Fast Company has a terrific cover piece this month about Jeff Bezos.
 My favorite part is when he talks about asking other people (experts, even)
 for their opinion about new projects.

 Inevitably, people say no. Don't do it. I don't like it. It'll fail.
 Don't bother.

 When I think about every successful project (whether it's a book
 or a business or a website) the people I trust have always given
 me exceedingly bad advice. And more often than not, that advice
 is about being conservative.

 The incentive plan here is pretty clear. If someone dissuades you
 from trying, you can hardly blame them for the failure that doesn't
 happen, right? If, on the other hand, they egg you on and you crash,
 that really puts a crimp in the relationship...

 I think the problem lies in the question. Instead of saying,
 "what do you think?" as in, "what do you think about Amazon
 offering 1,000,000 different titles even though some of them are really
 hard for us to get..." the question ought to be, "how can I make this
 project even MORE remarkable?"

I highly recommend you to read more of Seth Godin´s blog

P.S.: Do not

 gem install rails

if you have files in app

Update: David has fixed that bug, but it should teach us all a leson to keep using CVS/Subversion all the time.

Daniel Beger saw the Python version

 > I came across this nifty looking sidebar for Python documentation at
 > http://projects.edgewall.com/python-sidebar/.  Is there something
 > similar for Ruby?  If not, does someone need a project? :)

And here is the ruby version

It’s really cool!

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/

Why do I love Debian? Coz of the package management system. Now Ruby has the same nice feature, called RubyGems

Install:

ruby install.rb

gem --remote --list

gem --remote --search Doom

gem --remote --install progressbar

Now relax, have a good milkshake in the sun. A big big thanks to the developers: Rich Kilmer, Chad Fowler, David Black, Paul Brannan, Jim Weirch, Curt Hibbs, Gavin Sinclair, etc.

European Ruby Conference 2004. New date: October 8 and 9 in Munich

Register

Come for some Ruby-fun. Last year’s conference: www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/europeRuby/tiki.cgi/

Its features include:

• A test-centric design that allows you extensively unit test any program that runs on top of Lafcadio. It comes with a MockObjectStore, which mimics the database and allows you to test database interactions without all the annoying setup code of a real database-driven test.
• A block-driven querying language that will cover 99% of the ad-hoc queries you have to do. These queries look like: child_users = object_store.getUsers { |user| user.age.lt( 18 ) }

These queries can be run against the MockObjectStore, meaning they can be unit-tested.

• In-Ruby triggers that can be written per domain class. These triggers can be tested, too!
• Lafcadio makes very few assumptions of how your database was setup, and comes complete with a lot of hooks to allow you to fit your pre-existing database. Because programming’s a messy job, and we’re always cleaning up after somebody’s mistakes (even if they were our own).

Lafcadio is production-ready and runs a number of websites, including Rhizome.org, which more than 3 million hits a month.

link

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.

 So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?

 Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future?
 What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry -
 it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or
 make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location?
 Nobody does that.

 With digital you can do things better; for a really simple straight forward
 things.

 No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband
 and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.

 So who, then? We've seen that even with the best intentions Wintel can't do
 a good job. It has to come from the consumer electronics people;

 ...

 What would you do differently, if you had your time as CEO again?

 We wouldn't have spent time on user interfaces. We'd have left that
 much earlier. [In 2001, Symbian left the business of designing UIs to its
 licensees, with the exception of UIQ, which remains part of the company].
 Everyone was keen to share and we tried hard for two years, but it was never
 going to happen. Everything about those companies [phone OEMs] is based
 in their own UIs. So that was two years wasted.

 In hindsight we came to the right view; but we never learnt that lesson.
 There were other things people were keen for us to get into early, for
 example WAP. We could never have NOT done it, but I had a pretty good
 feeling it wasn't going to be worth it. But I wasn't the customers.®
 So it has to go back to being vertically integrated; you have to tackle
 the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically
 because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through,
 starting with a niche.

story

Skype is a good VoIP program, that also does conference calls amongst several people reasonably well. It helps me cut down my phone bill :-). skype

I saw this post, dated May 16, 2004 by terminus, a skype staff member, which made me very happy. I am sick of running windows on my laptop only to use for skye. Now I can stay in good old Penguin-land.

 Skype is now starting a closed Linux beta. We are looking for forum
 members who would be willing to actively test the Linux version and
 provide input and feedback to finalize the Linux version development.

link

LinuxTag program

Homepage: battery.rubyforge.org/

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

 The Ruby Production Archive (RPA) will provide packages of Ruby
 libraries and programs in a form that allows production use, engineered
 through a stringent process resembling FreeBSD's or Debian's.

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA. Its scope and
 purposes are different to those of other systems like RubyGems.

 rpa-base 0.1.0 is now available on http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org .
 Please keep in mind that this is *not* a RPA release (that is, a release
 of the repository) but just a release of the rpa-base tool itself. We
 have provided several sample ports/packages for testing purposes, but
 they don't formally belong to RPA. Read below for information on the
 libs/apps packaged so far.

 rpa-base requires Ruby 1.8.1 (certainly 1.8 at least, it might work on
 1.8.0); it has been tested on several Linux distributions, FreeBSD and
 win32. We would appreciate feedback (both positive and negative) under
 those or any other architecture.

 It takes but a couple minutes to install and will allow you to do

 rpa install instiki ruvi

 ;-)
 (NOTE: ruvi, the cool pure-Ruby vim clone, won't work on win32)

 Features
 ========

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA's client-side
 package management. You can think of it as RPA's apt-get + dpkg. It
 features the following (working right now):

  * sane dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed,
    keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no
    longer needed dependencies
  * atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic
    transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS
    crashes too on POSIX systems)
  * modular, extensible design: the 2-phase install is similar to FreeBSD and
    Debian's package creation; rpa-base packages need not be restricted
    to installing everything under a single directory ("1 package, 1 dir"
    paradigm)
  * rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install
    time (currently disabled on win32)
  * ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed
    by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa (currently disabled on
    win32)
  * handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can
    compile extensions as needed
  * unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the
    installation is canceled if they don't pass