>I work for ThoughtWorks (TW) and would be happy to tell you about it.  TW
 >was founded on the idea that if you put together the best and brightest
 >people and give them a challenging environment then only great things can
 >happen.  This has been and continues to be the main criteria by which we
 >hire people and is the one of the reasons we are so successful.  As such,
 >the recruitment process is a series of flaming hurdles, but well worth it.
 >I just can't bring myself to leave the company even after 5 years :-)

If you want to relax after too much work .. and are sick of the normal Hollywood movies, check out Beat Takeshi.

Excellent page about Beat Takeshi.

Takeshi Kitano on the question: What’s you’re coolest moment?

 "In Japan, there is a broadcasting station called NHK,
  like BBC, but much, much stricter. When I was a rising
  star in comedy I appeared on a live program, and the director specifically
  said you can't say such-and-such, if you use these words you'll
  be finished. So of course I couldn't resist. I said 'shit'
  12 times in a row. I said, 'I saw a shit-like substance on the street.
  So I went over and I picked it up and smelled it, and it smelled like
  shit. Then I felt it and it felt like shit, and I liked it, and
  it tasted like shit, so I put it away. Thank god I didn't step in it!'
  That was my coolest moment, because it was a tremendous risk. They could have
  cut me off but they didn't. The director was fired and the producer was moved
  to another program, far away from Tokyo."

Today I’m passing on to you the first fruits of a big batch of material forthcoming. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to Irb.)

poignantguide.net/ruby/expansion-pak-1.html

Stick around. Picture a man with a balloon, pinching the air out slowly, cats tied to his leg. If you can do that, then you’re all prepped for chapter 5.

Thank you, -talkers.

_why

 I grabbed the latest 1.8.2 source.
 I ran the usual: autoconf, configure, make, make install.
 ri failed.
 I looked inside Makefile and see the target install-doc.
 I ran make install-doc.
 ri worked.

 Not the most obvious path for me, but there you go

Just in case you do not know what to buy me as my next birthday present .. I saw this monster on Gizmodo.

As Stefan has sent me many new quotes, I did finally update my quote collection again.

Rails is an open source web-application framework for Ruby. It ships with an answer for every letter in MVC: Action Pack for the Controller and View, Active Record for the Model.

Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files. Like Basecamp, which was launched after 4 KLOCs and two months of developement by a single programmer.

Enjoy the Show, dont tell! 10 minute setup video (22MB).

Have fun with Ruby .. says a tired Armin right now coding simple cgi-stuff without any frameworks :-)

If uncertain about the dress code, also enjoy today’s Dilbert

What’s a day without Dilbert and UF?

The auto industrys number is almost up.

The 17-digit codes that identify the origin, make, model and attributes of cars, trucks, buses even trailers worldwide will be exhausted by the end of the decade.

And like an odometer that returns to zero and starts over again, a Vehicle Identification Number or VIN could be duplicated.

Experts say duplicated VINs would cause havoc for repair shops, state license offices, insurance agencies, law enforcement and other groups that use VINs to process warranty claims, investigate accident claims and recover stolen vehicles.

Weve been brainwashing law enforcement and the insurance community and virtually everybody that a VIN is like DNA theres one for any one vehicle, said Ed Sparkman, spokesman for the Chicago-based National Insurance Crime Bureau.

At the root of the impending shortage is the explosion of vehicle production in recent decades. Automakers build 60 million cars and trucks every year and each one needs a unique VIN in the same way a newborn is given a Social Security number. And that doesnt count heavy trucks, motorcycles and other vehicles that require VINs.

link

 After labouring over the weekend, I am happy to present the first
 version of Gnome's Guide to WEBrick:
 http://shogo.homelinux.org/~ysantoso/WebWiki/WEBrick.html

 The guide is more of a reference-type documentation rather than
 tutorial. I believe that WEBrick is straightforward enough for someone
 to grasp its idea. At that point, a tutorial would be of lesser use
 than a reference.

 Being the first release, I am aware that there are many mistakes:
 spelling, grammar (not native English-speaker), obtuse example, etc. I
 am also aware that there are missing sections. Some of the missing
 sections are listed in the 'NOT YETs' section. If you think there are
 other topics I missed, please inform me.

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!

rubyforge.org/projects/net-ssh

Version 0.0.2 brings the implementation to full compliance with the SSH2 protocol, since you can now use ssh-dss key types.

The most significant new feature is a limited implementation of the SFTP protocol. Only a subset of the features of SFTP are implemented, namely directory enumeration, and getting and storing files. More features are coming.

The SSH protocol itself is asynchronous, so the "core" implementation of the SFTP protocol (Net::SSH::SFTP::Session) is also asynchronous. However, a synchronous version (useful when you don’t need multiple channels open simultaneously) is also available (Net::SSH::SFTP::Simple).

Until Ruby 1.8.2 is released, you need to also install the patched version of the OpenSSL module for Ruby (also available from the Net::SSH site). Ruby 1.8.2 will include the patched version of OpenSSL, though, so once you have installed you’ll need nothing else to run Net::SSH.

Registration and Infopage

high-resolution version

This is the inital announcements for Arachno Ruby on this newsgroup.

Arachno Ruby IDE is a commercial IDE that is currently available for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. A Linux version will follow later this year.

The most important feature is the integrated debugger which is the first debugger not based on "debug.rb" and which allows to debug GUI’s, Interactive Console Applications and Web Applications.

For the later it comes with a full integrated local apache environment that is started and stopped behind the scenes, whenever you open/close a project. It is possible to set breakpoints in CGI and ERuby (.rhtml) scripts and single step through the code.

The editor has some convenience features based on Emacs and the Delphi CodeRush IDE plugin like stack based markers (Control-Enter drops a quickmark, ESC goes back), one key copy/cut, incremental search, autoindentation, good syntax highlighting (handles even nested heredocs) and a mixture of tiled/tabbed window handling.

www.ruby-ide.com/download_ruby.php

 This vignette is primarily about an interpretive program I created for IBM
 in 1956. In one of those "lessons lost" it has a lot to do with today's
 JAVA language, 40 years later.

 How? Well, JAVA is an interpreter, too. A form of language processor that
 was supposed to have been obsoleted by compilers like FORTRAN and COBOL.

 I had found, as the JAVA people did, that interpreters were slow, slow!
 And I created a preprocessor to modify the source so that every decision
 that would be made exactly the same would be made once and for all at
 the beginning, in the source program as modified. Hello, JIT compilers!

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.