>How many racing car drivers ever built a car from scratch :-)
 >> I do not think that's the best way to become a racing driver.
 >>
 >> How many sketch artists ever made their own pencils?
 >>
 >> How many  great tennis players ever built their own playing equipment?
 >>

A machine shop foreman gets an order for a large number of widgets in a short time frame and calls an old buddy out of retirement for some extra help.

Bright and early Monday morning the foreman hands out copies of the mechanical drawings to his usual crew and his old buddy and tells them to get to work. Everybody heads off to their workstations and gets busy. By the time the lunch whistle blows, each of the crew members has one shiny new widget to show for their efforts except the old hand. He has a small but neat collection of parts that look nothing like the widget. After lunch and a bit of good-natured ribbing at the expense of the "old" hand, the machinists go back to work. The end of the day arrives and each crew member has another shiny widget to show for their efforts. The old hand has added to his collection of parts, but still has no widgets to show for the days work.

Tuesday proceeds in much the same way as Monday, with each crew member producing one widget before lunch. The old hand takes his lunch-time ribbing with a silent smile and goes back to work. At the end of the day, each crew member again has two new widgets to show for their day’s work. The old hand has a apparently completed his collection of parts, but still has no widgets to show for his efforts.

Wednesday lunch rolls around and the crew prepares for another round of laughs at the expense of the perhaps-too-old hand. Much to their dismay, they find a collection of shiny new widgets equal to all of their output for Monday. A quiet lunch ensues and the crew pays special attention to the old hand’s work over the course of Wednesday afternoon. Sure enough, the old hand completes another batch of shiny new widgets in record time.

It turns out that the old hand spent two days building a set of tools and jigs that allowed him to turn out widgets at pace that equaled the sum total of the work of the less experienced crew.

Building your own tools may dramatically improve your efficiency, but you also have to have the experience to know what kind of tools to build.

— Trey

RetroWeb is an extension of RetroForth for creating XHTML documents.It features a readable and elegant Lisp-like syntax to ease writing XHTML. It is quite small, very extensible and gives you the full power of Forth when you need it.

link

Changes: The search server was enhanced. The logging format was changed. Accuracy of document clustering was improved. The building configuration was enhanced, and now Mac OS X 10.3 is supported.

link

Frameworks in big companies: Some designers develop the specs. Then another company implements it, then a 3rd company is forced to use it .. which means make it usable first. Why don’t these designers eat their own dog food and actually implement real apps in their oh so great frameworks. Architects ..

I just now had to look sth. up about REXML. and came across this :-).

 First off, Ruby does iterators differently than Java. Java uses a lot of
 helper classes. Helper classes are exactly the kinds of things that theorists
 come up with... they look good on paper, but using them is like chewing glass.
 You find that you spend 50% of your time writing helper classes just to
 support the other 50% of the code that actually does the job you were trying
 to solve in the first place. In this case, the Java helper classes are either
 Enumerations or Iterators. Ruby, on the other hand, uses blocks, which is
 much more elegant. Rather than:

 for (Enumeration e=parent.getChildren(); e.hasMoreElements(); ) { Element child = (Element)e.nextElement(); // Do something with child }

 you get:

 parent.each_child{ |child| # Do something with child }

 Can't you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby is the language Buddha would have programmed in.

Should I start talking about Java-Beans now?

We have a superfast matrix class: NArray (not in standard lib). It claimed to be 3x faster than NumPy for some tests and a bit faster than Octave for for matrix operations.

www.ir.isas.ac.jp/~masa/ruby/index-e.html

Vim-like bindings for firefox.

 SELECT a, b, INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/result.text' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
 OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' FROM test_table;

 <madgarden>    Heh... "Saying that Java is nice because it works on all
                OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it
                works on all genders"
 <hefner>       nice quote, shame I can't hang that one up at work..
 <madgarden>    Write it in the bathroom stall, who'll ever know? ;)

Note, that it’s in no way complete, nor usable for anything other than toy examples (due to very little code, it’s probably stable, but especially with the Html-generation stuff, there might be problems).

You can download the sources directly from viewcvs here: www.ntecs.de/viewcvs/viewcvs/Wee/

There are no dependencies. To get started change into the examples directory and run example.rb, then point your browser to localhost:2000/app/ and have fun, or play with it online here:

ntecs.de/wee/counter

You can find some documentation on my blog. www.ntecs.de/blog/?cat=web

Any comments, bug fixes etc. very welcome!

Many thanks goes to Avi Bryant, who guided me into the right direction by answering a lot of question. Thanks!

I really wonder what impact this might have on the US-elections. Videomirror

Microsoft hates the fact that email is in plaintext. My Outlook Express client is buggy when it comes to handling the simplest of all tasks: receiving and responding to a text email. I’ve fiddled with all the internal settings, trying to get it to convert HTML mail to text, responding in text, and including all these simple plaintext protocols like adding ">" to quoted parts of an email I’m responding to. But my Outlook still insists on having things pop-up in tiny, colored fonts that are impossible to read, and then not tagging quoted text. In this environment, emails quickly bloat and become incoherent.

I found that I needed to know more about Ruby’s garbage collector in order to write robust extensions. This page is an attempt to fill this gap. It assumes the reader has some knowledge of Ruby’s C API, for example they have read the introduction in Programming ruby.

It’s a test-balloon. Maybe they will sell it as online pdfs in the future.

  class Float
    def truncate(sd=2)
      scale=(10**sd).to_f
      (self * scale).to_i / scale
    end
  end
  a=0.255
  a.truncate(2) #-> 0.25

Very nice picture. Belgium has the lightest sky, as they have lights on their highways. Germany is only on Nr. 4.

easyHotel

They copied the idea from Japan.

 I do this regularly, though most of the work so far has tended to be much
 more centric on web based applications.

 >> 1. A database
 >>     Java world: Oracle, MySQL or another relational DB of your choice

 MySQL

 >> 2. Some way to persist domain objects and manage transactions
 >>     Java world: entity EJBs, JDO, hand-coded DAOs, O/R <censored>
 >> mappers, etc

 Kansas has been maturing wonderfully for my purposes for this.

 >> 3. An RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism for communication between
 >> the front-end and the back-end (assuming that the front-end is a
 >> thick GUI).         Java world: session EJBs, servlets

 drb.  Works great.

 >> 4. A thick GUI
 >>     Java world: Swing

 TK, Qt, Fox

 >> 5. A Web GUI
 >>     Java world: JSP, XSLT, XMLC and all the other stuff

 I've use Iowa very successfully for this every day for a couple of years.

 >> 6. An asynchronous communications infrastructure
 >>     Java world: message-driven EJBs

 I am using Drb/Rinda/Tupleserver pretty effectively for this.  No problems
 with it at all so far.

 Kirk