Anyone know Ruby? I'm learning it for work, and I can't get a "Hello World" program to work.

My program is:

puts “Hello, Tom!”

And I get this when I run it:

hello.rb:1: syntax error, unexpected tIDENTIFIER, expecting keyword_do or '{' or '('
puts “Hello, Tom!”

I'm using the Ruby that came installed in my new Macbook Pro. Perhaps a version or setup issue? The Ruby version is:

ruby 2.0.0p247 (2013-06-27 revision 41674) [universal.x86_64-darwin13]

I read that the program file must be ANSI encoded. I'm using TextEdit. I've tried saving the file as Unicode (UTF-8) and Western (Mac OS Roman). Maybe neither of these are ANSI encoded?Maybe I need a better text editor?

eta: Pretty sure it's an encoding issue--maybe TextEdit can't save a text file as ANSI encoded?

eta²: Never mind. I changed the code to singe-quotes and it worked. (The example in my book had double-quotes.)

The quotes in your original quoted example are smartquotes. They probably need to be straight.

Ahh, good catch!

I typed them as straight quotes, but I originally had TextEdit set to default to rich text, so TextEdit must have helpfully "corrected" the quotes for me.

Anyway, I just downloaded TextMate so now I have a decent text editor for programming.

Sublime Text Editor. Was it amych who recommended it here? Anyway, so nice I paid for it, and so nice I'm happy I paid for the per user license (I can install it on as many of my PC and Mac devices as I want). My tough stuff evaluation is that the web dev/Javascript guys up there live inside it. I only scratch the surface.

Anyway, so nice I paid for it

Yep. The demo version doesn't have any functional limits and never runs out, but I eventually got to the point where I really wanted to buy it. It's lovely to feel that way about a tool.

I'm trying to switch from TextMate to Sublime just because TextMate's development has been so slow over the last ten years or so. Many people seem to be doing the same thing so extensions appear to be showing up for Sublime instead of TextMate these days.

That said, there's still a lot about TextMate I like better so the switch is going slowly. Sublime is a much faster and more polished editor, but TextMate has the better extension system.

So, HDMI cables.

I'd been having intermittent problems with my Apple TV dropping frames for years. Over the weekend it got much worse and started occurring while watching cable as well. This finally led me to realize that my HDMI cables were too close to power cables, causing interference. (I had thought that HDMI cables either worked or didn't.) I repositioned the cables which made things much better, although my Apple TV still drops the occasional frame.

So, what HDMI cables to folks use? I know the super-expensive ones are a waste of money, but are there brands that have better shielding? Or is keeping them away from power cords the most important thing?

Crap. My Apple TV was having problems again. I swapped cables and that didn't help. But trying a different HDMI port on the TV solved the problem. So the port on the TV is bad.

Wouldn't it be nice if things like that were easily replaced?

Computers (and TVs) today seem to have lost the FRU mindset again.

I once had a Sony TV that actually had slots like a computer.

Of course, they wanted a high price for the parts...

So I'm still having problems with my Apple TV dropping frames. Sometimes it's really bad, where every other frame gets dropped, so it's unwatchable at that point.

Rebooting the Apple TV will sometimes stop the frame-dropping for a half a day or so, and sometimes it does nothing. But the problem always comes back. Last night I managed to get things working perfectly by switching the Apple TV HDMI back the the original port. So it's not any particular port that's the problem.

So it's either the TV or the Apple TV. Or else, I've heard that certain combinations of HDMI devices don't play nice together, so maybe it's both.

So my theory is that the HDMI connection between the Apple TV and the TV starts out good, but somehow the connection gets corrupted or something. Forcing the TV to break the HDMI connection by switching the Apple TV to a different port (which then causes the TV to establish a new connection) seems to temporarily solve the problem.

Any thoughts? I'm not sure what to do. Get a new Apple TV? A new TV TV? If the problem is my Apple TV and my LG TV just aren't that compatible, replacing one or both might not fix things.