I remember my first computer programming class clearly and with great fondness. It was Logo for the TI-99/4a. It’s funny how excited I was to make turtle graphics do silly, simple things like fly across the screen from left to right, over and over and over again.

Kids these days have it easy, right? Not like back in the day, when we had to hike uphill both ways to get to school. I took my early enthusiasm for Logo and found my way to BASIC, to LISP, around C++, through a series of web, database and scripting languages, until I finally arrived at Ruby. But now for today’s kids, Ruby is the starting point!

Hackety Hack! has set out to teach kids to program using Ruby through a series of short, conversational lessons. The lessons (seven total) are targeted at kids 13 and up. Yesterday’s turtle graphics are today’s blogs and instant message applications—which seem perfect for capturing the attention of modern teenagers. Hackety Hack! is free but only runs on Windows right now.

And just because they say it’s for kids, doesn’t mean it can’t help you learn Ruby too.

(Hat tip to Make Magazine’s Blog for the link.)

As a lead up to RailsConf 2007, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from Rails Envy filmed four videos spoofs based on the popular, “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” ads. The videos are funny and well done. Originally they promised to release one per day, but now they are holding out on the fourth so that they can premiere it at RailsConf. (Such teases.)

• #1: Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails, and I’m Java.
• #2: Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails, and I’m PHP.
• #3: Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails, and I’m PHP.
• #4: Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails, and I’m PHP.

WordPress, the popular PHP blogging application, has announced that version 2.2 is now available for download. The code name for version 2.2 is “Getz” after Stan Getz, who is pictured at left. The biggest change is that Widgets (formerly available as a plug-in) are now included in the core and in the default themes. There have also been many bug fixes, UI improvements, and optimizations.

This release is part of the WordPress team’s commitment to put out a new release every four months; which means the next release will be out in September.

The strftime function is a common way for programmers to convert a computer time into a human-readable string. You can pronounce it “string-f-time”, “string-from-time”, or “string-format-time”. While Ruby and PHP each have their own implementation, the function is actually part of the Unix open spec. That’s great news for developers because it means that we can reuse the formatting techniques in any language. I’ve also found that the Ruby/Rails docs are a little lacking and you might not have known that there were more options available. Since it’s not just for Ruby, we don’t have to rely on them as our sole source of information.

Keep reading and I’ll show you how to use strftime, give you a full list of format codes (downloadable even), and demonstrate a useful helper function for working around one of the quirks of strftime.

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Working with Rails is making a list of some of the high-profile organizations using Ruby on Rails. (HiPO is an acronym I just made up, but use it and maybe it will catch on.) Amazon, Yahoo, IBM, NASA, Cisco… The list could be helpful when you are trying to convince bosses or clients that Rails is ready for primetime.

P.S. And while you are there, you can sign in and tell them that you know me.

Are you working with PHP and Oracle? Oracle has just released an updated version (v1.4) of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual. It’s downloadable as a free PDF.

Two quick codas to yesterday’s post regarding the Microsoft-Free Software Foundation Cold War.

Wired has “Big Guns Jump on Open-Source Bandwagon for New Web Apps”, an article about how Sun, Adobe and Microsoft (cough, cough) are “starting to adopt a hybrid approach to software development that marries traditional proprietary programming practices with open-source ideals.”

O’Reilly’s blog has a post by Allison Randal about the new version of the GPL. She wishes they had tried for more clarity and simplicty instead of dense legalese.

The Fortune magazine article “Microsoft takes on the free world” has gotten a lot of press today. It’s a long article that outlines generally the history of the free and open-source software movement and in particular how Microsoft is readying for patent claims against Linux. The complete article is well-written and full of details, but I’ll attempt to sum it up for you.

Microsoft claims that Linux infringes 235 of its patents and wants royalties for what it sees as its intellectual property. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), started by Richard Stallman, wrote and maintains the GNU General Public License (GPL) which applies to Linux. The GPL requires that the software be entirely free (making royalty payments to Microsoft problematic), that the source code be open to the public and free to reuse, and, most importantly, that any software that uses GPL code also follow the same GPL terms.

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The BBC has an article covering a recent speech by Jakob Nielsen bemoaning how the rush to make “Web 2.0″ websites is distracting web firms from the basics of good design. Shiny features have trumped usability. One interesting stat in the article: 10% of a website’s users are contributors while 90% are non-contributing readers. Nielsen uses that stat to say that developers should take it easy on tools which few will use and which hurt usability for the majority.

Surprisingly, the BBC article never mentions where Nielsen was giving his talk. I believe it was at the Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week 2007 conference last week in London, the third of four week-long conferences. (Wouldn’t that make it “Usability Weeks”???) If you are interested in learning more about putting design and usabilty first, they’ll be hosting a fourth Usability Week 2007 in San Francisco from June 18-23 and tickets are still available.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the link.)

That’s the question being discussed among some prominent Drupal and WordPress developers right now. You see, the problem isn’t that they don’t love PHP, Drupal and WordPress are two of the most popular PHP applications. And both of them use PHP 4. (Null is Love is running WordPress with PHP 4.3)

The problem, they say, is that web hosting companies are reluctant to switch to new-and-improved, object-oriented PHP 5. (PHP 5 has only 17% adoption after almost 3 years.) Therefore the developers can’t roll out versions of their apps which require PHP 5. And since major applications don’t require it, the web hosting companies don’t feel any pressure to switch, especially since both PHP 4 and 5 are being supported by bug and security fixes. For them, software upgrades equals support headaches which equals time and money, so they need a compelling motivation. It’s become a chicken-and-egg problem (a.k.a. deadlock) and these PHP developers are looking for a way out.

So what to do?

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