Trying out Posterous

I am trying out the Posterous service. It lets me make a blog post using email. The post goes to my blog on greggraham.posterous.com, but it should also post it on Blogger and Twitter, putting any pictures on Flickr. Sounds like fun! I'm attaching a picture of St. Thomas to see how that part of it works.

Posted via email from Greg's posterous

Welcome

I have redirected the blog that used to be at grahamtx.net/greg/ to here at greggraham.blogspot.com. I have also renamed this blog to Scriptorium because it will contain posts having to do with Theology (which mostly comes from Scripture) as well as programming (for which I often use scripting languages). Scriptorium refers to the "written output of a monastery" [Wikipedia], and while I am not a monastery, I do now work at a school run by monks, so that's another reason for me to pick this new name.

I hope that the new readers of this site who are interested in Theology are not bothered by the programming posts, and I hope the old programming readers are not bothered by the Theology posts. I have gone back and forth in the past on whether to have separate blogs for these subjects, or one combined blog. Well, it's combined again, and I hope it's for the best.

Great Quote

Tim, the Enchanter, is a Ruby coder who also created a git installer for OS X. His blog has a great quote at the bottom: "What manner of man are you that can summon up code without C# or Java?"

Let the Coding Begin

As is obvious, I have not posted a lot on here lately. Part of the reason is not thinking about it, or putting something in Twitter instead. However, another reason is I haven't done much coding lately. Well, that's about to change. I need to do v. 2.0 of a Django app at work this summer, and I will be doing some coding at home in Processing to get ready to teach it in the fall. Hopefully these projects will inspire some posting here.

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

This is a video of an interview with Bob Martin, Pete McBreen and Michael Feathers about software craftsmanship.

Git is the next Unix

I was asked in a comment to my previous post about comparing Git to Mercurial. I have only used Mercurial in simple scenarios, and I'm an extreme newbie when it comes to Git, so I can't really say, except that repository synchronization in Git seemed harder to learn than in Mercurial.

Even so, I'm going to continue to try to learn Git because of posts like this one. Here are his concluding remarks:

With git, we've invented a new world where revision history, checksums, and branches don't make your filesystem slower: they make it faster. They don't make your data bigger: they make it smaller. They don't risk your data integrity; they guarantee integrity. They don't centralize your data in a big database; they distribute it peer to peer.

Much like Unix itself, git's actual software doesn't matter; it's the file format, the concepts, that change everything.

Whether they're called git or not, some amazing things will come of this.

Clojure Gitorial

This article by Larry the Liquid describes a great idea of using the Git version control system combined with the Github hosting service to present a tutorial. Each commit is like a slide in the tutorial. They can be viewed through the Github web interface, or you can clone the repository yourself using Git, enabling experimentation.

Camping

Gregory Brown wrote a nice little article on Camping, a Ruby web framework that is much smaller and simpler than Rails. Here is a quote to whet your appetite:

I realized that this was the kind of tool I was looking for. Something simple, basic, and super extendable. I’m not afraid of rolling my sleeves up, and sparse documentation isn’t enough to keep me away from code that seems cool. If you’re in the same boat, be sure to check Camping out.