They got zillions of interesting parallel computing and Bayesian maths problems. More to follow ..

One of the lessons I learnt sofar from this venture is that if you have enough data, you do not need to be too smart as things have nicely converged :-).

Sebastopol, CA, February 13, 2007—To meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the joy of Rails, Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media are teaming up to produce RailsConf Europe 2007, an entire conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. Happening September 17-19 in Berlin, Germany, RailsConf Europe will offer keynotes, sessions, and tutorials from the most innovative and successful Rails experts and organizations. O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central are seeking leaders to present sessions and tutorials at the conference. Qualified practitioners with insights and anecdotes to share with IT professionals and the Rails community are invited to submit a proposal by April 12, 2007.

The Ruby on Rails development framework turns three years old this summer, and in that short time, it has gone from cult favorite to major player in the Web development world. By every measure—feature richness, adoption, publications, developer reception—Rails is a phenomenon, and one that’s here to stay.

The conference committee is looking for presentations and/or tutorial proposals from Rails developers and hackers, Rubyists at large, Rails trainers, designers with a Rails focus, managers, entrepreneurs—anyone with Rails experience, expertise, and insight.

Proposals should focus on helping attendees by teaching from experience. Any Rails-related topic will be considered. Below are some specific areas the committee would like to see represented at the conference:

• Timesaving developer productivity tips, tricks, and tools
• Spotlights on important Rails subsystems
• Making the most of new Rails features
• Rails development case studies, including application rewrites and organizational boot-strapping
• Migrating applications and people from other technologies to Rails
• Gem and plug-in highlights
• Patterns and best practices
• Extending Rails

RailsConf Europe 2007 will bring together hundreds of Rails practitioners from Europe and around the world, for three days of presentations, tutorials, and Rails comradery. Last year’s event sold out completely and we are expecting an even greater number of participants in Berlin for RailsConf Europe 2007. Attendees will include Ruby and Rails enthusiasts, web developers and programmers from all sizes and types of organizations, open source developers and hackers, IT managers tracking emerging technologies, tech-savvy entrepreneurs, and users at every level of expertise.

For complete RailsConf Europe 2007 details, visit: www.railsconfeurope.com

Interesting write up at register.com

Brian Marick wrote this great book. Brian is a well known testing guru, but this books appeals to a much wider audience. Through a few simple scripts he teaches people how to code every day tasks in ruby.

It’s a short and easy read of nearly 300 pages and requires no previous ruby knowledge. If you already know ruby, this book is probably too slow, but if you come from any other language, it’s a great book.

In the end, it’s better to avoid creating stubborn dragons in the first place and to slay them early if they start to turn bad. Young dragons are easier to slay than old ones. You may even slay several dragons before you are happy that you have one you can live with.

Image source

The rumor mill says, that we will soonish see tons of interesting Javascript and Ruby stuff there .. thanks to one project in winter country :-).

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Say things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse."
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
• Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
• Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
• Comparing the state of dead horses in todays environment.
• Change the requirements declaring that "This horse is not dead."
• Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
• Declaring that "No horse is too dead to beat."
• Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
• Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
• Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
• Declare the horse is "better, faster and cheaper" dead.
• Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
• Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
• Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
• Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Nice thread int he extremeprogramming-ML

You can get the entire book at Projet Gutenberg for free.

 hdiutil burn image.iso

 $ hdiutil  burn  KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso
 Preparing data for burn
 Opening session
 Opening track
 Writing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing track
 ..............................................................................
 Closing session
 ..............................................................................
 Finishing burn
 Verifying burn...
 Verifying
 ...............................................................................
 Burn completed successfully
 ...............................................................................
 hdiutil: burn: completed

Good old trusted linux does it with cdrecord :-)

 cdrecord  speed=2 dev=0,1,0 -data sol-9-install-sparc.iso

 Hi all,

 Long time since I announced my last project....

 With RubyJS you can transform a subset of Ruby into Javascript code.

 What works?
 * Classes, modules, inheritance
 * Instance methods, class methods
 * Exceptions (rescue/ensure)
 * Meta-programming stuff like 'attr_reader'
 (any meta-programming stuff works that does not appear inside methods)
 * Iterators, yield
 * "require" (with platform-specific extension ala Google Webtoolkit)
 * Inline Javascript code
 * Some kind of compile-time method lookup  ;-)
 * Numbers, String, Array, Hash, Proc (a lot of functionallity is missing!)
 * Testing with Rhino-JS
 * A lot more  :)

 There is a lots of room for optimizations and improvement  :)

 DOWNLOAD
 http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/

 Best use Mercurial (www.selenic.com/mercurial) to check it out:
 hg clone static-http://ntecs.de/hg-projects/rubyjs/

• Merge PDF Documents
• Split PDF Pages into a New Document
• Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
• Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
• Encrypt Output as Desired
• Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data or XFDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
• Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
• ..

The nice thing is that one can use it all from the commandline :-).

• Examples Merge Two or More PDFs into a New Document

 pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

• Split Select Pages from Multiple PDFs into a New Document

 pdftk A=one.pdf B=two.pdf cat A1-7 B1-5 A8 output combined.pdf

• Burst a Single PDF Document into Single Pages and Report its Data to doc_data.txt pdftk mydoc.pdf burst.

It’s a jewel one should have in its tool-shop.