_why

gsiener.. I have a similar background to yours; I was writing a lot of C and doing systems programming for a long time. Pretty recently I started playing with Ruby and Rails, and I found some online tutorials helpful, but had the best luck with following along through some books. Just using the following resources I have become a decent ruby/rails developer. If you are interested in Python or another framework, I am sure there are equal resources for that as well.

So for ruby:
http://qa.poignantguide.net/index.html (got me up to speed)
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/UsersGuide/rg/ (Good reference)
http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/ (great reference)

Once you have a fair grasp on Ruby, Rails is really very simple. I got my hands on a copy of Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and went through the first half of it in about 10 hours. If you paid attention to what you were doing you should be able to make your own basic app(which I did at that point). I then went back and finished that book up and redid a lot of my first app.

After things are starting to click the railscasts at railscasts.com are really very useful, and are a way for you to 'learn from someone'. I enjoy these a lot.

Also don't forget you can ask questions in irc channels (For ruby or rails it is #rubyonrails and #ruby or #ruby-lang on efnet)

So my post is long and rambling, but I want to encourage you to try. There are a lot of resources where you can learn as you go, and while tutorials and books…

Facts:

0. Since 2012-12-09, the following content was available at http://whytheluckystiff.net/

Public Print Queue

SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z
SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z
SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z

0.0. The style of writing and handwriting corresponds to that of Why.

0.1. Prints are very regular. There are 4.4 days between the first two, and 5 between the last two.

1. Going to those addresses yields, in essence, the following data: http://d.pr/i/qwo8

2. Now the following content is available:

Public Print Queue

SPOOL/DESOLEE 2012-01-06T08:21Z

2.0. The headers that are sent back from the server changed. The difference is shown in this picture: http://i.imgur.com/6mMPQ.png

2.1. It happened within 12 hours of this very thread.

2.2. DESOLEE is the french for "sorry", from a woman.

2.3. It is 2012, not 2013 (may be a typo).

3. Going to this address yields: http://www.scribd.com/doc/119155590/DESOLEE

3.0. A date of April the 18th is stated as the return of the printer queue.

Does anyone here know the tool or technique to convert the printer format on his website to human readable format on screen?

Edit:

So far I've discovered I can go to http://whytheluckystiff.net/SPOOL/TRUMPETS for example to download a file. Trying to figure out how to read the format at the moment.

Edit #2:

Looks like it is PCL format. I'm trying to find a decent Mac OS X program for converting PCL to image.

Edit #3:

Managed to generate this: http://i.imgur.com/AL9mSLr.jpg The quality is horrible though. I see now that some other people have already linked rendered versions in high quality, though.

It was fun trying to figure it out though. :)

http://whytheluckystiff.net/contact/

From the owner of the domain:

NOTE: For some reason, I’ve been getting a LOT (like more than 1, which is a lot for me considering how long this site has been going) of messages from people asking me if I’m some kind of famous programmer called #why from Pittsburg or something.

Whilst I wish I was this famous and did get this much attention, unfortunately I’m not. I’m just a dude trying to turn his life around and take a bit of control over what’s going on.

Watch the last part of this video where he describes his very last project, a card game to help teach coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ihzA8v89U&t=1560s

Does anyone remember him? He had a huge impact on my life back in 2006 when I was trying to learn Ruby to use Ruby on Rails.

The

Thanks Jonathan for all the foxes, and thanks to whoever is maintaining his legacy: https://whytheluckystiff.net/