Logo:

It comes with Gnome 2.8 and a 2.6 Kernel. The overall install was amazingly simple. Download it.

Was heute in der "Bild"-Zeitung steht, steht morgen ueberall. Vielleicht sollte man sich also mal genauer anschauen, was sie schreibt. Die kleinen Merkwuerdigkeiten und das grosse Schlimme.

link

Using Ruby and SQLite to create Linux clusters that take advantage of idle nodes and bypass expensive software solutions.

My friend Dave Clements always is game for a brainstorming session, especially if I’m buying the coffee. Recently, we met at the usual place and I explained my problem to him over the first cup. My office had a bunch of Linux nodes sitting idle and a stack of work lined up for them, but we had no way to distribute the work to them. Plus, the deadline for project completion loomed over us.

Over the second cup of coffee, I related how I had evaluated several packages, such as openMosix and Sun’s Grid Engine, but ultimately had decided against them. It all came down to this: I wanted something leaner than everything I’d seen, something fast and easy, not a giant software system that would require weeks of work to install and configure.

After the third cup of coffee, we had it: Why not simply create an NFS-mounted priority queue and let nodes pull jobs from it as fast as they could? No scheduler, no process migration, no central controller, no kernel mods—simply a collection of compute nodes working as fast as possible to complete a list of tasks. But there was one big question: was accessing an NFS-mounted queue concurrently from many nodes possible to do safely? Armed with my favorite development tools—a brilliant IDE named Vim and the Ruby programming language—I aimed to find out. link

 32.times{|y|print" "*(31-y),(0..y).map{|x|~y&x>0?" .":" A"},$/}

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

link

I consider the mozex extention for Firefox a "must have." With mozex, I can edit textareas with vim and handle mailto links with mutt!

Mozex will also enable you to view html source in vim. link

You can edit your mozex prefs by typing about:config in Firefox.

 My personal take is that they just wanted to make sure that
 *everybody* is keen on getting an account. Make it exclusive,
 by invitation only. Seeding it amongst the geekest of geeks,
 first generation invites went quickly. But seemingly invited
 users got their own share of invites.

 Now it has become a practical test for the claim that every two people
 in the U.S. can build a chain of mutually known persons of maximum
 length 6. If that is true, how many invites per person would you need to
 reach saturation?

 Make people sign up and store their information on your company disks?
 Easy. Instead of crawling and begging them for their data, be a snob
 and make it a challenge for them. They will fall for it.

 On my box I have gobs of gigabytes for email storage, no ads
 and a very fast interface via procmail, formail, mutt and grep.
 I will not entrust a company with a service I can provide just
 as good.  I will be the last one without a Google email address.

link

For details and downloads, go to: freeride.rubyforge.org/

Many bug fixes in this release especially on the Windows platform. There are also some new features: all dock panes can now be dock and undocked, Debugger and Script Runner works better on Win32, debugged process can be run in a console for Windows users to see the process output…

Have fun! And, as always, feedback and contributions are welcome.

 >How many racing car drivers ever built a car from scratch :-)
 >> I do not think that's the best way to become a racing driver.
 >>
 >> How many sketch artists ever made their own pencils?
 >>
 >> How many  great tennis players ever built their own playing equipment?
 >>

A machine shop foreman gets an order for a large number of widgets in a short time frame and calls an old buddy out of retirement for some extra help.

Bright and early Monday morning the foreman hands out copies of the mechanical drawings to his usual crew and his old buddy and tells them to get to work. Everybody heads off to their workstations and gets busy. By the time the lunch whistle blows, each of the crew members has one shiny new widget to show for their efforts except the old hand. He has a small but neat collection of parts that look nothing like the widget. After lunch and a bit of good-natured ribbing at the expense of the "old" hand, the machinists go back to work. The end of the day arrives and each crew member has another shiny widget to show for their efforts. The old hand has added to his collection of parts, but still has no widgets to show for the days work.

Tuesday proceeds in much the same way as Monday, with each crew member producing one widget before lunch. The old hand takes his lunch-time ribbing with a silent smile and goes back to work. At the end of the day, each crew member again has two new widgets to show for their day’s work. The old hand has a apparently completed his collection of parts, but still has no widgets to show for his efforts.

Wednesday lunch rolls around and the crew prepares for another round of laughs at the expense of the perhaps-too-old hand. Much to their dismay, they find a collection of shiny new widgets equal to all of their output for Monday. A quiet lunch ensues and the crew pays special attention to the old hand’s work over the course of Wednesday afternoon. Sure enough, the old hand completes another batch of shiny new widgets in record time.

It turns out that the old hand spent two days building a set of tools and jigs that allowed him to turn out widgets at pace that equaled the sum total of the work of the less experienced crew.

Building your own tools may dramatically improve your efficiency, but you also have to have the experience to know what kind of tools to build.

— Trey

RetroWeb is an extension of RetroForth for creating XHTML documents.It features a readable and elegant Lisp-like syntax to ease writing XHTML. It is quite small, very extensible and gives you the full power of Forth when you need it.

link

Changes: The search server was enhanced. The logging format was changed. Accuracy of document clustering was improved. The building configuration was enhanced, and now Mac OS X 10.3 is supported.

link

Frameworks in big companies: Some designers develop the specs. Then another company implements it, then a 3rd company is forced to use it .. which means make it usable first. Why don’t these designers eat their own dog food and actually implement real apps in their oh so great frameworks. Architects ..

I just now had to look sth. up about REXML. and came across this :-).

 First off, Ruby does iterators differently than Java. Java uses a lot of
 helper classes. Helper classes are exactly the kinds of things that theorists
 come up with... they look good on paper, but using them is like chewing glass.
 You find that you spend 50% of your time writing helper classes just to
 support the other 50% of the code that actually does the job you were trying
 to solve in the first place. In this case, the Java helper classes are either
 Enumerations or Iterators. Ruby, on the other hand, uses blocks, which is
 much more elegant. Rather than:

 for (Enumeration e=parent.getChildren(); e.hasMoreElements(); ) { Element child = (Element)e.nextElement(); // Do something with child }

 you get:

 parent.each_child{ |child| # Do something with child }

 Can't you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby is the language Buddha would have programmed in.

Should I start talking about Java-Beans now?

We have a superfast matrix class: NArray (not in standard lib). It claimed to be 3x faster than NumPy for some tests and a bit faster than Octave for for matrix operations.

www.ir.isas.ac.jp/~masa/ruby/index-e.html