link[http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/Euruko2003]

The First European Ruby Conference was held at the University of Karlsruhein in Germany, from the 21st to the 22th of June, 2003. It was organized by Michael Neumann, Stefan Schmiedl, Armin Roehrl and with the help from many others.

Thanks to Michael, the presentations were digitally recorded and have been made available as AVI files. Some of theses are now available for download from ruby-doc.org The videos have had the some noise filtering and volume normalization applied, and have been converted to MPEG-1 to reduce (albeit slightly) their size.

Not all of the videos are available right now. Others will go up as time permits me to do the file processing.

I initially had some FTP timeout trouble uploading the files to ruby-doc.org, so I split them into chunks. I decided to leave them this way to help avoid marathon download sessions. To combine the chunks into the complete file you basically just need to 'cat' them in sequence. I've written a Ruby script to do this, available from the video download page. If anyone thinks they can mirror any of these files it would be a tremendous help.

If you know anything about video compression, and can tell me a way to make the files smaller without serious loss of quality, please tell me.

You can get Rake from rubyforge. If you have rubygems installed, then all you need to do is

  gem -i rake

If you have a very recent version of rubygems (i.e. from CVS), then the gen-rdoc option finally produces a decent rendition of the Rake documentation locally.

QuickStartExample

It’s probably because in order to post in the Java ng he has to be 10x as verbose as in the Smalltalk ng.

He probably has to declare himself, cast himself, wrap himself in a try catch block, bubble up any exceptions, use some external iterators, implement some interfaces, and wrap up his primitives in real objects. Maybe after auto-boxing and generics are supported, he’ll only have to post 7 or 8x as often.

Don’t worry James, we appreciate and understand your terseness over here. ;-)

Welcome to my little book. In it, my goal is to teach you a way to think about computation, to show you how far you can take a simple idea: that all computation consists of sending messages to objects. Object-oriented programming is no longer unusual, but taking it to the extreme - making everything an object - is still supported by only a few programming languages.

Can I justify this book in practical terms? Will reading it make you a better programmer, even if you never use "call with current continuation" or indulge in "metaclass hackery"? I think it might, but perhaps only if you’re the sort of person who would read this sort of book even if it had no practical value.

The real reason for reading this book is that the ideas in it are neat. There’s an intellectual heritage here, a history of people building idea upon idea. It’s an academic heritage, but not in the fussy sense. It’s more a joyous heritage of tinkerers, of people buttonholing their friends and saying, "You know, if I take that and think about it like this, look what I can do!"

link

The code is on SqueakSource: kilana.unibe.ch:8888/ObjectiveCBridge/ObjectiveC-avi.70.mcz You can get a prebuilt plugin (for use with Ian’s 3.7 VM) here: beta4.com/~avi/ObjectiveCPlugin The browser demo can be run with "CCBrowser test". It requires this nib file: beta4.com/~avi/CCBrowser.tgz You need to untar that and place it inside Contents/Resources/English.lproj of your VM application bundle. I’m announcing this partly because I’ve run out of steam on it for now, and am hoping someone else will take it the next step of building UIs for the various Squeak tools (browsers, debuggers, workspaces, inspectors, etc) in Cocoa. A custom NSMorphicView would also be cool, although might be pretty tricky. Anyway, if someone does try to take this on, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions they have about the underlying bridge code.

 I have run Compiere251d with Oracle10g & Java 1.5 beta :-), and I am very nice.

 You have to make the step:

 1.- Copy the $ORACLE_HOME/jdbc/lib/ojdbc14.jar
 to $COMPIERE_HOME/lib/oracle10g.jar

 2.- Change into $COMPIERE_HOME/RUN_setup.sh  in the -classpath oracle.jar for
 oracle10g.jar

(Source: whytheluckystiff) The (Poignant) Guide is a new approach to teaching Ruby, emphasizing the lingual traits of Ruby and illustrating its uniqueness with comics, visual imagery, and songs with accompanying hand gestures.

This date marks the release of the first three chapters. Feel free to tell your friends and family (a.k.a. Slashdot) about the news. With enough input and support, this book could see completion by next year. Hopefully this is a step towards explaining to the world why Ruby is such an enticing and voluptuous gem to behold.

Go and enjoy the book

Okay, I’ll keep this short. If you want to read more about my motivation, head over to the announcement on my site. motivation

Of course, the devil’s in the details: there’s inventory to manage, backorders to fulfill, outstanding invoices to collect, orders to process, bills to pay, and customers to service. The goal of business may be simple enough — but the business of running a business is anything but.

Fortunately, computers are a natural for the back office, and software to manage a business — called customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) software — has become a big business in itself. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft charge plenty of beans for bean counting software. For example, Microsoft’s Great Plains Software division charges $50,000 for a license, $100,000 for implementation, and $20,000 a year for maintenance.

But just as Linux has provided a free alternative to proprietary operating systems like Windows and Solaris, Compiere, this month’s "Project of the Month," provides an open source alternative to commercial CRM and ERP solutions. link

Unlike cameras, infra-red, RF systems or tilt technologies, Gametrak. allows movement forwards and backwards as well as up, down, left and right.

With Gametrak you can punch your opponents with your hands; sports games let you pick up and play using real golf clubs or tennis racquets . you can even bounce virtual basketballs!

Designed and manufactured by In2Games, Gametrak will launch across Europe o­n PS2 in September 2004 with the revolutionary fighting game, Dark Wind.

Future Gametrak titles include golf, baseball, adventure, dancing and basketball games.

FAQ

 Microsoft may be making a colossal mistake by trying to force
 the industry into a next-generation cycle before it is ready
 to move. Sony, with its enormous dominance of the market, could
 probably just about get away with it - if it moved, the industry
 would have to move with it, however much it hated the idea. But
 Microsoft, still a relatively small player in the games industry,
 just doesn't look like a company that has the influence needed to
 force a shift like this. It may be backed up by the biggest
 software company in the world, but publishers will still look at
 the bottom line - in this case, installed base and cost of
 development - and base their decisions on that alone. Herein lies
 the arrogance; Microsoft isn't used to making decisions as an
 industry small-fry, and it's trying to act like an industry leader
 in an industry it simply doesn't lead.

But, people working on DAV have had goals which extend beyond simple web page authoring. Some view DAV as a network filesystem suitable for the Internet, one that works on entire files at a time, with good performance in high-latency environments. Others view DAV as a protocol for manipulating the contents of a document management system via the Web. An important goal of DAV is to support virtual enterprises, being the primary protocol supporting a wide range of collaborative applications. Importantly, a major goal is the support of remote software development teams. A final goal of DAV is to leverage the success of HTTP in being a standard access layer for a wide range of storage repositories — HTTP gave them read access, while DAV gives them write access.

Well, the website clains WebDAV in 2 minutes .. I think 10-20 minutes is more realistic :-). A good starter.

Apache2 already comes with mod_dav.

I just now came across this link on slashdot. The only thing I can say is that like in the RIAA (sic) cases one really wonders about our politicians. And this is the weakest way of putting it .. oh boy! Lessing has said it correctly: *If we don’t fight for our freedom, we do not deserve it*. I am so sick of all these stupid trivial patents like double-click, hyperlinks, etc. .. does anybody care that obvious prior art exists?

The /. link

Some nice quotes :-)

 Ministers were being trusted to represent the view of the government that sent
 them... but it seems as if business interests have found that these
 individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act
 on their own.

 The corporations won the war.

I coped this from: Napkin Look & Feel is a pluggable Java look and feel that looks like it was scrawled on a napkin. You can use it to make provisional work actually look provisonal, or just for fun.

The idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete.

Sven C. Koehler, our hard-coding dataminer has sent me an email while his code was probably exploring the DNA of some beauty. I wonder whether it was the beauty the root-team uses in their logo? Hey, just because of the logo, one ought to give root a try.

 What I was impressed about:
 http://root.cern.ch/root/Mission.html
 ``We started the ROOT project in the context of the NA49 experiment at
 CERN. NA49 generates an impressive amount of data, about 10 Terabytes
 of raw data per run.'';

 ``Thanks to the builtin CINT C++ interpreter the command language,
  the scripting, or macro, language and the programming language are
  all C++. The interpreter allows for fast prototyping of the macros
  since it removes the time consuming compile/link cycle. It also
  provides a good environment to learn C++. If more performance is
  needed the interactively developed macros can be compiled using a
  C++ compiler.'';

 http://root.cern.ch/root/Architecture.html
 ``The backbone of the ROOT architecture is a layered class
 hierarchy with, currently, around 310 classes grouped in about 24
 frameworks divided in 14 categories. This hierarchy is organized in
 a mostly single-rooted class library, that is, most of the classes
 inherit from a common base class TObject. While this organization
 is not very popular in C++, it has proven to be well suited for our
 needs (and indeed for almost all successful class libraries: Java,
 Smalltalk, MFC, etc)''.

The bootdisk supports standard (dual)IDE controllers, and most SCSI-controllers with the drivers supplied in a seperate archive below. It does not need any other special hardware, it will run on 486 or higher, with at least 32MB (I think) ram or more. Unsupported hardware: MCA, EISA, i2o may not work. Some newer IDE/SCSI-raid systems may not work either.

Tested on: NT 3.51, NT 4, Windows 2000 (except datacenter?), Windows XP (all versions), Window Server 2003 (at least Enterprise).

DANGER WILL ROBINSON! If used on users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or later service packs on win2k, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless you remember the old password again

link

Sven C. Koehler has started to read "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers". He was so kind to send me a few quotes he likes from the introduction.

 Most books on computing stress the estimation of roundoff,
 especially the bounding of roundoff, but we shall concentrate
 on the avoidance of roundoff.  It seems better to avoid roundoff
 than to estimate what did not have to occur if common sense and
 few simple rules had been followed before the problem was put on
 the machine.

 Another standard algorithmic problem both in mathematics and in the use
 of computation to solve problems is the solution of simultaneous linear
 equations.  Unfortunately much of what is commonly taught is usually not
 relevant to the problem as it occurs in practice; nor is any completely
 statisfactory method of solution known at present.  Because the solution
 of simultaneous linear equations is so often a standard library package
 supplied by the computing center and because the corresponding
 description is so often misleading, it is necessary to discuss the
 limitations (and often the plain foolishness) of the method used by the
 package.  Thus it is necessary to examine carefully the obvious flaws and
 limitations, rather than pretending they do not exist.

update: (sorry, German only;) A big thanks to Sven C. Koehler for this summary

 Ich habe es nun in den groessten Teilen ueberflogen.  Die Ideen sind nicht
 wirklich neu: Umformen von Gleichungen, Vermeiden ungefaehr gleichgrosse
 Zahlen von einander abzuziehen, Approximation.  Beim Loesen von
 Gleichungssystemen schlägt er z.B. vor, ein Verfahren einzusetzen, das
 kein wiederholtes Dividieren benoetigt, dann wird's auch nicht ungenau.
 Trotzdem mag ich das Buch, weil es in mir den Eindruck weckt, dass es
 sehr fundiert ist.  Es ist voll von mathematischen Formeln, die ich alle
 nicht wirklich verstanden habe, aber ich werde in jedem Fall wieder darin
 nach Erklaerungen suchen, wenn ich mal wieder ein Numerik-Problem habe.

 Ich glaube für dich ist as Buch eher langweilig, das meiste kennst du
 bestimmt aus dem Studium. :-)

 >Documents work
 >> because you can use them early (models that build knowledge),
 >> because they persist (you're not crippled by your imperfect memory),
 >> because they're efficient (you don't have to keep repeating the same
 >> conversation with perfect fidelity), because they can capture
 >> details (not just vague impressions), because they can be reviewed,
 >> critiqued, and corrected (unlike your trembling thoughts), because
 >> they remain (unlike you, you job-hopper!), etc.

Excellent points. Extreme programming demands this of the code as well as any documents the customer may require.