It’s been a while. :) So, I ended up buying a Mac Mini, and last week I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs so I’m sitting pretty well right now. (With the original 512 megs the Mini had at first, things were dog slow, especially when I tried to run Photoshop or InDesign. But now it’s quite fast. I am happy. :))

In other news, at work I’ve been coding a board game in Flash. It’s effectively my first Flash project ever (years and years ago I edited a company map in Flash, but it was so long ago that I can hardly remember it, and I was only maintaining it, so it doesn’t really count). Flash is smooth. I’m not completely satisfied with ActionScript, but it certainly works well enough, and I’m sure more experience with it will make it better. Overall, my time with Flash has been good and fun.

Finally, I’m hoping to get back into more Ruby/Python/Perl coding before too long. My new job’ll require some XML magic, for which I’ll probably use Python and XSLT. And in my typographical work on the side I’ll be doing a lot with TeX and either Ruby or Python.

All of which is to say, hopefully I’ll start blogging here more often. :)

Lately, the need to finish these major projects at work before I switch jobs at the end of August has turned most of my coding time (well, all of it right now) into ASP.NET time. Blech. It’s okay, I suppose, and it could be worse (COBOL, anyone?), but I miss Ruby on Rails. Soon, Ben, soon. :)

In the meantime, the library finally got me Agile Web Development with Rails via ILL. I’ve been waiting a while for it. :) Just reading about Rails makes me happy. (Speaking of which, I must be behind on my Rails blog reading. Maybe I’ll do that for a while today… :))

Another little project I’ll do sometime soon is convert my Perl etext script into Ruby (it takes Project Gutenberg texts and preps them for InDesign by removing extra blank lines, removing newlines, replacing two hyphens with an em-dash, etc.). It can’t be that hard — it’s 15 lines long :) — and it’d be a nice back-to-Ruby project to tide me over until all this work stuff is finished.

Speaking of which, I really, really, really wish I could write this extraction web app in Rails instead of ASP.NET. I could get it done sooooo much faster, and I’d be happier. But the rest of the site is in ASP.NET and I’d have to get the sysadmins to install Rails on the server and it’d probably be too much trouble. ~sigh~ Oh well — only one more month of it, and then it’s goodbye forever to .NET. Period. :)

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