FLOSS Weekly 27: Ward Cunningham is, in my opinion, the best episode of FLOSS Weekly so far. Which I can say without guessing, because I listend to them all.
Part of my excitement is probably the fact that the things that Ward Cunningham has contributed are what I am pursuing to propagate at may dayjob right [...]

If you are a Perl professional and you feel that the way you and your co-workers use Perl is not entirely flawless, Tim Bunce’s slides about Perl myths are a must-read for you.
I stumbled over it, read the first few pages and greedily slurped it to the end. These slides contain some nice-to-know Perl details [...]

I am currently unable to use the visual editor in wordpress. I first ran into the problem in my default browser, which happens to be Firefox. After a few futile attempts to load the editor, I gave IE a try. It didn’t load either, but I discovered a funny link at the bottom of the [...]

A few weeks ago I joined Goodreads. A few days ago I installed a wordpress plugin that displays three of the books on my ‘currentl reading’ shelf. This plugin uses the RSS features delivered with wordpress. It fetches the feed belonging to the shelf, grabs the first three items and displays them in my sidebar.
I [...]

if can be used to build expressions, so you can use it for conditional assignments.
variable =
  if condition
    if_value
  else
    else_value
Even using operators is basically calling methods. So 3 * 2 + 1 can be [...]

Here’s a both entertaining and interesting introductory lesson about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This guy seems to really know what he’s talking about. I already put the book on my wishlist. I guess he could make his point clear with a little less jumping around on stage, but if that’s his preferred way of [...]

Names of boolean methods are usually suffixed with a question mark.
Names of methods used to set values are usually suffixed with an equals sign.
Within a method body you can determine whether a block was passed by calling, guess what, block_given?.

Putting a minus between the << and the string terminator allows heredocs to be indented.
The string class provides two alternatives of several methods. One that returns a modified string and another that changes the string in-place. The latter is then suffixed with an exclamation mark.
 

A block passed to a method after the regular parameter list can be invoked by saying yield.

20 chapters of Python should be a foundation solid enough to let me start learning yet another language without mixing the new knowledge up. Well, at least I am gonna give it a try. So here’s what I found out while reading Programming Ruby.

When overriding a method in a subclass, the keyword super suffices on [...]