This was one great weekend ! Easter should be more often than once a year, I guess. Unlike Christmas, there was no shopping craziness before and much less overeating danger. Not counting overdose of chocolate, of course, but that's OK. I managed do mostly nothing for about one day - up to Friday evening. Then I dived into the Ruby and Ruby on Rails world. After reading this and one third of this book, I like Ruby even more.

I have decided to take weekend off. No catching up, no work, no stress. And it will be a proper weekend - 4 days long in total because both Friday and Monday are statutory holidays in Thinknostic. Great opportunity to relax, decompress, catch up on some reading and audio books and do something fun. And maybe gettogether with friends and celebrate Vlad's birthday. After all, the 28H is not every year :-)

.NET 2.0 offers very rich and nicely designed library of core data structures, collections and algorithms. Occasionaly, you run into situation when you need something not in there. Before starting to design you very own extension of LinkedList or HashTable, look into interesting open-source project NGenerics - chances are you will find it there. It contains quite a few new data structures: Association Bag BinaryTree BinarySearchTree Deque GeneralTree Graph HashList Heap Matrix ObjectMatrix PascalSet PriorityQueue ReadOnlyPropertyList RedBlackTree SkipList SortedList extensions of existing data structures to work with Visitor pattern

I guess it is too early to write any more systematic opinion about the language you know less than 10 days, but after reading the Programming Ruby 2nd edition (thank you, Safari Books) I have found out that I actually do like couple of Ruby features a lot. Your mileage may vary - what speaks here is my Java/C#/C++/C/Python/Perl background and bias. Here there are my favorite Ruby-isms (so far) in no particular order:

Today I have started the walking season 2007. I did some gentle preparation during the week - few short, 4-5 km strolls around the neighbourhood, but it was today when I really started. It was beautiful day in Ottawa - sunny, temperature around 8-10, so I took off and did 12 km loop through Westboro, down south and around Dow's Lake up to downtown. Just fantastic. The companion on the road were Security Now!