This post is a slightly edited version of the BarnCamp 2011 blog post, which appeared on New Internationalist's tech blog. I am a big fan of the BarnCamp.I first went along to what was then called the Hacktionlabin 2009, and found a unique combination of stunningly gorgeouscountryside, …

It all looked so easy, especially after the monster list of assignments on Io, day two. Well, appearances can be deceptive it seems. The place where I got stuck was on question three. Try as I might I couldn't override the colon operator as I wanted to do. It worked fine on the commandline. No pr …

Backtrack Linux has become increasingly useful to me over the last few months. The latest release Backtrack 5 came out on 10 May, so I, of course wanted to have a play. Just a little background on Backtrack. Its specifically aimed at security professionals and hackers and has everything that you …

Update: Now this uses my new TwitRSS.me tool. Please donate and keep TwitRSS.me online.User: With replies?:   Love it or loathe it, it looks like Twitter is likely to remain an important part of the infrastructure of the interwebs for some time. Bac …

Wow. Day two messed with my head. I woke up a bit tired this morning to have a crack at it and got really baffled by how to make a fibonacci sequence. Just drew a total blank. So, I dug out some old c code I had and copied that into io. Which is sort of cheating, but got me going and also helped …

After getting Io installed, I am feeling a little smug with myself. I don't know if its just because the language is so different, or because I’ve had a beer or what but the Io introductory material seems more complex than that for Ruby. However, looking back at what was covered I suspect tha …

Well, it has been a while since Ruby, so I thought it was time to have a crack at the next of the my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks challenges, its time to play with Io. As it turns out Io was a bit of a faff to install on Debian Squeeze. So I’ve written up a day 0 tute on how to do just th …

There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of learning. One is never going to be proficient at any lan …

The last day is definitely the most fun. We get to play with metaprogramming with one bigger question, of which more shortly. My reflections on Ruby were it was cool to catch up with the language. I’d sort of forgotten quite how nifty it was to play with. For my money its more Perlish than th …

The second day of Ruby picks up the pace a bit, mostly focussing on the nice bits of sugar that Ruby provides and the excercises give you a chance to play with them a bit. Find out how to access files with and without blocks.#!/usr/bin/ruby -w# without blockcou …