I’ve been writing a lot of Ruby code at home lately, and the next Cyberdelia podcast (when I get around to editing and releasing the episode) is about Ruby too. Some of this is a matter of circumstances, and some of it has been a deeper thinking about how I’ve been approaching my personal software projects.

Earlier today I did a code review and saw my coworker using Array.new to create an empty array. This gives the same return value as the literal constructor []. But are they the same internally?

This is one of the protocols that I’m kind of surprised isn’t in more use, by virtue of its simplicity in implementation. RFC 865 is a layer 7 debugging RFC where a socket listens for a TCP or UDP connection, and then sends a short, arbitrary message.

I’ve been playing a lot with Sinatra lately, and so far I’m pretty impressed with it. It works wonderfully for small operations, but there’s a few creature comforts missing, and one of them is internationalization (i18n for short). Fortunately, it’s possible to use the ‘i18n’ gem (which is used in Rails) to accomplish this.