Rails for Zombies is an intriguing attempt to teach people how to use Ruby on Rails directly in the Web browser. It comes from Envy Labs (and specifically Gregg Pollack, once of RailsEnvy fame).

Over on the Ruby Best Practices blog, Robert Klemme walks through the process of building a new numeric class from scratch in Ruby - taking into account all the gotchas and considerations that pop up

Toto ^{(GitHub repo)} is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata.

With Roger Federer’s recent win of the 2009 French Open, he is now tied with Pete Sampras for holding the most Grand Slam titles — fourteen. Although the two athletes have arrived at the same destination, how do their respective journeys compare with one another? With this question fueling my curiosity, I set out to create a rich visualization of the data to add some depth to this story.

The final product is available as follows. For additional notes about the techniques used to create these graphs, keep on reading.

While on a recent plane ride, I embarked on a self-imposed quickfire challenge to use Adobe Illustrator to design the text “@davidpots” (my Twitter username) in the style of the Washington Capitals logo. I was armed with only 45 minutes and a vector version of the Capitals logo; no internet connection would be at hand for additional assets (such as fonts, etc).

By the end of the plane ride, things worked out great: