Michael Neumann has announced his latest project :-).
Hi all,
Long time since I announced my last project....
With RubyJS you can transform a subset of Ruby into Javascript code.
What works?
* Classes, modules, inheritance
* Instance methods, class methods
* Exceptions (rescue/ensure)
* Meta-programming stuff like 'attr_reader'
(any meta-programming stuff works that does not appear inside methods)
* Iterators, yield
* "require" (with platform-specific extension ala Google Webtoolkit)
* Inline Javascript code
* Some kind of compile-time method lookup ;-)
* Numbers, String, Array, Hash, Proc (a lot of functionallity is missing!)
* Testing with Rhino-JS
* A lot more :)
There is a lots of room for optimizations and improvement :)
DOWNLOAD
http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/
Best use Mercurial (www.selenic.com/mercurial) to check it out:
hg clone static-http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/
If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic
staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses.
Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep
one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:
Merge PDF Documents
Split PDF Pages into a New Document
Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
Encrypt Output as Desired
Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data or XFDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
..
The nice thing is that one can use it all from the commandline :-).
Examples Merge Two or More PDFs into a New Document
pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf
Split Select Pages from Multiple PDFs into a New Document
Wink is a great tool for Linux
and Windows to record your desktop sessions. We used it to capture
screenshots of a legacy app we had to port, that did not run on our OS.
Good post by John Carter to the pragprog@yahoogroups.com
Let me relate a few war stories...
Once I had a very very complex problem to solve.
I had not the foggiest notion in which order to compute what.
So I took the cowards way and hooked in the Observer all over the place
so I didn't have to think in what order to do it.
It was very slow and buggy and I was no closer to understanding in the
problem than before. It did work occasionally though.
I put in enough logging to see what order it did things in (when it
worked). After glaring at that for an hour I saw the pattern, recoded
it as a couple of tight while loops.
Result...
Very fast, very understandable, easily maintained, no bugs and no observers.
Story two...
Once I took over the maintenance of some code that had several
observer pattern instances scattered around it.
It was fragile, buggy, and erratic.
After much loss of hair and many hours of poring over log traces I
figured it out.
There were complex loop paths through several observers. No mere
mortal could really understand what would happen if object X updated,
since the possible impacts and possible variants of paths were almost
limitless and depended crucially on the order of registration of
observers.
After a brief killing spree amongst the instances of the observer
pattern the code was still buggy, but at least no longer fragile and
erratic...
"I planned 6 weeks to convert from ST/V to Dolphin, realizing that
much of the non-GUI code was re-usable.—Here’s the killer,
remember this was my First real Dolphin project, and second
‘smalltalk’ project.….The conversion took only 2 days,
mainly because I could build and test in a workspace, and used SUnit
Testing for non-gui stuff as needed. "
Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department
at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005.
Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in
2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship.
ABSTRACT
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to
challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk
introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve
problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving
such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach:
constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example,
the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game —
many people play over 40 hours a week — and when people play, they
help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can
be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play
the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.
I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom,
which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity,
which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach
for constructing games with a purpose.
Forrest Gump: That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County. And I figured, since I run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama. And that's what I did. I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason I just kept on going. I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going. When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go... you know... I went.
Interesting statistic.
A Lisp coder earns on average $85k, while a Java-guy $76k. I wonder whether
that statistic would change if one takes out the age-factor. :-)
Let’s admit it, Lisp coders are on average very smart, but so are the
early ruby adapters .. and they get only on average $60k. Sniff ..
Short update, before the conference on
Nov 4 and 5.
We are still evaluating whether we should get a bigger room. Sofar we have
about 30 people that confirmed that they will show up. We have space for 50
people and might simple close the conference registration once we are fully
booked and overbooked by 5% like these airline companies.
O’Reilly might give a free book to every speaker. Please add to the
wiki what book you want. I will send off our wish list o O’Reilly
around Oct 5.
Please put titles of your talks in the wiki, so that some structure will
emerge. In the worst case we do a "planing-game" at the start of
the conference and quickly produce the program as we did last year.
Get-Togethers will be announced in the wiki till Friday this week.
