Today I’m passing on to you the first fruits of a big batch of material forthcoming. The Tiger’s Vest (with a Basic Introduction to Irb.)

poignantguide.net/ruby/expansion-pak-1.html

Stick around. Picture a man with a balloon, pinching the air out slowly, cats tied to his leg. If you can do that, then you’re all prepped for chapter 5.

Thank you, -talkers.

_why

So, lets talk about SQLites handsome features:

• SQLite is swift. In my own testing, I have found it to be speedy. Some speed comparisons with MySQL and PostgreSQL are here.
• SQLite is not a large database server, such as MySQL. You dont connect to the database. Using SQLite, you access a database file. Everything happens in-process.
• SQLite is an ACID database. Supports transactions, triggers.
• SQLite is public domain. Absolutely no licensing issues.
• SQLite is typeless. Any type or length of data may be stored in a column, regardless of the declared type. This allows extreme flexibility and avoidance of type errors.
• SQLite allows custom functions and aggregates. This is my favorite feature of SQLite, which we will explore shortly.

link

Make sure you also read the story about Crypto AG and the Iraq-Iran Conflict.

 The really weird twist to this story is that the U.S. has already
 been accused of doing that to Iran. In 1992, Iran arrested Hans Buehler,
 a Crypto AG employee, on suspicion that Crypto AG had installed back doors
 in the encryption machines it sold to Iran -- at the request of the NSA.
 He proclaimed his innocence through repeated interrogations, and was finally
 released nine months later in 1993 when Crypto AG paid a million dollars for
 his freedom -- then promptly fired him and billed him for the release money.
 At this point Buehler started asking inconvenient questions about the
 relationship between Crypto AG and the NSA.

link

I came across this on why the lucky stiff’s blog.

 georg nussbaumer
 Tristan: Schwimmen und Schweigen!
 piano, mezzo soprano, tuba, bass drum, cymbals, 4 video screens,
 location:  indoor swimming pool (swimming audience (optional))

Because Perl6 is so far away, support for Ruby and Python is probably actually going to come first. A big test, the first major public showing of Parrot, is going to come at this year’s O’Reilly convention. Python/Parrot is going head to head benchmarking with CPython. The loser gets a pie in the face; watch for it.

Parrot matters. To scripting-language hackers generally, to Ruby hackers specifically, and to the Open Source movement as a whole.

Parrot promises to furnish a fast, portable environment for every major scripting language. This will remove one of the big obstacles to more widespread deployment: speed. Moreover, if I download a Parrot VM to run someone’s PyGame program on my machine, I already have what I need to run your Ruby or Perl program without further dependency worries: viral portability. Fast Ruby means more Ruby hackers. Fast Python and Perl means more hackers in those languages and thus more people who might take a look at Ruby; a common runtime would make the transition even easier.

For OSS as a whole, Parrot promises a rival to Java or .Net without corporate ownership, developed as open source, for languages that are open source and in which tons of open source code is already written. As the Gnome project considers a new development language, a timely Parrot implementation could mean an in for Python, maybe even Ruby. That would be awesome.

Parrot is a respectable ways along. Not by any means done, but more than vaporware. Support for objects was recently added.

Parrot page

Parrot frontend

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

and the solution

India lags far behind China in Internet numbers - just 17 million people are online, according to IDC. But it is a growth market - Internet subscribers are expected to reach 30 million in 2006. link

 rpa-base 0.2.1pre1 is now available at http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org .
 Many of the most popular libraries/applications as per Rubyforge
 statistics (rails, rake, redcloth, activerecord, sqlite, log4r, copland,
 ruvi, to name a few) have been packaged for use with rpa-base 0.2.1pre1.

 You can find a list of the 100+ packages at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Packaged_Software

 Screenshots and animations can be found at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Rpa_Base_In_Action

 rpa-base 0.2.1pre1 fixes some issues in the bootstrapping phase, which
 couldn't hence be solved through the normal self-upgrade mechanism.
 In addition to several other bugfixes, 0.2.1pre1 features better proxy
 support, isolation of unit tests run automatically when installing a
 lib/app, and improvements in the command-line tool.

 Foreword
 --------

 The Ruby Production Archive (RPA) will provide packages of Ruby
 libraries and programs in a form that allows production use, engineered
 through a stringent process resembling FreeBSD's or Debian's.

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA. Its scope and
 purposes are different to those of other systems like RubyGems.
 Features
 ========
 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA's client-side
 package management. You can think of it as RPA's apt-get + dpkg. It
 features the following as of 0.2.1pre1:

 * strong dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed,
   keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no
   longer needed dependencies
 * atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic
   transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS
   crashes too on POSIX systems)
 * parallel installs: you can install several ports in parallel; builds
   will be parallelized and the final phase will be serialized properly
 * self-hosting: rpa-base installs and updates itself
 * modular, extensible design: the 2-phase install is similar to FreeBSD and
   Debian's package creation; rpa-base packages need not be restricted
   to installing everything under a single directory ("1 package, 1 dir"
   paradigm)
 * rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install
   time (currently disabled on win32)
 * ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed
   by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa
 * handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can
   compile extensions as needed
 * unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the
   installation is canceled if they don't pass

 Several of the above features are illustrated in the screenshots and
 animations available at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Rpa_Base_In_Action

 Limitations:
 ===========
 A number of features have been pushed back to 0.3.0:
 * full support for binary platform-specific packages
 * signed packages/ports
 * system-wide configuration system
 * better user interface
 In practice, the first one is the most limiting at the moment since it means
 that win32 users in particular need a working C toolchain to install
 extensions. This will soon be addressed.

 ...

This is the inital announcements for Arachno Ruby on this newsgroup.

Arachno Ruby IDE is a commercial IDE that is currently available for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. A Linux version will follow later this year.

The most important feature is the integrated debugger which is the first debugger not based on "debug.rb" and which allows to debug GUI’s, Interactive Console Applications and Web Applications.

For the later it comes with a full integrated local apache environment that is started and stopped behind the scenes, whenever you open/close a project. It is possible to set breakpoints in CGI and ERuby (.rhtml) scripts and single step through the code.

The editor has some convenience features based on Emacs and the Delphi CodeRush IDE plugin like stack based markers (Control-Enter drops a quickmark, ESC goes back), one key copy/cut, incremental search, autoindentation, good syntax highlighting (handles even nested heredocs) and a mixture of tiled/tabbed window handling.

www.ruby-ide.com/download_ruby.php

I always think of such measures as inferiority complex. People will listen to what is best, no need to purify one’s language. Evolution will win in the end anyhow. .. but doesn’t marketing power brainwash us? Yes, but vote with your money and buy the cds of the language you want to support.

How come some sucessful bands like "Wir sind Helden" still sing German in Germany? If you sing English, the audience is much larger .. where is the problem? It’s a good thing .. people can actually understand it.

Countries like France that try to push French even in scientific publication only shoot themselves in the leg and live in the past. Sorry, vive la belle France!

There are cultural differences between countries. The French are still more likely to buy a French car than Germans buying German cars.

Why does Europe not wake up and only use one official language? Already now with 11 languages we wasted 550 million euros per year on translation. 1,300 translaters translate 1.5 million pages a year. Now the budget will increase to 800 million euros.

BBC-story-Ukraine

BBC-story-Translation

 'We may have nuclear technology, but we still have stone-age brains"
 -- Anthropologist Paul Roscoe.

article

 I grabbed the latest 1.8.2 source.
 I ran the usual: autoconf, configure, make, make install.
 ri failed.
 I looked inside Makefile and see the target install-doc.
 I ran make install-doc.
 ri worked.

 Not the most obvious path for me, but there you go

We’d like to share what the Internet sounds like when it sleeps, and in its current highly agitated state, we think it’s worth sharing. www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34227.html

Sven C. Koehler has not had much time lately to add more languages or benchmarks, but it is an impressive collection of benchmarks. link

XUL can give a richer widget than HTML. For a nice application look at the www.infodraft.com/~faser/mab/ Amazon browser. The author says on its webpage: 6/03/2003 I discovered XUL some months ago, when I found the O’Reilly’s book "Creating Applications with Mozilla", freely available at books.mozdev.org/ . I started to read the book and I understood that in my daily web development I could use all widgets I’m used to have in desktop applications. When I develop Content Management System, Control Panel, and Web Administrative tools, I find myself spending a lot of time designing the interface to reproduce the most basic widgets. Things like resizing the columns width of a data grid, make the application usable with the keyboard, scrolling result list with arrow keys, creating tab panels and so on, are not a so simple task in web development. I have to write or find somewhere a lot of javascript library and I waste my time in designing the basic interface when I want to focus on the business logic. I think web applications (that are a different things from public web site) should have a powerful user interface similar to the ones on desktop programs. XUL have almost all widgets. You can customize them using simple CSS or the GUI inherit the browser theme. I remind you that Mozilla is not just a browser, but a complete framework for building cross-platform applications. A big part of Mozilla is made with the same technology you can use in web applications: Javascript, CSS, XUL.