smart stuff

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Ruby Forum		25 Sep 04
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Alexey Verkhovsky saids, `Ruby Forum is a newly created bulletin board for discussing Ruby. Unlike ruby-talk mailing list, it allows anonymous posting and implements more understandable interface for searching. Intended target audience of this forum is newcomers to Ruby that are not committed enough to subscribe to a 100+ posts/day mailing list.’ RubyForum

[XP] OT: Regarding the Subjunctive Mood, if you happen to be in one ...		25 Sep 04
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(Source: Ron Jeffries) It’s important to take grammar seriously, even if she has been dead for years. www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatAsYouWere.htm

AltGr keys and irb

25 Sep 04

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From the Ruby-ML: I just noticed that I cannot type any AltGr character combinations on a German keyboard both on NT4 and Win2k in the current irb (ruby 1.8.2 2004-07-29 i386-mswin32).

This hurts the ruby experience a little bit, because among those characters are {}[]~\| …

and the solution

Ruby for the Web: The Arrow Web Application Framewor		25 Sep 04
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I’ve posted the slides from my session "Ruby for the Web: The Arrow Web Application Framework" on Arrow’s project page I thought the sessions went well, considering that we were in a room off in a corner on a floor completely separate from the other conference events. Quite a lot of people showed up at the sessions I saw (standing-room only), and people seemed interested.

Cathedrals of the body		25 Sep 04
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Dieter Blum has some fascinating pictures. A must see.

More and more female athletes pose nude

25 Sep 04

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This entry is politically incorrect, but I decided to post it anyhow, as

it seems to become more and more of a trend in the last 5 years: for the EM the wives and girl-friends of the Russian team took a nude photo session, for olympic games 2000, Australia’s women soccer team, the Dutch tean, Katie Vermeulen in the August Playboy, etc.
I really liked the words on Bridgette Starrs photo. Yes, I like the photo, too :-), as two friends have commented at once.
Yes, sex sells. It is really sad if the female athletes feel the necessity to pose nude for raising money.

It’s sad if the athletes feel it necessary to pose nude to raise money.

Make sure you read the motto on the picture.

Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating?		25 Sep 04
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(Source: Dave Bryant) Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori is not exactly a household name but, for the speculative fiction community at least, he could prove to be an important one. The reason why can be summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase that translates into English as the uncanny valley. Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human look . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete. This chasm the uncanny valley of Doctor Moris thesis represents the point at which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human, but just enough off-kilter to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is human enough to arouse some empathy, yet at the same time is clearly enough not human to avoid the sense of wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment affection, perhaps, but rarely more than that. [www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html]

Seth Godin about job resumes		25 Sep 04
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Seth Godwin has a good entry about job resumes: link

Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

25 Sep 04

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As the latest trend by spammers seems to be to spam wikis, one can setup the same sort of "enter the number in the image" process as network solutions, ebay, etc, do. CAPTCHA below is one possible solution.

A simple CAPTCHA ("Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart") written in Ruby. This will dynamically create an image containing a key displayed on a noisy background, which the user must enter into a text box. link

Alternatively, as Ari has pointed out in ruby-talk:

 Alter the engine so that external URLs go to a non-indexed-by-
 search-engines "leaving the site" page. It effectively kills any
 pagerank that adding a link would add to the linkee. That's both good
 and bad, but it's a short-term solution.

 It may be that a simple HTTP redirect script would work, too, but I'm
 not sure.

OObench		25 Sep 04
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OO-Bench compares the speed of the same object-oriented tasks in several object-oriented languages. It also has a statistics tool (written in Java), which can be used to easily compare the speed of the several versions of a given benchmark Sven C. Koehler has not had much time lately to add more languages or benchmarks, but it is an impressive collection of benchmarks. link

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