open up on your screen. The left pane contains the source code you selected. The right pane shows other source code files in the same project. As you open new files, Krugle places them in tabs across the top of the page, very similar to Firefox. The difference is that Krugle uses Ajax goodness to drive its user-friendly interface. Searching with Krugle is a real treat.

If you’re interested in trying Krugle for yourself, visit the web site to sign up for the beta. Alternately, you could just wait a few more months for the production version of the engine to be released. If Krugle proves as useful to other developers as it has to me, I would be expecting Google to aquire yet another search engine a few months after Krugle goes live.

dnrTV’s March 9th episode featured Venkat Subramaniam giving an interactive demonstration of .NET Generics. The entire video tutorial is about an hour long. I thought it was quite useful. It’s fantastic being able to watch an expert in this area as he writes code and explains what he’s doing while he’s writing it. It’s almost as good as pair programming with a master developer.

I may have to check out some of the other shows on dnrTV this week. .NET Gotchas and Databinding in .NET 2.0 in particular look like they would be interesting.

Amateur radio is a hobby of mine and it’s always sad to read about the restrictions being placed on hams these days. This WRAL article is especially interesting, considering the amount of help hams have provided during the aftermath of the Katrina disaster.

73s,
Matt / AG4TS

“We may find, by our own unhappy experience, that there is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny, and that arbitrary power is most easily established upon the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.” — George Washington

So what in the world is Ruby on Rails? Where does it make sense to use it? How do you get started developing with it? And why would I forsake the established Java community for the wild ravages of a “new” technology, and love every minute of it?

The next Java User’s Group meeting will feature a talk by my friend and former co-worker, Nathaniel Talbott, on why he prefers Ruby on Rails over Java. It’s sure to be an educational (and controversial!) presentation. For more information, visit the JUG web site.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” — Mark Twain