Hashes are now ordered. This really shouldn’t cause problems for you, since the order of hashes in 1.8 are not to be trusted. You may want to consider an alternate implementation of OrderedHash once you go to 1.9 so eliminate unnecessary work.

Object now has a superclass, BasicObject. You should checkout the Pickaxe for the reasons behind this, but it’s important that you don’t rely on Object.superclass being nil.

The grammar for single line if statements has changed. Specifically, then is now the blessed form. The : form has been removed.

The retry command has been removed from looping. It is still available for exception handling, though. I doubt anybody here really used this. Don’t start.

The scoping rules for blocks have changed. This is probably the most likely to bite you because it’s an easy thing to miss. The change is that, in 1.9, block parameters are always private to the block. The best way to protect yourself from this is to never share a local variable name with a block parameter name.

If all 6.5 billion humans on Earth were programming, and every second, each one was producing code that was the equivalent of the entire Linux kernel history (1 million Git objects) and pushing it into one enormous Git repository, it would take 5 years until that repository contained enough objects to have a 50% probability of a single SHA-1 object collision. A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.

Good enough for me. The book also discusses what will happen in the event of a collision, but it’s less interesting.

I just discovered I Love Stars from Potion Factory, which is a simple app for making it easy to rate your music in your iTunes library. The best way I’ve found to rate my music is to do so while it’s playing. I Love Stars makes it easy to do so without needing to remember to pull up iTunes every three and a half minutes.

John Resig wrote about the disappearance:

_why – even in his code – was eccentric, humorous, cute, and whimsical. He relished his ability to express his art and was extremely good at it, at the same time.

Underlying the layer of whimsy that permeated his work there was a more serious tone: expression, simplicity, and education. In all of his code, and writing, he was constantly trying to find ways to bring the art of hacking to more people – to younger people – to simplify the complexities that normally permeate development.

The thing I learned during that is that tools that are so integral to how everybody works are not easy to replace. Many people would rather use something that’s holding them back than learn something new. There’s also the issue of stability, maturity, and workflow integration. Being generally pleased with Subversion, and it being so well accepted now, I’d become skeptical of all of these new hotness systems all the cool kids had started using. I figured that, even if they’re marginally better in the way that SVN is better than CVS, it’s not worth the battle.

Last year, I was working on a contract for a company that used git. I bought the very excellent Peepcode introduction to git and was immediately floored with what I saw. Git has changed the way I work in a manner as significant as moving from file based version control to CVS. There’s a new freedom to quickly experiment or completely change directions without the fear of the merge.

Today, I manage a codebase that always has several simultaneous lines of development. I feel more agile. I’m more willing to take on large refactoring projects without fearing what will happen if they’re interrupted by some other task. Since it’s so easy to setup a local repository (git init), a much larger percentage of things I work on are versioned. Features like stashing and partial file commits make it easy to switch context without fear or losing work or dirtying commits.

If you haven’t tried git yet, you should. Take 45 minutes and watch the Peepcode video. You can easily create a shared repository on github. Give it a try.

But github isn’t what I want to talk about today. Today, I’m going to talk about gist. Gist is a new pasting service from the good folks at Github. For those of you unfamiliar with what that means, a pasting service is a tool for posting snippets of code or plain text quickly and easily online for sharing. I use this service regularly for sending someone an example of how to do something that would be too cumbersome to type into my chat client. It’s also extremely useful for posting snippets of code up when asking for help on a message board or IRC channel.

What makes gist special over many of the other pasting services I’ve used before – aside from its clever name – is that it’s based on git. Each gist(pasting) is actually a mini git repository that you can clone(checkout) and make changes to, etc. It’s a very clever idea, and quite useful.

Another really sweet feature of gist is that the site provides javascript based embedable tags that you can drop into your own websites that will display the code snippets, properly formatted and with syntax highlighting. Getting sample source code to look good on this site has been something I’ve struggled with since I first started blogging. I’ve used all kinds of formatting plugins, used features in TextMate that produce a nice result but use an insanely unmanageable amount of markup. I’ve even just posting links to other pasting services before.

This is so much easier:

Product Page
App Store

If you like this library, but find that it doesn’t quite do what you need, please feel free to fork and modify. I’ll be happy to incorporate any additions that others will find useful.

Checkout Scrolbox.js on github

I don’t think touch computing is going to replace the mouse just yet, and we’re certainly not ready to give up our keyboards, but hasn’t the time come for us to be able to touch our screens. If you can find somebody who’s never used or observed a computer before, sit them down in front of your machine. Ask them to click on something or move a window. I’ll bet you they don’t reach for the mouse. The most natural way to interact with the spacial metaphor of windows is to touch them.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sporting dual thirties or a svelte thirteen point three, chances are, you’re using all of the real estate and more. Far too much time is spent moving panels around to get what you want in front of you. The mouse is just not the right tool for the job. It’s too limited. You have to find the point you want to drag, find your pointer, move your pointer to the point you want to drag, then move the window. The problem is even worse for drag/resize maneuvers. Studies have shown that there is a marked productivity increase associated with having a larger display. This is because it reduces the amount of time you have to spend organizing your windows.

Styluses suck. We don’t need them. They’re not the answer. We need sexy glass surfaces that respond to our fingers in the most natural way possible. Apple has already taught us several multi-touch gestures with the iPhone. There’s no reason they can’t translate directly to the OS X windowing system. Touch and drag to move windows. Pinch to resize. Tap to click. That’s all we need to start with. From there, you can expose the stuff to the application and let apps do clever things or do nothing.

The world is ready. We have the technology. Let us have it.

The new “avatars” feature sure seems a whole lot like Nintendo’s Mii functionality. The major difference is that Microsoft’s version seems to be much less flexible. It looks like you’ll be buying new outfits to customize your characters. So, the gamer pictures you just purchased are now unusable, but Microsoft is generously providing new worthless content for you to buy. I never actually spent money on this content, but it’s very upsetting to see Microsoft just nuke paid content without providing the user with any options.

The one feature I’m happy to see as part of the new update is integration with Netflix. It will be nice to have an easy way to use the Netflix streaming functionality on my TV.