Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Right now, I'm teaching myself some ruby.  I've mucked with it in the past, but I've decided to pursue increasing my python, ruby, c/c++ skills.  i'm pretty satisfied with my php skills now.  i just need to figure out how to use CakePHP eventually and I'll be set.  With ruby, I just got through basic inheritance and some simple string manipulation.  Syntactically, I like Ruby more than PHP, but I'm extremely used to coding in PHP now.  However, the syntactic sugar of Ruby is slowly drawing me in.  Lots of shortcuts rather than elongated function names.  I hope to get to Rails sometime in the next few months.  Eventually, I'd like to put together a simple Rails application just for fun.  Maybe I'll build my own music/movie organizer AJAX website.  The same with Python in terms of getting into it for fun.  I'm not a big fan of Python's syntax compared with Ruby, but Google's use of it along with Zope look like compelling reasons to give it a try.

I'm not as sure what to do with c/c++ in terms of a project.  I always wanted to participate in building some KDE project.  Not sure what yet.

Got some cool chances to work with a few new toys at work.  Got Samba to work (finally!)  It's nice being able to go between my Kubuntu system and my laptop running XP Pro and copying files over transparently.

Setup a Subversion repository with WebDav.  I want to get a better bug track system or something that'll tie into Subversion.  My friend suggested a site for this, but I don't like the fact that they use their own login system.  I want a centralized login system that utilizes the same data.  Don't want to have to hack a system for this purpose.

Also, worked a bit with Phing.  Phing is like Ant for PHP.  Only they're still generations behind in terms of support.  I had to write a bunch of my own plugins.  But that's the cool thing with it.  Maybe I might contribute to Phing in terms of adding my plugins to their repository.

Lastly, I've worked with this gzip'd compressed XML data unix set of command tools called Musashi.  It was a major bitch to set up.  But I wrote wrappers in PHP to be able to interface with the tool.  Not native, but still good enough for now.