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.

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.

A Cisco purchase gone wrong has cost San Jose, California’s CIO Wandzia Grycz her job. Grycz exited her CIO post earlier this week just ahead of an audit release detailing the city’s findings on a recent computer and phone network installation proposal. Grycz has publicly denied that she allowed Cisco to craft the nature of the IT contact.

…

A new $51m computer system has had so many bugs that city officials can’t get the technology up and running at all. And the culprit looks like SAP.

"We find problems on a daily basis, and part of that is getting the (computer) system to work for us," Diane Supler, budget director in Tacoma told the Associated Press. "Every time we think we’ve identified all of the issues, something else happens in SAP (the system software)."

link

 have a look at googlism.com and type bush or chirac or armin roehrl :-)

 Version 0.7.0 of FreeRIDE has been released and is available for download!

 For details and downloads, go to:

    http://freeride.rubyforge.org/

    Many bugs have been fixed and there is also a bunch of new features
    (Experimental code Refactoring, Preferences plugin available, Debugger
    fully functional on Linux and Windows...)

    The Window's version still runs FreeRIDE with its own private copy of
    Ruby (that will not interfere with your installed version), but this
    private copy of Ruby is now version 1.8.2 preview 2.

    Linux users will find both a tgz and a rpm file ready for use with
    your own copy of Ruby.

    === FreeRIDE Overview ===

    FreeRIDE aims to be a full-featured, first-class IDE on a par with
    those available for other languages, with all the best-of-breed
    features that you would expect in a high-end IDE.

    Some of FreeRIDE's features include:

    * Multi-file editing
    * Syntax highlighting
    * Auto-indenting
    * Code Folding
    * Source navigation by module, class, method, etc.
    * Integrated debugging
    * Written in Ruby for easy extension

    Some planned features include:
    * Full internationalization
    * High-end refactoring support
    * Remote pair programming

    In its current state, FreeRIDE cannot yet be called a real IDE. What
    is does have is a stable infrastructure with all the working plumbing
    needed for the hordes of anxious Ruby developers that want to create
    plugins to extend the functionality of FreeRIDE. The FreeRIDE team
    will be working on such FreeRIDE plugins that we will individually
    release to incrementally improve the FreeRIDE system. Periodically we
    will rollup these added plugins into new releases of FreeRIDE.

    Even if you have not officially joined the FreeRIDE team you can still
    create plugins for you own use, share them with others, or send them
    to us and we will make them available for download from our project
    wiki. We may even ask for your permission to include them in the
    FreeRIDE core distribution.

• 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.

Registration and Infopage

high-resolution version

Summary:

• Advertisement market has limits
• the cash from the IPO is the emergecy fund to reinvent themselves
• only buy small companies with interesting technology
• take on Yahoo and Microsoft, but not directly
• Amazon, ebay, etc. are there to lose .. The key to making money in search is to get between people and what they are searching for, and that’s where Google is on a collision course not only with Microsoft and Yahoo, but also with Amazon and eBay
• expect GoogleMedia taking on iTunes and entire new market places of intellectual property
• whatever Google will do will be incredibly technical

 This came up in conversation with a client today - the problem with
 projects is the equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
 The more control you want on their status (or position), the less you
 have over their velocity. Pick one of the two - and pick wisely.

 Potential Corporate SCO Defendants

 For those organizations threatened with legal action by SCO, the Legal
 Defense Center is the one, central source for objective information
 regarding common issues faced by all potential SCO defendants. Based
 in Washington DC and comprised of a carefully-selected Panel of
 highly-specialized Intellectual Property legal experts fully-briefed
 on the intricacies of the case, the Legal Defense Center provides
 unmatched legal and defense resources. Membership in the program is
 $100,000 annually and provides resources to its members that
 would cost in the millions if developed independently.

 Linux Kernel Developers

 Individual contributors to the Linux kernel gain access to the
 full resources of the Open Source Legal Defense Fund including
 guidance on how to best protect and defend their own intellectual
 property rights. They also receive $25,000 in legal protection
 from OSRM if they are named in future lawsuits involving their
 contributions to the Linux kernel. Membership for individuals
 is $250 annually.

P.S.: Do not

 gem install rails

if you have files in app

Update: David has fixed that bug, but it should teach us all a leson to keep using CVS/Subversion all the time.

 Fast Company has a terrific cover piece this month about Jeff Bezos.
 My favorite part is when he talks about asking other people (experts, even)
 for their opinion about new projects.

 Inevitably, people say no. Don't do it. I don't like it. It'll fail.
 Don't bother.

 When I think about every successful project (whether it's a book
 or a business or a website) the people I trust have always given
 me exceedingly bad advice. And more often than not, that advice
 is about being conservative.

 The incentive plan here is pretty clear. If someone dissuades you
 from trying, you can hardly blame them for the failure that doesn't
 happen, right? If, on the other hand, they egg you on and you crash,
 that really puts a crimp in the relationship...

 I think the problem lies in the question. Instead of saying,
 "what do you think?" as in, "what do you think about Amazon
 offering 1,000,000 different titles even though some of them are really
 hard for us to get..." the question ought to be, "how can I make this
 project even MORE remarkable?"

I highly recommend you to read more of Seth Godin´s blog

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.