| RubyX - a ruby based Linux distro |
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: ruby-talk, Andrew Walrond, Oct 24, 2003) Rubyx is a ruby based linux distro. It is also the name of the script which creates Rubyx the distro and handles the package management
In light of the recent rubyx/lunar threads, I thought it sensible to make the rubyx source available for scrutiny by the ruby community. You can get it using Bitkeeper like this:
bk clone bk://ftp.rubyx.org/rubyx
cd rubyx
bk co
You'll see three files: rubyx - The man script
init - The ruby based init script
strfile.rb - Some code shared by rubyx and init
Important! The build machine must be capable of running the generated code,
How it all works will require further discussion, but if you want to get involved, it would be a good idea to ask rubyx to download the sources. To get everything, you'll need 4Gb and broadband ;) For just the basics, it's a fraction of that but I don't have the figure to hand. Do this as root...
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)
If you don't have broadband, you might want to use --dj 1 to reduce the number of parallel downloads.
I wrote this in part to learn ruby, so any comments/suggestions on the code or style are welcomed. Although I am writing this in Kmail on my laptop running Rubyx, rubyx is still very much work in progress, so don't expect too much.
Lots more to discuss, but this will do for starters :)
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| Test Version of FreeRIDE with RRB Refactoring Support
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Curt Hibbs) I just put up a test version of FreeRIDE that includes
RRB Refactoring support and I would like to ask your help in testing it.
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. Full details at: [freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?RefactoringSupport]
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| Three monsters united: Woody+Oracle 9.2 + Compiere 2.4.4.a
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25 Sep 04 |
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the monster of opensource ERP & CRM systems on the monster of free
GNU/Linux operating systems with the monster of commercial object
relational databases. What happens when 3 monters go to bed together?
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| The dark side of computing: floating point arithmetic
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25 Sep 04 |
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I saw this post on ruby-talk: raise "false" if ((625.91 + 900.00
+ 22.00) != 1547.91) And yes, of course it raises the exception in ruby or
in C. Guy Decoux (as always) answered quickly:
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
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| DE: My Compiere slides for Linuxtag 2004
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25 Sep 04 |
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Bin gerade am Linuxtag 2004 in Karlsruhe. Die Folien meines Compiere-Vortrages
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.
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| What's Shiny and New in Ruby 1.8.0?
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25 Sep 04 |
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why has produced a must_read summary about new features in Ruby 1.8.0. whytheluckystiff.net/articles/2003/08/04/rubyOneEightOh
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| Interesting Ruby page: semantics & semiotics; code manufacture |
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25 Sep 04 |
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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
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| Smalltalk with Style
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25 Sep 04 |
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Stephane Ducasse posted this to the Squeak-ML. download
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
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| On reading a text file in Smalltalk
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: comp.lang.smalltalk, Lex Spoon) If you accept losing one notch of
performance, then you can make much clearer code in Smalltalk. The
"file lines" idiom in this thread is very useful, because you can
then use collect:, select:, etc., on the resulting collection of lines.
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.
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| Euruko 2003 Videos available at ruby-doc.org
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25 Sep 04 |
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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.
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| Rake 0.40. is out
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25 Sep 04 |
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Rake is a make-like utility written entirely in Ruby. It allows to you
specify build target and actions, with the action being standard Ruby code.
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
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| Smalltalk must be dead because ...
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25 Sep 04 |
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Donald Raab posted this goodie to the st-mailinglist.
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. ;-)
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| A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects
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25 Sep 04 |
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This is a draft book titled A Little Ruby, A Lot of Objects. It’s in
the style of Friedman and Felleisen’s wonderful The Little Lisper,
but on a different topic.
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!"
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| Squeak: ObjectiveCPlugin process
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Avi Bryant, squeak-ML) A while ago, Alain Fischer announced his
new ObjectiveC plugin, allowing Squeak to use Apple’s Cocoa and other
ObjectiveC libraries. Todd Blanchard and I have since done some further
work on it, and it’s at the point now where it can begin be used to
build Cocoa UIs from within Squeak. As a quick test, I built a native OS X
UI for the system browser, which you can see in this screenshot: img
src="
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.
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| Compiere 251d and Oracle 10g and Java 1.5 beta
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25 Sep 04 |
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For all of you that want to be bleading-edge … Perez Juarez posted
this to the forum:
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
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| Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
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25 Sep 04 |
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(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
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| Compiere - Linux-mag article
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25 Sep 04 |
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Like the heart and lungs, accounts payable and accounts receivable keep a
company pumping. Money goes out; raw materials come in. Products and
services go out; money comes in. If more money comes in than goes out, the
company prospers. At least that’s the theory — and the goal.
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
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| Good ruby documentation
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25 Sep 04 |
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Just in case you have not seen this for 1.9
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| Gametrak
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25 Sep 04 |
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Gametrak. is a new videogames controller, giving you precise and intuitive
control in 3D space. 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
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| Comment: Microsoft's rush to next-gen could see the Xbox take a tumble
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25 Sep 04 |
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(Source: Gamesindustry) from the article
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.
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