_why scares me, in a good way. When he’s not illustrating his recent code snippets by hand, drawing cartoon foxes, making an idiosyncratic soundtrack to an equally-idiosyncratic Ruby programming manual, he’s coding, furiously.

Witness balloons, little webpages that you can plug some Ruby code into and share with the world. The world can then run the program by running something like this on the command line:

ruby -ropen-uri -e 'eval(open("http://balloon.hobix.com/balloon_name").read)'

Just replace the balloon_name with the name of the balloon and run the command line. As a bonus, the code is viewable by a normal web browser. For an example, look at keepvid.

Hobix, _why’s blog engine, always used this mechanism to install itself, so I guess Balloons were a logical outgrowth.

Silly? Yes. Brilliant? Quite possibly.

ASIDE: IMHO, The funniest creation _why ever came up with was this fake ad that lampoons those X10 “camera” ads that were once ubiquitous on teh intarweb back in Web 1.0 days.