The programming spirit

(tags programming, Ruby, webdev, WEBrick, dependency injection, Windows Automation, Excel)

I'm kinda getting back into the programming spirit. I'm doing some Excel and Internet Explorer integration as an experiment, so I'm trying to glue them together (at the server side) with Ruby (require "win32ole") and WEBrick. Maybe I'll have to go for Java though for interoperability and maintenance, though, as soon as I get more info about the specification.

I'm also trying to read a lot more blogs. My mind is getting blown away with "Abstraction cannot be taught" by Christian Neukirchen. Also I'm trying to wrap my brain around Needle, a dependency injection container (a related but not equivalent term is Inversion of Control). I'm considering trying Nukumi2 and Camping for a blog project.

I'm also amazed that WEBrick, the standard quick and easy web server for Ruby, can function as a proxy server. I've wanted a proxy server that I can quickly changes routes (in front of Privoxy, for instance) and maybe I can write a simple one using this article as a guide: "Make a proxy server with WEBrick for fun" (「WEBrickでプロキシサーバーを作って遊ぶ」) from the Rubyist Magazine. Great article.

Tell me when Ruby can support https easily, though. I heard it's in Ruby 1.9 (experimental). I want to backup my del.icio.us bookmarks like before.

Finally, I've been putting Ruby, Rake and some SQLite to work at generating this game score board at Shmups for Parsec47. Pretty neat. Pretty and neat. One touch post formatting, but the data input is still manual.

That's the ticket.

Actually I dread having to learn Python, Lua, Io, etc. Why can't Ruby just "win"? Then I tell myself it's just a tool, in a long line of tools that keep improving.