One of these has to be rubywarrior (thanks to Ritchie K. for introducing me to this one at Railcamp 7 in Canberra). Written by Railscasts stalwart Ryan Bates it’s there to teach you Ruby. And it rocks.

The scenario is that you’re a warrior that gets set a scenario each time and must write a method to get you through the scenario each time. You run the scenario and see if you’re successful.

sudo gem install rubywarrior

will get you the program installed on your machine

cd into a directory where you tend to keep your source files and run the command
rubywarrior.

Welcome to Ruby Warrior
No rubywarrior directory found, would you like to create one? [yn] y
[1] beginner
[2] intermediate
Choose tower by typing the number: 1
Enter a name for your warrior: RubyNewb
First level has been generated. See the rubywarrior/rubynewb-beginner/README for instructions.

So, cd into the rubywarrior/rubynewb-beginner/README and open it however you like to do that (textmate is best if you’re on a mac) and you’ll note it gives you a scenario and usually a hint at how to modify the play_turn method you’re responsible for to get through the scenario. You modify your player.rb file and the play_turn method, save it and then run the command rubywarrior in your directory. That runs the turns through a fun little text animation and if you are successful in completing the level you get a nice message, some points, and proceed to the next level where the README file has changed and given you a new scenario to overcome.

It’s a very simple way to learn actually and is a bit like a simple brainteaser to get through each level.

Definitely recommend it if you want to learn basic Ruby (there is also an intermiediate level available if you think you’re hot stuff) and especially if you’ve come to Ruby through learning Rails first.

Actually found it quite tricky even in languages I speak so good practice if you’re rusty, let alone learning. It even allows you different levels of difficulty. I hope it catches on across other languages like Arabic, Turkish and, ahem… Mandarin (did I mention I’d like it in Mandarin?… ).

(via Lifehacker.)

Global warming a problem? Just shave the bears.

Let’s define ‘bear shaving’ as the efforts we go to do deal with the symptoms of a problem instead of addressing the cause of the problem.

I wonder if I could start calling bear bounties at work ? Hmmm…

(via Seth’s Blog.)

Interesting comment about the primary interfaces of a lot of people moving to computers and such, but I still believe nothing really beats a book when you just want to sit and read. Course I haven’t tried a Kindle yet, but still willing to bet I’d rather go dead tree.

(via Wired News.)