• onestepback.org/
• www.jamisbuck.org/jamis/
• fhwang.net/
• pablotron.org/

 Smalltalk is an amazing and legendary language
 divulged to humans by Prometheus. This angered the
 gods enough they condemned him to refactor a big ball
 of Hadean mud for all eternity.

 Smalltalk can only be used by humans with a psi power
 greater than 17, with adjustments. Smalltalk
 programmers do not type, they lean their heads towards
 their monitors, and meditate. The more advanced
 programmers do not even need monitors.

 Smalltalk responds to their thought patterns by
 testing itself, coding itself, and refactoring itself.
 When humans with low psi powers need to _see_
 Smalltalk, it manifests itself as a physical avatar of
 a series of almost meaningless ^[]: characters,
 interspersed with intention-revealing selectors.
 Squinting at these symbols will reveal a Mandala
 symbolizing the 7th Chakra of the nearest programmer
 who is romantically involved, if any.

 Smalltalk itself generates its own refactoring
 browser, test rig, IDE, and 3D graphics subsystems as
 you write your program with it. So as you structure
 your program, Smalltalk uses that structure to
 generate the refactoring browser needed to refactor
 its structure. This is why some advanced Smalltalk
 Gurus know the best way to program Smalltalk is to
 simply pick up the CPU and shake it.

 The only reason such an obviously superior language
 has not taken over the world is because it interferes
 with the plans of the astral Lizard People, and their
 avatars and representatives among us. These can be
 recognized by their MCSD plaques, their years of
 experience writing distributed application servers
 that serve application distributors, and - especially
 - their books with code samples in Java.

 |Can we use ruby for commercial
 |application?

 Yes.

 |Do we need to distribte our application with sources?

 No.  If you're using regex.c comes with 1.8.2, you have to allow
 re-linking the binary (via supplying object files or dynamic linking),
 because it's LGPL.  If you are using Oniguruma new regex engine, you
 have no such restriction.

 Gabriele Renzi added:
  IIRC 1.9 in the cvs already has oniguruma as the standard regex lib.

Bypass compulsory web registration via Firefox’s right-click context menu. Compatibile with Mozilla and current Firefox releases that use the new extension manager. Visit bugmenot for full details of their service.

link

Try a System

If you’d like to have a chance to try out an application that uses CMU Sphinx, try the Communicator, an experimental system that helps you plan air travel. You can reach it at the toll-free number 1-877-CMU-PLAN (1-877-268-7526) or at +1 412 268 1084.. The system will provide real flight information. The system may be sensitive to loud background noises, especially over cell phones.

(Source: Paul Graham) I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor. "Twelve!" he said. He tried to sound indignant, but he didn’t quite manage it. He knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy.

Yahoo was a special case. It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a pyramid scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo’s earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter— stimulating another round of investments in startups.

link

I especially like this part: Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.

 Whoa, say what?
 ---
 Rubydium is aiming to become an optimising reimplementation
 of the Ruby 1.8 interpreter, currently its as good as vapourware
 however the key mechanism has been prototyped, thusly before
 commencing a major rewrite I thought i'd release the
 current state of the art.

link

www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatAsYouWere.htm

A+ is open source. link

Last night there was once again spam in the Rubygems wiki. I guess we need to pass it through a Bayesian filter before committing changes or finally install CAPTCHA.

The problem with spam is .. people! Spam simply works .. and as long as spam works it will not stop.

On /. is an article that Wikipedia has now reached 300,000 articles! For size comparisons, the English Wikipedia has 90.1 million words across 300,000 articles, compared to Britannica’s 55 million words across 85,000 articles. (All the languages combined together reach 790,000 articles.)

slashdot article

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