I'm actually in the process of learning Ruby right now. I'm curious though. From the perspective of someone who has hasn't been programming for a long time, would you consider it a good idea to learn Ruby before learning Rails? I'm waiting on my copy of The Well-Grounded Rubyist to arrive so I can get started.
Check out http://tryruby.org/ while you wait. I just ran through it again last night and it's so beautifully crafted I want to weep.
I learnt Ruby kind-of-alongside Rails and wish I'd spent more time focusing on the language itself; I'm going back and deepening my knowledge of it now. But it depends on how your mind works, whether you want to get a Rails project going yesterday, what knowledge you have locked away somewhere, and so on.
Absolutely. I'm a non-programmer that had been working on picking up Rails a number of times without a good background in Ruby. Each time I'd run into one issue or another and not have enough knowledge to push past it.
I've put in a bit of time in Ruby and it's opened up Rails (and programming in general) for me more than I thought it would. The biggest advantage, besides just general programming, is reading other people's code and documentation. Recently, I've been exploring i18n (internationalization) in Rails. By going into time_ago_in_words helper, I was led to the distance_of_time_in_words helper and it's source code (https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/bd8a9701c27b4261e9d8dd84...). By understanding enough ruby, the Rails code became a wonderful source of documentation.
The FCC keeps information on radio stations, but it doesn't include anything on the station's genre. This could probably be fixed with a classifier that learns based on the station's website.
I've never heard of Shoutcast, I'll have to check it out.
EDIT: SHOUTcast's API doesn't seem to support anything that would allow a show host to gather info on users. That's probably for the best though ..
I'm pretty sure that shoutcast stations run their own shoutcast sever, and presumably you get IP addresses, and could then plug them into a IP Geolocation API. If you built an app or plugin for the shoutcast broadcaster, they could know where their listeners were. Now, if you wanted to gather info on other people's servers, that could be problematic, though I suppose, once you built an app for an individual hosting a server, you could have it send the geographical info without IP addresses for analysis purposes and maybe a leaderboard. "You are the 4th most popular dubstep station in Peoria, IL!" Hmm and even anonymous data on that level could potentially have monetization opportunities.
Now, obviously Miami is a long ways away, but at the very least looking into some of the links in the Quora response may lead to interesting things. Or
Alternatively you could find an OSS project that fits in your wheelhouse and could be something you could get into. Most projects have lots of 'grunt' work that needs to be done, it isn't glamorous or really challenging, normally, but it can get you familiarity with the codebase (necessary for more interesting changes) and it can get you into 'the scene' so you can get to know other project members, get CR's from them (very helpful for learning, though can be scary for beginners...or even experts :)), pointers to jobs opportunities, etc..
