The PSP chipset comprises a number of components: the CPU, a media processor, a 3D graphics engine, a security processor and a power manager. The PSP’s MIPS R4000-based CPU will run at up to 333MHz, Sony chip designer Masanobu Okabe revealed at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford University, California. Its frontside bus runs at up to 166MHz, with both frequencies controlled by processor load. It contains a vector processing engine. link

matz called his talk: "How Ruby sucks".

 > PPS:
 > I remember working for a company, where it took the make utility3/4 of
 > an hour to figure out *what* to compile, and the compilers a day to
 > compile- it was a C++ project b.t.w. which was canceled and replaced by
 > a Smalltalk program after they spent 50man-years on a non-working
 > program - so much for non-toy languages !

Yeah and I just spent 3 days in an inhouse J2EE workshop held by one of our chief architects. We spent most of our time fighting with the tools. Changed setting over and over. The goal of the workshop was to demonstrate how to insert a row into an oracle table. At the end of the 2 days the table was still empty. Another non-toy language.

I have written two small apps (apx 5000 LOC) one in squak and one in stx. It was a dream. Got up in the morning and fixed two or three bugs before breakfast. You can only do this with a real cool environment.

So hats off to Nucleus Research for firing a salvo at SAP for causing customers to shell out millions on software with little more than added worker productivity in return. link

For windows user’s there is a complete pre-built binary (it can coexist with your current FreeRIDE installation), and for non-windows users there are instructions for adding RRB refactoring support to your existing FreeRIDE installation.

You can find full details at: freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?RefactoringSupport

bk clone bk://ftp.rubyx.org/rubyx
cd rubyx
bk co

 
mkdir /my/rubyx/dir  (or something like)
./rubyx --root /my/rubyx/dir --download base net disk (for the basics)
./rubyx --root /my/rubyx/dir --download all (for everything)

link

 svg% ruby -e 'p  "%.24f" % (625.91 + 900.00 + 22.00)'
 "1547.909999999999854480847716"
 svg%

 svg% ruby -e 'p  "%.24f" % 1547.91'
 "1547.910000000000081854523160"
 svg%

Dave Thomas explained: It’s about 40 years old, and unlikely to be fixed. Floating point numbers are not represented exactly inside computers, and so floating point comparisons are routinely deprecated in books on programming. Certain values cannot ever be expressed in floating point representation. If you want exact, fractional, math, you should probably use the ‘rational’ library and investigate ‘mathn’. This is the classic article to read link What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Michael Neumann added: In Ruby you can use BigDecimal:

 require 'bigdecimal'
 BigDecimal.new("625.91") + 900 + 22 == BigDecimal.new("1547.91") # => true

How well does the Oracle-compatability mode work for SAP DB? I got to check that as it might be an option to replace the existing Oracle DB dependency.

I will post a few pics from the Linuxtag later. Not too many people here this year. Linux has simply made it into mainstream. The adventure has long gone :-). Got a nice yellow "no software patents" t-shirt.

Some very interesting ruby stuff:

• Artificial Neural Networks: Implemented a multilayer backpropagating artificial neural network using a momentum term and optionally a weight decay term.
• Borges mod_ruby Integration: I have managed to get Borges running using mod_ruby. I will produce a library ready version of that and check it in the Borges project.
• and much more
link

 Smalltalk With Style is now freely available.
 Thanks Suzanne, Ed, and Dave. This is a great book everybody should read!!

 I added the chapter 27 of Smalltalk by Example.
 I added a link to point to the book of Liu: Smalltalk, Object and Design

And it is important to consider that once you commit to, say, iterating over an entire file, that the file must be reasonably small anyway to get decent performance. The same issue exists with collections. Who cares if collect: creates an extra collection or if WriteStream wastes space at the end of a long underlying collection; if these concerns are really so important then probably this huge collection should not exist and/or you should not be iterating over the entire thing anyway.

To put it very simply: you just can not expect a program to work on large data structures just because you micro optimized everywhere. If you want to handle large data structures then it takes planning and specialized algorithms and test cases. If you are not going to put in that effort, then don’t sweat the small stuff. It is very liberating to code with an eye towards correctness and towards algorithmic performance, and not to worry about getting down the constant factor. It seems to lead to lower stress, faster code production, and fewer bugs generated.

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