smart stuff

⇐ 164 to 183 of 612 articles ⇒

The probabilistic age		19 Dec 05
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Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing? A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale. Great read

Crossing the alps

18 Dec 05

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It’s always great to pass the Alps. Some shots taken during the recent flight to Rome.

www.approximity.com/blogPics/alps_1629_small.JPG

www.approximity.com/blogPics/alps_1634_small.JPG

Introduction to Refactoring Streamzine

18 Dec 05

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Net Objective’s latest stream-zine demonstrates refactorings and code-smells. Audio and slides.

www.netobjectives.com/streamzines/CurrentStreamzine/

Very good introductory material.

Ruby versus .. Perl5 versus XOTcl

18 Dec 05

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Thanks to Michael Schlenker we added a XOTcl column to our OO comparison table.

Extended Object Tcl (for short: XOTcl, pronounced exotickle) is an object-oriented scripting language based on MIT’s OTcl.

Interesting book sales news

09 Dec 05

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radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/ruby_book_sales_surpass_python.html

Ruby books are up over 1500% over last year, while Python books are up 20% (and Perl is down 3%).

Several interesting comments as well.

— thanks, -pate

Ruby and .Net Fitnesse Tutorials

09 Dec 05

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Hi All,

I’ve been working on some tutorials for getting Fitnesse up and running with some of the other runners. I’ve completed the tutorials for .NET (C#) and Ruby, and would love feedback on them.

.NET/C#: www.cornetdesign.com/2005/11/fitnesse-and-net-basic-tutorial.html

Ruby: www.cornetdesign.com/2005/12/fitnesse-and-ruby-basic-tutorial.html

Thanks!

Cory

Marrying Ferret and Rails		09 Dec 05
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Great wiki summary based on a rails mailing by Kaspar Weibel. It works on multiple Active Records.

Rails Cheat Sheet		09 Dec 05
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I found this cheat sheet. Unfortunately I do not know who the author is, but thanks to the anonymous author anyhow.

Why should egineers and scientists be worried about color?		06 Dec 05
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Highly recommended article for anybody who tries to visualise data. The misuse of excel and powerpoint leads to too many 3D pie diagrams :-(. Any student should read his Tufte.

Ten Wikipedia Hacks		06 Dec 05
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Some good tips on using wikipedia.

Ruport		05 Dec 05
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Ruport is currently a combination of a neat proof of concept with some useful little scripts and utils that are quickly becoming rather powerful. The aim is to be a very handy report generation framework and library which will support an insane amount of input sources (CSVs,Excel,any Database Ruby-DBI supports,various ORMS, anything you can hack away at with parse/input,etc) and then output in an insane amount of formats (PDF,XHTML,XML,CSV,Excel,RSS,etc,etc) while leveraging a powerful set of tools that will munge, organize, and beautify whatever it is you need to report on. It’s not nearly there yet, but it’s on it’s way. Slightly more information available at the home page

AllInOneRuby		05 Dec 05
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AllInOneRuby creates an compressed executable for Windows or Linux that includes both the Ruby interpreter and the runtime libraries. This is useful for temporary installations or USB sticks. www.erikveen.dds.nl/allinoneruby/index.html

Flatland online

05 Dec 05

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Who hasn’t yet read the story of Flatland?

Flatland: A romance of many dimensions

Text by Edwin A. Abbott, 1884; copyright expired

Economics in one lesson		05 Dec 05
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jim.com/econ/contents.html

Great Hubble Space Telescope pics		05 Dec 05
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link

Greasemonkey - making the browser more powerful

05 Dec 05

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Would you like to see price comparisons while browsing Amazon?

Would you like to use a website in ways its page authors have never thought of? Stop being the passive read,er be active. Amend the information.

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.

For example, you could:

Make sure that all URLs displayed in the browser are clickable links
Improve the usability of a site you frequent
Route around common and annoying website bugs
Use the Coral content network selectively.

Some other smart extension scripts.

Famous and not so famous programming quotes

03 Dec 05

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After a 2 year break, I finally did update my quotes collection. On RubyGarden you can find even more quotes.

Hey, it’s a rainy day today.

Google Maps in Rails

03 Dec 05

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Great post.

Cartographer is a ruby library for Google Maps API.

enjoy!

Userscripts.org		03 Dec 05
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Userscripts serves tons of useful scripts. Great site!

Project (Cartoon)		01 Dec 05
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Enjoy the super comic. It’s truer than one thinks :-).