Technology of 2008
At the end of this year I changed my cell phone to be an android. Welcome to the 21st century! I deliberately didn't get an iphone in 2007, and so this year had to decide between the iphone and the android. I went for the technoogy that was open source, of course. But honestly another reason was the keyboard. I have dry fingers, and I swear it makes them a little less conductive and so makes touch screens a little more irritating for me. With the android I can use physical qwerty if need be. Anyway, the android is just awesome. With 2 buttom presses I can scan a book at a used book store, the app(shop savvy) will then automatically look up that book on line and give me its price at all known online retailers as well as all local stores. I can then either use my phone to buy the book online, or use my phone to get a map from my current location to any of the local retailers. I can watch rock videos on youtube. I can use it as a level, a astrolabe, a GPS device, a graphing calculator, a strobe light, a complete set of polyhedral dice, and of course email, text messaging, web browsing, mp3 player, etc. etc.. I plan to write an app for it that makes it into a (fake) tricorder so that I can determine how breathable the atmosphere is and whether there is a large, fast moving alien coming my way.
I taught myself ruby this year to the extent that I was able to write highly modular and configurable distributed test framework in the language. I find ruby more elegant than python, though not quite as well supported. If it were as well supported as perl, it would be the total end all of interpreted weakly typed languages.
I also wrote a number of interesting things in python and perl, the hardest of which was a perl module for windows that looks at the perfmon NIC statistics and lets you read them into your perl program. Perl is soooo 90s though.
I taught myself ruby this year to the extent that I was able to write highly modular and configurable distributed test framework in the language. I find ruby more elegant than python, though not quite as well supported. If it were as well supported as perl, it would be the total end all of interpreted weakly typed languages.
I also wrote a number of interesting things in python and perl, the hardest of which was a perl module for windows that looks at the perfmon NIC statistics and lets you read them into your perl program. Perl is soooo 90s though.