From: Michael Fellinger <m.fellinger@...>
Date: 2008-06-15T12:18:39+09:00
Subject: Re: What was YOUR first Ruby Project

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Eric Hegwer <ehegwer@mac.com> wrote:
> I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
> Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough)  side project that you
> decided to take on?

My first encounter with ruby was on a sailing boat cruise along the
coast of croatia, I had my trusty old notebook with me and it was
running gentoo, we used it for music and videos but only had power
when the generator was running (around 3-4h a day) at which time i
recharged.
To get most out of the notebook i decided to take advantage of the
multimedia buttons on the outside, but had no idea how that could be
done. I mostly knew PHP back then, but had heard of python and ruby
and installed some docs and the interpreters, part of the docs was the
old copy of the pickaxe, and while the python docs more or less
freaked me out with their spacey code i found the ruby one very much
read/understandable and started reading about IO, finally found that
when i cat /proc/acpi/events i would get the key codes for the
multimedia buttons and finally wrote a script (must've been 200 lines
or so) of overly complicated if/else statements that hooked onto a
simple IO.open/read. for controlling the actual multimedia i used
xmmsctrl.
Ruby version must've been something like 1.8.2.
Didn't do anything else with Ruby for another year after this, but got
poked by the hype around rails and subsequently learned Nitro.

^ manveru