This morning I turned on my iPod after not having used it over the weekend, and I was surprised to find that it had been completely erased, as if I had restored it to factory settings using the iPod updater. It prompted me to select my language, I had to re-enter all my settings, and all my songs and podcasts were gone. I had used my iPod on Friday without any problems, and I hadn’t used it since then and not even plugged into my PC or anything....

The Pragmatic Programmers have published another Ruby book: “Learn to Program”, by Chris Pine. The book is intended for new or non-programmers and teaches programming from the ground up - variables, flow control, and everything. It’s nice to see Ruby move even more into the mainstream, and this book looks like a great introduction for new programmers.

I just realized that it’s been a little over a year since I pretty much permanently switched from Windows to Linux! I had been using Linux on and off over the past 10 years or so, but it wasn’t until a year ago that I seriously ditched Windows in favor of Linux. On December 30, 2004 I blogged about my Gentoo installation, which I had completed the week before. I kept Windows as a dual boot option, but these days I pretty much never boot Windows any more....

I just added another external hard drive to my Linux system, and now I’m wondering about a few potential issues. At this point I have one permanently attached external hard drive, one backup hard drive that I only hook up occasionally, my iPod (which I mostly use on my Windows laptop because I don’t want to miss out on iTunes, but which I want to be able to occasionally hook up to my Linux box to transfer files, etc....

Koders is a very cool source code search engine. It indexes many open source projects and covers a wide range of programming languages, including of course Java and Ruby, but also more obscure languages. Clicking on a search result brings up a very nice syntax highlighted version of the source code. Many elements in the source code (such as other class names within Java code) are themselves clickable and bring up the search results for the selected element....