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

 rpa-base 0.2.1pre1 is now available at http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org .
 Many of the most popular libraries/applications as per Rubyforge
 statistics (rails, rake, redcloth, activerecord, sqlite, log4r, copland,
 ruvi, to name a few) have been packaged for use with rpa-base 0.2.1pre1.

 You can find a list of the 100+ packages at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Packaged_Software

 Screenshots and animations can be found at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Rpa_Base_In_Action

 rpa-base 0.2.1pre1 fixes some issues in the bootstrapping phase, which
 couldn't hence be solved through the normal self-upgrade mechanism.
 In addition to several other bugfixes, 0.2.1pre1 features better proxy
 support, isolation of unit tests run automatically when installing a
 lib/app, and improvements in the command-line tool.

 Foreword
 --------

 The Ruby Production Archive (RPA) will provide packages of Ruby
 libraries and programs in a form that allows production use, engineered
 through a stringent process resembling FreeBSD's or Debian's.

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA. Its scope and
 purposes are different to those of other systems like RubyGems.
 Features
 ========
 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA's client-side
 package management. You can think of it as RPA's apt-get + dpkg. It
 features the following as of 0.2.1pre1:

 * strong dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed,
   keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no
   longer needed dependencies
 * atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic
   transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS
   crashes too on POSIX systems)
 * parallel installs: you can install several ports in parallel; builds
   will be parallelized and the final phase will be serialized properly
 * self-hosting: rpa-base installs and updates itself
 * modular, extensible design: the 2-phase install is similar to FreeBSD and
   Debian's package creation; rpa-base packages need not be restricted
   to installing everything under a single directory ("1 package, 1 dir"
   paradigm)
 * rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install
   time (currently disabled on win32)
 * ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed
   by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa
 * handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can
   compile extensions as needed
 * unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the
   installation is canceled if they don't pass

 Several of the above features are illustrated in the screenshots and
 animations available at
 http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Rpa_Base_In_Action

 Limitations:
 ===========
 A number of features have been pushed back to 0.3.0:
 * full support for binary platform-specific packages
 * signed packages/ports
 * system-wide configuration system
 * better user interface
 In practice, the first one is the most limiting at the moment since it means
 that win32 users in particular need a working C toolchain to install
 extensions. This will soon be addressed.

 ...