Flatland: A romance of many dimensions

Text by Edwin A. Abbott, 1884; copyright expired

link

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.

Hey, it’s a rainy day today.

Cartographer is a ruby library for Google Maps API.

enjoy!

It’s truer than one thinks :-).

Rabbit is a presentation tool. Rabbit uses RD format as slide source. We can make a slide from the following text:

  = Rabbit

  : subtitle
    Presentation with RD

  : author
    Kouhei Sutou

 = First Slide

  * Rabbit uses Ruby/GTK+
  * ...

 = Second Slide

Some screenshots

Rabbit includes a theme for lightning talk a.k.a. ‘Takahashi method’: pub.cozmixng.org/~gallery/kou/screenshot/rabbit/lightning%2Dtalk/

Rabbit supports m17n: pub.cozmixng.org/~gallery/kou/screenshot/rabbit/m17n/

Rabbit supports PS/PDF output: pub.cozmixng.org/~kou/archives/rabbit/

Rubyforge

Action Profiler allows you to profile a single Rails action to determine what to optimize. You can use the Production Log Analyzer and action_grep to determine which actions you should profile and what arguments to use.

Information on the Production Log Analyzer can be found at:

rails-analyzer.rubyforge.org/pl_analyze

Action Profiler REQUIRES Ruby 1.8.3, even if you just use Ruby’s builtin profiler.

Action Profiler can use three profilers, Ruby’s builtin profiler class, Shugo Maeda’s Prof or Ryan Davis’ ZenProfile.

Shugo Maeda’s Prof: raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-prof

Ryan Davis’ ZenProfile: rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=712&release_id=2476

Gem Installation

 gem install action_profiler

How can I top last week’s prediction about Google’s shipping container data centers? By explaining a bit more about how the system came to be and how it will work.

In last week’s column I told how Google has been experimenting with portable data centers built in standard 40-foot shipping containers. The idea isn’t new and it isn’t even Google’s. As far as I can tell it came originally from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who wants to replicate the archive here and there around the world and figured that a shipping container filled with servers and disk drives might be the easiest way to do so. Not only is it truly plug-and-play, but it is also a heck of a lot cheaper from a bit-schlepping perspective. Carrying a petabyte data center by ship from California to Australia is the virtual equivalent of an OC-192 optical connection - the world’s most powerful SneakerNet.

I’ve just released a very early version of a bridge that allows Rails applications to run reports written by the java reporting tool DataVision.

DataVision supports ruby as a scripting language (via JRuby) so it seemed a good fit. I haven’t had a chance to get my head around releasing it as a gem, plugin, etc so right now it’s just a tar that you extract in the directory of the app you want to "reportify".

You can download and/or find out more at rdb.rubyforge.org

Enjoy!

There has been a lot of attention to the legal encumbrances in Microsoft’s new MS XML format. In this article we’ll look at the technical side, and try to show you how the design of these formats affect interoperability. After all, that is the purpose of open standards.

OpenDocument benefits from 5 years of development involving many experts from diverse backgrounds (Boeing, National Archives of Australia, Society for Biblical literature, etc.). It was written with the explicit purpose of being interoperable across different platforms. In contrast, MS XML has not gone through a peer-review process, and was written with only one product in mind. This difference shows in the design of the formats.

Groklaw link.

RiskJobs is a German Headhunting website for the Risk Management domain. Applicants can fill out their profiles (tree structures) and companies can search: e.g. we need an operational risk expert with 3 years of experience that also knows X, Y and Z.

This adds one more app, the ever growing RealWorldUsage wiki page.

Well, actually skiing is good, too .. but I need sun!

 > Word is worse than a hog. It's a blabbermouth. I was once sent a business
 > proposal in Word format. I don't have Word, and Microsoft's free reader
 > was two versions old and never updated. To read the letter, I used a hex
 > editor, finding many interesting tidbits, including the printer on his
 > system, scraps of other documents to other people that indicated shady if
 > not criminal dealings, and the directory -- "Used Cars" -- that the letter
 > to me was composed in. I declined his offer to cooperate.
 >
 > Much of Word's bloat is "empty", but that means whatever was in RAM at
 > Store time.
 >
 > Jerry

Ive been playing with Avi Bryants continuation-based web framework Seaside, which is written in Smalltalk. Wow. Thats all I can say. After some recent work with Rails, I had come to admire the cleanliness of the frameworkeven if, on occasion, I had some complaints about short-cuts taken that need not be necessary. Compared to Seaside, Rails seems to me to be a jalopy. Dont get me wrong, its a seriously pimped out jalopy, but the easy with which one can build interactivity and modify it on the fly with Seaside is mind-blowing.

…

NB: Dont take this as a slam of Rails, as its not. Rails is brilliantfor what it is. It takes the historical model of page interaction and data storage to new heights of simplicity. It doesnt, however, change how you view the web. Seaside does. Whether you use it for your next project, or not, its worth looking at, going through the tutorials, and allowing your mind to conceive of a web that simply behaves more naturally.

blog.amber.org/2005/11/23/she-sells-seashells-by-the-seaside/

With Seaside Avi wrote sth. interesting: dabbledb.com/about/.