The distributed Git version control system has been gaining a lot of traction lately. In contrast to traditional, centralized version control systems like CVS or Subversion, Git enables developers to easily fork each other’s repositories, pull patches from each other, etc. Even though I have not had a chance to use Git beyond pulling down some open source projects (such as Merb), it is clear that this enables much richer collaboration and development dynamics....
This morning, Apple finally announced details about the long-awaited iPhone SDK. The SDK is available for download starting today, and it sounds pretty intriguing! It comes with a full application stack that includes a custom version of Cocoa (Cocoa Touch), and APIs to access all the iPhone specific features, including hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, the accelerometer, camera, contacts, as well as location-awareness. This sounds a lot more complete that I expected....
I was deeply saddened to find out that Gary Gygax passed away today, after struggling with health issues for several years. Gary Gygax co-created the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and thereby invented the entire role-playing game genre. Like any good geek, I grew up playing role-playing games during my teens. Even though we did not actually play that much D&D in particular, all the RPGs we played were directly descended from it, and none of them would exist without Gary Gygax....
A short story about how the music industry has changed (though not all of them have recognized this yet). Earlier this evening, a Twitter message alerted me to the Ghosts instrumental album that was released by Nine Inch Nails today, completely announced. I had been curious about Trent Reznor’s plans, as he had previously voiced his discontent with (and freedom from) the music industry. So when I checked out Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts website, I was not disappointed....
Today, I attended a tech talk by ThoughtWorks’ Ola Bini on JRuby (JRuby Wikipedia entry here). I keep hearing great things about JRuby (even Matz has good things to say about it), and it’s nice to hear this from the horse’s mouth as well (Ola is one of the JRuby core developers). Apparently the latest version is highly compatible with Ruby 1.8.6, although applications that use native C extensions are not supported....