I really wonder what impact this might have on the US-elections. Videomirror

Microsoft hates the fact that email is in plaintext. My Outlook Express client is buggy when it comes to handling the simplest of all tasks: receiving and responding to a text email. I’ve fiddled with all the internal settings, trying to get it to convert HTML mail to text, responding in text, and including all these simple plaintext protocols like adding ">" to quoted parts of an email I’m responding to. But my Outlook still insists on having things pop-up in tiny, colored fonts that are impossible to read, and then not tagging quoted text. In this environment, emails quickly bloat and become incoherent.

I found that I needed to know more about Ruby’s garbage collector in order to write robust extensions. This page is an attempt to fill this gap. It assumes the reader has some knowledge of Ruby’s C API, for example they have read the introduction in Programming ruby.

It’s a test-balloon. Maybe they will sell it as online pdfs in the future.

  class Float
    def truncate(sd=2)
      scale=(10**sd).to_f
      (self * scale).to_i / scale
    end
  end
  a=0.255
  a.truncate(2) #-> 0.25

Very nice picture. Belgium has the lightest sky, as they have lights on their highways. Germany is only on Nr. 4.

easyHotel

They copied the idea from Japan.

 I do this regularly, though most of the work so far has tended to be much
 more centric on web based applications.

 >> 1. A database
 >>     Java world: Oracle, MySQL or another relational DB of your choice

 MySQL

 >> 2. Some way to persist domain objects and manage transactions
 >>     Java world: entity EJBs, JDO, hand-coded DAOs, O/R <censored>
 >> mappers, etc

 Kansas has been maturing wonderfully for my purposes for this.

 >> 3. An RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism for communication between
 >> the front-end and the back-end (assuming that the front-end is a
 >> thick GUI).         Java world: session EJBs, servlets

 drb.  Works great.

 >> 4. A thick GUI
 >>     Java world: Swing

 TK, Qt, Fox

 >> 5. A Web GUI
 >>     Java world: JSP, XSLT, XMLC and all the other stuff

 I've use Iowa very successfully for this every day for a couple of years.

 >> 6. An asynchronous communications infrastructure
 >>     Java world: message-driven EJBs

 I am using Drb/Rinda/Tupleserver pretty effectively for this.  No problems
 with it at all so far.

 Kirk

Hi guys,

I backed to Japan with no trouble :)

I uploaded following resource used by RubyConf2004 presentation.

Very thanks to RubyConf staffs and attendances.

Presentation Slide: www.atdot.net/yarv/RubyConf2004_YARV_pub.pdf

Benchmark: www.atdot.net/yarv/bench_20041002.txt

We have made the .mp3 files (64kbs…downsampled from 192kbs) available of the sessions of the 2004 Ruby Conference. I added mp3 tags on all the files so they appear as an album (compilation) and the artist is the speaker. They are available from the RubyForge BitTorrent site. They are all in a single .zip file (rubyconf04.zip…364MB)…there are a total of 20 mp3 files in the .zip:

Friday: 01-Welcome.mp3 02-RubyTraining.mp3 03-TestingWithRuby.mp3 04-Ruwiki.mp3 05-TychoPIM.mp3 06-HackingRuby.mp3 07-Alph.mp3

Saturday: 08-Narf.mp3 09-rubydoc.org.mp3 10-RubyOnRails.mp3 11-RailsDemo.mp3 12-RubyGems.mp3 13-YARV.mp3 14-TestUnit.mp3 15-Keynote.mp3

Sunday: 16-RubyOnWindows.mp3 17-Copland.mp3 18-CodeGeneration.mp3 19-Rubyx4DC.mp3 20-Closing.mp3

Links:

bt.rubyforge.org/

The torrent is:

bt.rubyforge.org/rubyconf04.zip.torrent

If someone wants to get these, unzip and host them via HTTP that’s cool…we just don’t have the bandwidth :-) If someone wants them in 192kbs format, let me know via a direct email and we can work out how to get them to ya (its 1.4GB that way though).

                    Best, Rich

ruby-doc.org: www.ruby-doc.org/index.rb/2004/Oct/2#ruby-doc.org__-_Now_and_the_Future_Presentation

Ruby-Gems: onestepback.org/articles/rubygemsfacets/

Changes: This release adds quite a bit of new functionality. Support for aliases, filling memory ranges, and finding addresses of functions has been added. The native version has a serial console, serial port support, parallel port support, hard drive support, and interrupts. There are also two new ports using libc, one of which has support for using shared libraries. A few minor bugs in the conditionals were fixed.

freshmeat.net/redir/retroforth/35324/url_homepage/www.retroforth.org

Changes: Many things have changed since 1.0. The R language has acquired namespaces, exception handling constructs, formal methods and classes, much improved garbage collection, generalized I/O via connection objects, and considerable improvements in the graphics area. The user workspace has been reorganized, and so has the set of packages that ship with R. Several "recommended packages" deemed indispensable in a statistical system are bundled. In addition, there has been a large number of more specific new functions, tweaks, and bugfixes.

www.r-project.org

Erlang is a small concurrent functional programming language developed by Ericsson. It is being used by Ericsson as a systems programming language for large concurrent fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Changes: This release includes two new applications, XMerl and EDOC. It increases the maximum number of simultaneous processes to 268 435 456. It adds several nice additions to the language, such as "Query List Comprehensions". It provides performance increases and several changes to included applications.

www.erlang.org/

I also released v 0.0.6 on Rubyforge — a few minor changes.

www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/26/175722/727 and www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/25/32218/1824

link

CityBuilder is an attempt to automate much of the work involved in creating very large virtual urban landscapes. The system takes a street map as input, and produces street geometry and a scene graph containing the building models as output. The user has control over the types of buildings placed in the city through the use of image maps. The potential applications for this system include video game content (think GTA*), visualization, etc.

It is well known to most of those in the field of computer graphics that mountainous terrain can be generated programmatically. A good deal of research has been done in this area, focused for the most part on the use of fractals to generate landscapes. While these techniques produce some impressive results, they are restricted in the kinds of terrain that they can generate. For example, these techniques are not appropriate for the creation of urban terrain.

This is unfortunate, as there are many benefits to being able to programmatically generate urban landscapes. Many recent video games, for example, feature very large urban environments. Finding little research on the topic of urban terrain generation, I decided to create my own utilities for that purpose.

Note - I have recently been made aware that a very similar project was published at SIGGRAPH 2001, entitled "Procedural Modeling of Cities". That project made use of L-systems to generate the street topographies (mine uses a user-created node graph) and (from the description) is considerably more complex. I haven’t seen their output. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you might want to take a look at their work, too.

With the CityBuilder system, there are three stages in the creation of a city. The first stage is to create the street map, the building models, and some miscellaneous support files used by the second stage. The second stage is where CityBuilder takes control. Street geometry is created using the StreetBuilder component, building models are placed in the city by the BlockBuilder component, and miscellaneous items like traffic lights are placed in the city by the ClutterBuilder component. The third stage is to fine-tune the output using a scene-graph editor or by hand-editing the output files. The city is then ready to be viewed.