Of course, the devil’s in the details: there’s inventory to manage, backorders to fulfill, outstanding invoices to collect, orders to process, bills to pay, and customers to service. The goal of business may be simple enough — but the business of running a business is anything but.

Fortunately, computers are a natural for the back office, and software to manage a business — called customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) software — has become a big business in itself. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft charge plenty of beans for bean counting software. For example, Microsoft’s Great Plains Software division charges $50,000 for a license, $100,000 for implementation, and $20,000 a year for maintenance.

But just as Linux has provided a free alternative to proprietary operating systems like Windows and Solaris, Compiere, this month’s "Project of the Month," provides an open source alternative to commercial CRM and ERP solutions. link

Original by Ronald Jeffries, translation by Aleksi Niemela and Dave Thomas. www.rubycentral.com/articles/pink/index.html

German English

So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link

From the README:

Major features:

• Cholesky decomposition
• LU decomposition
• QR decomposition
• Schur decomposition
• Singular value decomposition
• Eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a general matrix
• Minimization by least squares
• Linear equation solving
• Stand-alone LAPACK bindings: call any LAPACK routine from directly from ruby.

Source: _why, yaml.freepan.org) YAML is extremely simple to learn. The basics are extraordinarily simple. You may even find that you have unintentionally used YAML syntax when building lists or simple file formats.

It also helps if you have experience with any agile language (such as Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP). YAML was designed to suit these languages well and borrows a few basic ideas from them.

And look at the clock before you start. Jot the time down and we'll see how fast you are. [http://yaml.freepan.org/index.cgi?YamlInFiveMinutes]

The latest version of midilib (0.8.0) can be found on the midilib Web site (midilib.rubyforge.org/). The midilib RubyForge project page is rubyforge.org/projects/midilib/.

midilib is also available as a Gem. The Gem has been uploaded to RubyForge, and should appear in remote gem listings soon.

Changes: Several bugfixes were made for the JIT compiler. A working Java-to-Smalltalk bytecode translator (which does not support networking and reflection yet) was added.

homepage download

The last 20 years of the PC have been boring. PC vendors aim at businesses, who aren’t creative in their tool-use. They’re adults: they learn a system and stick to it. We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead, when all the pople alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries got the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice.

James Licklieder: in a couple of years, human brains and computers will be coupled. It hasn’t happened yet. Except in science, where scientists and computers are indeed thinking as no human brain has ever thought before. .. craphound.com/kayetcon2003

(Source: Avi Bryant) I came across Avi Bryant's blog. Tons of interesting stuff, especially about Seaside. http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView

Mauricio Fernandez posted this to ruby-talk: AFAIK he introduced the concept of "brain power consumption" (now renamed as "stress" in his last talk) for the first time.

That was the first time (I’m aware of) somebody stated that the main goal of a programming language isn’t expressive power (possibly by being close to natural languages, as Perl) nor ease of learning or usage, but making the programmer happier (which is a weighted mix of all other criteria).

www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/index.html

Video of the ll2 talk: ll2.ai.mit.edu/

Significant functionality was added:

• Credit Management & Dunning
• Improved Discount Management
• Payment-Invoice Allocation improvements (incl. Auto Match)
• Ship/Receive in multiple UOMs
• Service Level Agreements
• GL Distribution
• Prepayment Order Improvements
• Financial Report writer improvements

Technical Improvements:

• Support of Oracle 10g
• Improved Database Connection management
• Performance improvements

Significant reduction of open bugs.

matz called his talk: "How Ruby sucks".

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you’re the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There’s an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It’s an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It’s more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

link

The PSP chipset comprises a number of components: the CPU, a media processor, a 3D graphics engine, a security processor and a power manager. The PSP’s MIPS R4000-based CPU will run at up to 333MHz, Sony chip designer Masanobu Okabe revealed at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford University, California. Its frontside bus runs at up to 166MHz, with both frequencies controlled by processor load. It contains a vector processing engine. link

I’m still waiting for some more, so check back periodically to see updates.

 Ich habe mal ein erstes deutsches 3.7g zusammengestellt:

 http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/Squeak3.7gDeutsch.zip

 Das ist einfach das letzte 3.7g Full Image + deutsche uebersetzungen.
 Die englischen Fenster habe ich geloescht, die engl. Demo-Projekte sind
 aber noch drin.

 Was wir brauchen ist

 -> Eine deutscher Willkommen-text
 -> ein paar deutsche Demo Projekte
 -> am besten ein deutsches tutorial...

 Bi den Einfuehrungs-texten sollten wir uns nicht an den englischen orientieren,
 die sind naemlich eher sinnlos, denke ich.

Homepage: battery.rubyforge.org/

Download: rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=268&release_id=531

Smalltalk is very well thought out, extremely well engineered, very flexible, and generally gives quite good performance in a multitude of situations. It’s very adaptable to many different situations, and has lots of tricks up it’s sleeve. Driving it is a bit of a paradigm shift from driving your average plane, it has some new fancy controls, but once you get the hang of it, it can be totally amazing and really fun. Even if you don’t totally know what you’re doing you can still get yourself out of a jam. Given that you’ve got a good pilot you can launch off to a quick start and really do some very heavy and impressive damage in a very short time. It also tends to perform quite impressively if you’ve got a few of them around, and easier to coordinate an army of them.

Java is pretty difficult to drive, and once you get it going in a certain direction it’s pretty hard to get it going somewhere else. It has a few turbo buttons on it so that if you really know when and where to use it, it can fly pretty well. You can surely get it going really fast if you fly it high enough and then point it straight into the ground. It’s generally not very flexible and often a real pain to deal with, but overall once you’ve got a flightplan fixed in stone you can fly it reasonably well and run it reasonably efficiently. If you are meticulous in your planning and implementation, it can really deliver the goods. If you make some mistakes, things can go very wrong that may become almost impossible to correct. Don’t count on any big changes, quick maneuvers, or any sort of fancy tricks that just might save the day, and leave yourself a good bit of time for planning and implementation before you expect to be able to deliver the goods. If you come accross any surprise attacks or come up against an Apache hellicopter, you could be doomed.