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.

I came across this on why the lucky stiff’s blog.

 georg nussbaumer
 Tristan: Schwimmen und Schweigen!
 piano, mezzo soprano, tuba, bass drum, cymbals, 4 video screens,
 location:  indoor swimming pool (swimming audience (optional))

Make sure you also read the story about Crypto AG and the Iraq-Iran Conflict.

 The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already
 been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler,
 a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors
 in the encryption machines it sold to Iran -- at the request of the NSA.
 He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally
 released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for
 his freedom -- then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money.
 At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the
 relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

link

Last night there was once again spam in the Rubygems wiki. I guess we need to pass it through a Bayesian filter before committing changes or finally install CAPTCHA.

The problem with spam is .. people! Spam simply works .. and as long as spam works it will not stop.

On /. is an article that Wikipedia has now reached 300,000 articles! For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica’s 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.)

slashdot article

A+ is open source. link

Because Perl6 is so far away, support for Ruby and Python is probably actually going to come first. A big test, the first major public showing of Parrot, is going to come at this year’s O’Reilly convention. Python/Parrot is going head to head benchmarking with CPython. The loser gets a pie in the face; watch for it.

Parrot matters. To scripting-language hackers generally, to Ruby hackers specifically, and to the Open Source movement as a whole.

Parrot promises to furnish a fast, portable environment for every major scripting language. This will remove one of the big obstacles to more widespread deployment: speed. Moreover, if I download a Parrot VM to run someone’s PyGame program on my machine, I already have what I need to run your Ruby or Perl program without further dependency worries: viral portability. Fast Ruby means more Ruby hackers. Fast Python and Perl means more hackers in those languages and thus more people who might take a look at Ruby; a common runtime would make the transition even easier.

For OSS as a whole, Parrot promises a rival to Java or .Net without corporate ownership, developed as open source, for languages that are open source and in which tons of open source code is already written. As the Gnome project considers a new development language, a timely Parrot implementation could mean an in for Python, maybe even Ruby. That would be awesome.

Parrot is a respectable ways along. Not by any means done, but more than vaporware. Support for objects was recently added.

Parrot page

Parrot frontend

 in the very near future i'll be releasing ruvi 0.4.11.
 its a fairly complete vi(m) reimplementation in ruby
 thats getting to be fairly mature.

 includes stuff like:
   auto indent
   ruby highlighting
   curses interface
   macro support (new in .11)
   undo / redo
   class/module/method selector (major speedup in .11)
   word/filename completion in buffer (new for .11)
   rrb refactoring

India lags far behind China in Internet numbers - just 17 million people are online, according to IDC. But it is a growth market - Internet subscribers are expected to reach 30 million in 2006. link

 'We may have nuclear technology, but we still have stone-age brains"
 -- Anthropologist Paul Roscoe.

article

A simple CAPTCHA ("Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart") written in Ruby. This will dynamically create an image containing a key displayed on a noisy background, which the user must enter into a text box. link

Alternatively, as Ari has pointed out in ruby-talk:

 Alter the engine so that external URLs go to a non-indexed-by-
 search-engines "leaving the site" page. It effectively kills any
 pagerank that adding a link would add to the linkee. That's both good
 and bad, but it's a short-term solution.

 It may be that a simple HTTP redirect script would work, too, but I'm
 not sure.

 have a look at googlism.com and type bush or chirac or armin roehrl :-)

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We’d like to share what the Internet sounds like when it sleeps, and in its current highly agitated state, we think it’s worth sharing. www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34227.html