’Twas Brillig*

These are my links for April 30th through May 15th:

• gwap.com - Home -
• Univeral Resource Identifiers — Axioms of Web architecture -
• Railscasts - Free Ruby on Rails Screencasts -
• Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? -
• DanNorth.net » What?s in a Story? -

The library thing blog mentions this meme:

The meme of unread books

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done - when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

Later versions of the meme use an asterisk to indicate books read multiple times and underline books you want to read.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
• Anna Karenina (132)
• Crime and punishment (121)
• Catch-22 (117)
• One hundred years of solitude (115)
• Wuthering Heights (110)
• The Silmarillion (104)
• Life of Pi : a novel (94)
• The name of the rose (91)
• Don Quixote (91)
• Moby Dick (86)
• Ulysses (84) - I used to joke about Ulysees with a guy from work, since we’d both bought copies and neither one of us had been able to finish it
• Madame Bovary (83)
• The Odyssey* (83)
• Pride and prejudice (83)
• Jane Eyre (80)
• A tale of two cities* (80)
• The brothers Karamazov (80)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
• War and peace (78)
• Vanity fair (74)
• The time traveler’s wife (73)
• The Iliad (73)
• Emma (73)
• The Blind Assassin (73)
• The kite runner (71)
• Mrs. Dalloway (70)
• Great expectations (70) - I absolutely hate this book, although I’ve read it twice, I revisited it a few years ago to see if my opinion had changed.
• American gods (68)
• A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
• Atlas shrugged (67)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
• Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
• Middlesex (66)
• Quicksilver (66)
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
• The Canterbury tales (64)
• The historian : a novel (63)
• A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
• Love in the time of cholera (62)
• Brave new world (61)
• The Fountainhead (61)
• Foucault’s pendulum (61)
• Middlemarch (61)
• Frankenstein (59)
• The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
• Dracula (59)
• A clockwork orange* (59)
• Anansi boys (58)
• The once and future king*(57)
• The grapes of wrath (57)
• The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
• 1984 (57)
• Angels & demons (56)
• The inferno (56)
• The satanic verses (55)
• Sense and sensibility (55)
• The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
• Mansfield Park (55)
• One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
• To the lighthouse (54)
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
• Oliver Twist (54)
• Gulliver’s travels (53)
• Les misérables (53)
• The corrections (53)
• The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
• The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
• Dune* (51)
• The prince (51)
• The sound and the fury (51)
• Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
• The god of small things (51)
• A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
• Cryptonomicon (50)
• Neverwhere (50)
• A confederacy of dunces (50)
• A short history of nearly everything (50)
• Dubliners (50)
• The unbearable lightness of being (49)
• Beloved (49)
• Slaughterhouse-five (49)
• The scarlet letter (48)
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
• The mists of Avalon (47)
• Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
• Cloud atlas (47)
• The confusion (46)
• Lolita (46)
• Persuasion (46)
• Northanger abbey (46)
• The catcher in the rye (46)
• On the road (46)
• The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
• Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values* (45) - This is perhaps my favourite book ever although it was borrowed a year or so back and not yet returned.
• The Aeneid (45)
• Watership Down (44)
• Gravity’s rainbow (44)
• The Hobbit* (44)
• In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
• White teeth (44)
• Treasure Island (44)
• David Copperfield (44)
• The three musketeers (44)

These are my links for April 23rd through April 30th:

• TIBCO Developer Network - TIBCO Business Studio? - I've spent a couple of days learning about SOA and BPM from TIBCO and this is free - so I might take a look.
• Tom ten Thij's homepage: RSpec plain text story runner on a fresh rails app - story_runner - now that's what I was looking for.
• Developing a Rails model using BDD and RSpec, Part 1 ? Luke Redpath - bit out of date - but it has given me ideas
• Basic Instructions: Let no wall go un "papered" - Basic Instructions Wallpaper
• ThinkGeek :: Optimus Maximus Keyboard - OMG!!!!! WTF!!!!!! LOL!!!!!!!!! Sorry I can't think of anything sensible to say about this.

FreeRice is a free web based game that I play everyday. It is a simple, yet slightly addictive, vocabulary game which via the wonder of web advertising (I’ve actually done the unusual and disabled Adblock Plus for the site) results in rice shipments via the UN World Food Program.

It has 55 levels and after ages hanging around levels 45 to 48 I’ve just achieved level 50.

These are my links for April 18th through April 22nd:

• Learning Rails free online course for learning to build web applications with Ruby on Rails -
• Cotton Expressions - Miracle - "Then a miracle occurs" T-shirt
• Basic User Authentication in Rails -
• Inanimate Alice -
• stackoverflow -

Hmmm, I’d better post something before we’re overrun by del.icio.us posts.

I’ve been putting in lots of overtime, and as a result not been playing much. I need to finish Galaxy, but the remaining levels are going to need a lot of practice - mainly the long jump which I seem to always mistime. In Puzzle Quest I’ve headed up to an area populated by minotaurs, #1 has also started playing (the game allows two saves) so I may eventually get him hooked on RPGs.

These are my links for April 13th through April 15th:

• Ruby-Doc.org: Documenting the Ruby Language -
• Ruby Tutorial: Ruby Study Notes - Best Ruby Guide, Ruby Tutorial -
• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby -
• try ruby! (in your browser) -
• Ruby Programming Language -
• Version Control with Subversion -
• RegExr: Online Regular Expression Testing Tool -
• Rubular: a Ruby regular expression editor -
• Regular Expression Library -
• Getting Started - Google App Engine - Google Code -

These are my links for April 9th from 08:12 to 10:14:

• TwitterTools plug-in for WordPress -
• Super Mario in 14kb Javascript - Not complete, but still amazing

These are my links for April 4th through April 8th:

• The Escapist : Master Chief in Sneakers: Making Life Not Suck - Why life should sometimes be approached like a video game
• Shifting Mind » Postalicious -
• User Friendly Comic: 2008-04-06 -
• Flickr: Help: Guest Pass -
• Coding Horror: Setting up Subversion on Windows - Best coding horror post in ages and I think it may have a fix for a tortoise SVN problem I've been having
• Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet - Cheat Sheets - ILoveJackDaniels.com -
• AT&T Global Network Client no longer works after installing Virtual PC 2004 -

I’ve captured a Wolf Rider (which I found much harder than I should have) and a scorpion (which was insultingly easy). I’ve also completed lots of side quests for an ogre named Drong; he is one hungry ogre and so far has eaten spider, “crazy” goblin and ice troll meat and now wants me to get some wyvern meat for him.