why's Poignant Guide To Ruby in Korean

For a double dose of language learning and kimchi breath, read the Korean translation of Poignant Guide. I haven’t yet read this particular translation, but I wonder how some of why’s humor gets through to Koreans. According to leftsider (because I simply can’t stomach watching the stuff myself), Korean comedy on film tends to focus on behaviors given a social context instead of punchlines. Will readers be compelled to procure a Blixy Tee on the mirth merits of “chunky. bacon.”? Only time will tell.

See more progress on: Learn Ruby

King Kimchi

Wow. I had no idea kimchi was this important in Korea. Graduate studies and dissertations on kimchi? A flippin' kimchi museum?

Drawing a chess board with Ruby and Cairo

So I spent the evening hacking together this little app to draw a standard chess board with some 32×32 chess piece icons from IconBuffet. Sadly, ruby-gnome2 ’s documentation is lacking with respect to Cairo, so I had to switch between using reflection to examine the instance methods of various Cairo classes and their respective C documentation. Since the results are immediate, graphics programming is usually fun. But for the first couple hours I was stumped on a handful of code that was merely supposed to draw a single line and a PNG. The app either drew nothing at all, or painted the entire surface black. I eventually traced the errors to an unnecessary scaling function call that caused things to be drawn much, much larger than normal in a clipped region. So trying to rationalize the app’s odd behavior was like driving while wearing binoculars. Nevertheless, Cairo is cleanly designed and powerful. I look forward to messing around with it some more.

Next up is refactoring this simple do-nothing app into a full-fledged widget and by then I’ll have a good enough grasp of the differences between Cairo’s Ruby bindings and the C API to rewrite Davyd Madeley’s excellent GNOME Journal articles on writing Cairo-based GTK widgets (of which there already exists Pythonized versions).

See more progress on: master Ruby

rabbits => plinkety plink

I played classical piano from when I was five for a little over six years. Ever since I stopped performing at recitals, I found myself dabbling on some set of keys every other month or so. But music-related goals are taking a forefront this summer and I need to get my chops back soon. So last night I started working on sight-reading and relearning old sonatas and such. Apparently I lost those particular brain wrinkles b/c it was a bitch. I still had the finger dexterity to play intermediate pieces but there was simply no connection between the score and my hands.

See more progress on: play piano better

Untitled

43Things’ cheers > MySpace friends. Go figure.

See more progress on: Give 200 cheers