H3RALD

Glyph 0.5.0 Released

Featuring Calibre integration, macro composition, Turing-completeness, and more

By Fabio Cevasco

Too much time passed since the last Glyph release. Way too much. Finally I found the time and will to tidy up the last few remaining bugs, update the docs, and release it!

This new release was mainly focused on extending the features of Glyph as a language. Besides a few improvements that make writing Glyph code easier and more readable (e.g. macro composition), Glyph is now Turing-complete. It supports iterations, recursion, variable assignments, basic arithmetics… you can even write a program to compute the factorial of an integer, if you wanted to.

Additionally, it also features enhanced content reuse through fragments and output-independent macros, and a few bugfixes.

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Book Review: The Rails 3 Way

aka The (Rails) Bible, 2nd Edition

By Fabio Cevasco

Obie did it, again. With the second edition of his former masterpiece, The Rails Way, he managed to outdo himself delivering a new, even more useful, Rails Bible. Wether you’re a Ruby on Rails professional like him or just an enthusiast, this book is pretty much everything you need to learn how to master the third release of DHH’s Ruby web framework.

The Rails 3 Way is no ordinary second edition. If you already own The Rails Way, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that this is a different, more polished book. While something had to remain the same, there’s a lot of new content in its 708 pages, and even the old content has been rewritten or at least revised.

It doesn’t matter whether you already know Rails 2.x or you’re jumping straight into the Rails 3 world, if you use Rails, you can’t miss this book.

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Book Review: Reflections on Management

The key to becoming a true leader

By Fabio Cevasco

When I was offered to review this book, I was a bit skeptical: a book on management? I normally read and review books on programming and software development methodologies. However, I work as a Documentation Technical Leader, and while I don’t technically manage a whole team yet (damn economic crisis!), someday I may end up doing just that, so I gave Reflections on Management a try.

It’s short, after all, I’ll probably read it in a couple of weeks and move on — I thought. Well, beware of short books: I thought exactly the same thing when I picked up The Elements of Style, and it still follows me around everywhere, so that I can re-read bits of it whenever I need to.

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Ruby Compendium v0.2.0 released

With up-to-date Ruby implementations, more resources, and online version

By Fabio Cevasco

The Ruby Compendium has been updated, and it now lists the most up-to-date versions of various Ruby implementatios, even more web sites, books, podcasts, and Rubyists. In addition to the PDF version, the book can now be read online here on H3RALD.com.

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Getting things done... in Wonderland!

Why Wunderlist is the only Todo List I'll ever need

By Fabio Cevasco

I don’t remember the exact day when I started using a todo list in a serious way. It definitely happened at work, but I can’t remember when exactly. The point is that, once I started working (and getting paid for what I love doing – writing), I slowly turned into a real productivity freak.

I write everything down. My colleagues know that if I say that I’ll do something right now but I don’t do it within five minutes, they have to assume that I forgot about it altogether and they’d better send me an email.

I am not a paper person. Never been one. When I got a job which consisted in working on the computer for eight hours a day, I started looking for todo list programs. That turned into an endless quest: I tried X for a few weeks, then I discovered that Y was better, used it for months, then moved onto Z, and so on.

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Introducing the Ruby Compendium

An Essential Guide to the Ruby Ecosystem

By Fabio Cevasco

Learning a programming language can be hard and time consuming. You normally have to go through a bunch of tutorials, ask questions, read books… Ruby is no exception: there are plenty of resources out there about it, but it is often hard to find what you’re looking for. So, as a weekend project, I decided to create a Ruby Compendium, a short book about the Ruby Ecosystem.

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Take back your site, with nanoc!

How I turned H3RALD.com into a 100% static, hassle-free web site

By Fabio Cevasco

Back in 2004, when I bought the h3rald.com domain, this site was static. At the time I hardly knew HTML and CSS, nevermind server-side languages, so I remember creating a pseudo-template for the web site layout and using it whenever I wanted to create a new page, to preserve the overall look-and-feel. This was a crude and inefficient strategy, of course: whenever I changed the layout I had to replicate the change in all the pages of the site – the whole eight of them.

Five years later, after rebuilding this web site seven times using different backends (PHP + CakePHP, Ruby + Rails + Typo, etc.), I decided to make it static again, this time with a twist. It all started when I read a post by Tom Preston-Warner (GitHub co-founder) that I finally decided to give it a try. Today, the 8th release of this web site is 100% static: if you load any page, there’s no server-side interpretation going on, you’re just browsing a plain HTML page, at most with a few AJAX calls. But let’s start from the beginning…

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FEATURED CONTENT

Glyph – Rapid Document Authoring Framework

A free and extensible solution for personal publishing, 100% open source!

Glyph Logo

With Glyph, creating and maintaining any kind of document becomes as easy as... programming.

Glyph enables you to minimize text duplication, focus on content rather than presentation, manage references seamlessly and automate tedious tasks through a simple but effective macro language, specifically geared towards customization and extensibility. » Read More

Herald (Vim Color Scheme)

My very own VIM color scheme. Featuring 256, 16 and 8 color support, high readability and... pretty colors!

By Fabio Cevasco

I use Vim a lot. It’s my editor of choice when I code (mainly in Ruby), and also when I write my blog post and articles (mainly in Textile).

One thing I always liked about Vim was it powerful syntax highlighting: there’s probably a syntax highlighting file for every programming language ever created, even the new ones (Nimrod? Sure, here!).

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A Firefox Lover's Guide to Opera

An in-depth review of the Opera browser, with the eyes of a Firefox enthusiast

By Fabio Cevasco

I am a Firefox fan. I’ve been using Firefox since it was named “Firebird” and calling it “stable” was a big overstatement. Firefox dragged me out of Internet Explorer, and that was definitely one of its biggest achievements.

Because I’m addicted to trying out new tools, however, I always kept testing new browsers I discovered here and there. K-Meleon, Flock, Sleipnir… When Safari came out for Windows I immediately installed it and used it for about 2 hours, only to realize that it wasn’t – and it still isn’t – usable at all, mainly due to sporadic crashes.

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10 programming languages worth checking out

A quick comparison of 10 non-mainstream programming languages

By Fabio Cevasco

If you program for fun or profit, chances are that you know C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby. These programming languages are all widely known, and, to a different degree, used in commercial applications. At least some of them can safely be considered mainstream, even if that word has become so overused and misused that has almost lost its original meaning, if it ever had one.

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10 Reasons to Learn Ruby

Ten possible reasons to learn the Ruby Programming Language

By Fabio Cevasco

I discovered Ruby fairly recently, through the excellent Ruby on Rails framework. Although I don’t consider myself a Ruby expert by any means, I read the PickAxe2, I’ve coded a few utilities for my personal use in Ruby and I’m currently developing with Rails during my free time.

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