FreeMind

Some time back while browsing for something completely different I found this application called FreeMind. As it turns out I converted most of my text files into FreeMind mind maps and haven't turned back since =).

I love the way you can move nodes to change the tree structure and hide nodes you don't want to see. Or the feature where you can link to other FreeMind documents, web addresses and folders and have them open as you would expect them to.

Another neat thing is if you want to export the data to plain tab-structured text, you just copy-paste from the tree.

I'd recommend anyone who has to keep notes (for projects, studies, ... anything really), to go and check out FreeMind at http://freemind.sourceforge.net.

First impressions: Ruby

People have been talking a lot about Ruby... and I haven't actually heard anything bad about it this far. And I like good things :), so I decided to try it out.

To start with many recommended this site: http://tryruby.hobix.com. And it's great except I never got past the File.copy section, seemed a bit buggy.

I'm quite used to C and C++ so I found To Ruby From C and C++ interesting. After reading that I went on to go trough the official Quickstart.

The best learning resource I've found this far would be Learning Ruby.

The .chm of "Programming Ruby" included in the Ruby documentation isn't bad either.

The way of installing a Ruby environment is generally said to be the One-Click Ruby Installer. It's a pack containing ruby, libraries, docs and the gem packet manager (and more). Never did get the included FreeRIDE to work (no output). SciTE and the Ruby In Steel plugin to VS2005 worked about equally as good (colors, no auto-completion).

As I'm on my way to becoming a .NET programmer I'm of course interested in the Ruby.NET project, and I've tried their beta version with some small programs. I'm a bit interested in using it for scripting, but I'll probably end up with Boo for that (as that language is written for .NET to begin with).

One of the best uses I've found this far for Ruby is with ruby-on-rails and I'm definitely going to try making a site with ruby-on-rails someday.

So.. what are my first impressions of Ruby?

I'd say it's about the same as I had with Perl or Python: it's fast and easy to write small applications but I miss the robust feeling of C++ or C#. However, you should certainly use the right tools for the job at hand so you'll never know when it might be usefull :).

Welcome to my blog =)

I've been thinking of creating some kind of homepage for myself, but it never really got further than that :). Some friends of mine started getting blogs and I like the simplicity of it all. This blog is intended to be about the tech side of my life. My intention is to use this blog to post information on various projects I'm working on and write about useful things I find as I keep myself updated on programming and technology in general.