Programmable Nibbles

I'm playing with ecto right now as a desktop blog client. This is the first post with it. Waiting for w.bloggar to get updated, figured I might as well take another client for a spin.

Some programmer notes and blurbs:

• Programming Ruby, Second Edition shipped last week. I got my PDF on October 1st and this past Saturday the postman woke me up with the delivery of the hardcopy. Not a bad way to start the weekend.
  
• My current employer, Alexa Internet, just launched some brand-spankin' new web services (in beta) this week. Check out the information on the Alexa Web Information Service. Basically, the data you get in the Alexa Toolbar can now be fetched from us programmatically with both REST and SOAP APIs. Pretty spiffy. In my "spare time", I'm working on a library in in Ruby to make it easy to build AWIS-powered apps.
  
• Possibly my favorite blogger and Rubyist who I haven't yet met in person, why the lucky stiff recently added Chapter Five to his Poignant Guide to Ruby.
  
• Quantrix Modeler 1.2 was recently released from the folks over at Quantrix. I was testing a previous version for some analytics when I worked at a previous employer, but didn't get around to really putting it through its paces. I don't have any huge need for it these days; I'm doing most of my analytics (which are not so much a function of my job as they are a hobby, and a component of my other projects) in Excel, MATLAB, and friends. I did download and install the new trial version today, but getting it authorized was too much of a hassle just to play with the new features.
  
• Franz Allegro Common Lisp 7.0 should be released soon... lots of new features make it look pretty interesting. Maybe before November?
  
• Playing with Flickr these past few weeks. While it won't stop me from writing my own photo asset management software (eventually), it is pretty nifty. The sharing features are definitely nice, as is the simple fact of them hosting all my photos for me, rather than having any of my servers get pummeled should I take an interesting shot one of these days. The Flash UI is amazingly well done, I am seriously impressed with their use of Flash. Almost makes it feel like a rich desktop/client-side app, but with the plus-sides of the web too. I hope to get some time to play with their web services API soon as well.
  
• Jenson got back from his Arctic Cruise this Friday. Evan anounced he was resigning from Blogger/Google last night. I smell a party.