Teaching Kids to Program

HacketyHack is a Ruby sandbox designed to teach kids how to program in a way that emphasizes speed and fun. Since I'm attempting to devour anything I can find about Ruby these days, this popped up while surfing around the various "Ruby lifestyle" sites.

Since I have a few kids of my own, I'm hopeful this will come in handy. Maybe I can get my four year old to implement a Ruby TNS listener for me.

New Job For Me

So, I've finally caught my breath.

In the last month, I've a) bought a new house, b) rented out my old house, c) moved my family 7 miles, d) suffered (with said family) some horrible bronchial infection and e) got a new position at BreakingPoint Systems, where I've been doing nothing but brush up on my practical Ruby and XML, and learn various protocol specs so that I can actually perform the job they hired me for (which is essentially modeling real-world protocol implementions in, you guessed it, Ruby and XML).

I have learned that faithfully replicating a protocol is a lot harder than merely detecting one. :)

So, now that I've caught my breath (figurative and literal -- coughing spasms really suck at 3am), I'll start posting to my dumb blog again, and try very hard to not snipe at the current round of WSJ articles with ridiculous titles about my former employer.

Oh, and I don't have a cell phone at the moment. If you think you know my phone number, you're wrong. E-mail me if you'd like to get in touch.