I never forgot that day and have spent the past 42 years confronting racism whenever I witness it. I am so proud of my country and our people that we finally have moved beyond race, at least in this important decision. We have much to do, but this is such an important beginning. For the first time in my life, I voted for the person I really wanted and he won. I too am proud once more to be an American.

in hope!

How incredibly dumb.

I hope you enjoy yours, though! :)

I remember Villains & Vigilantes, too. We also played a lot of Traveller, plus other games that I’ve since forgotten.

Just for you, I’ve changed the RubyCorner configuration. Happy now?

this is twitter-spam

please stop it

Of course this 4K is insignificant – what makes a program big in ram is data, not code. The real memory cost of the CTGradient is the Apple based drawing routines which use video memory to draw on the screen. The bigger the gradient window, the bigger this cost. So rather than optimizing the CTGradiant class the lad could have made more impact on runtime memory by using less gradiant, which is far more significant than any memory increase caused by the use of a large class most of which will not be loaded in by the loader – and even if the rest of the 4K page loaded in was redundant the real memory cost is less than 4K memory, because some of that code *was* needed after all.

We are not coding for calculators anymore.

This isn’t Slashdot, and I don’t allow anonymous cowards any more.

The only fair point I’ll make to anonymous is that he (99% chance of that, don’t you think?) came to my blog via one of the many Ruby blog aggregators, possibly even through the Artima buzz.

Michael: True. It doesn’t work so well on a MacBook or MacBook Pro (what I have), but it is an option. If you’re constantly upgrading your hardware (as a coworker of mine is doing), the Mac won’t be your choice because of limited driver availability.

Or a Mac with a Bootcamp partition so you can dual-boot into Windows for Windows-only games, which is what I do on my Mac Pro at home. Games run as well or better on it than my (albeit slightly older) dual-boot x86 FreeBSD/Windows box.

It’s a special kind of hubris to presume you can label something off-topic or in any way inappropriate in a personal blog. Austin isn’t obligated to post about Ruby, and it’s especially laughable to think that anything he writes in it is somehow “intruding”. If you aren’t interested in anything he writes but the Ruby stuff, then get off your ass, take two seconds, look in the categories menu he’s helpfully provided to the right, and limit what you look at to http://www.halostatue.ca/category/ruby/. Or better yet, just STFU and go away.

2. This isn’t a blog about Ruby exclusively.

3. If you have a problem with my “left-wing politics” (I am, in fact, liberal in politics compared to the U.S.; then again, so are Canada’s conservatives by and large), then you may not want to read my blog. I’m blogging about things that matter to me. One of those things is Ruby. If I was blogging exclusively about Ruby, then you wouldn’t find my Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe (which is quite good, mind you).

4. Next time, own your comment. I am modifying my comment policy to make it clear that I am no longer accepting anonymous comments. Your email address or your URL must be valid and pointing to you. If I can’t get to either, your comment will be deleted.

I also have to admit that I’ll probably never use Ruby in Steel because I despise every second I have to spend in Visual Studio for numerous reasons (I haven’t yet upgraded to Leopard, so I can’t say whether XCode has a good Ruby mode or whether I’d use it). When it comes to editing, I’m a hard-core vim guy.

Even in C++, I will spend most of my time using the binary-search printfs approach rather than using Visual Studio, because it’s so painfully ugly. I only use the debugger when I already know where the problem is and I want to change values live while running.

The point is that, to be useful, a debugger has to be fast, easy to use (visual beakpoints, simple step-into/over/call-stack navigation etc.) and have full ‘drill-down’ expansion). That’s what our debugger has – among other things. If you are used to debugging in C# you may want to try our Ruby debugger which is part of the Ruby In Steel IDE for Visual Studio ;-)

More info here:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Developer-Overview

best wishes

Huw

I’ve *never* run out of hardware on my slowest box, a 1.3 GHz Athlon T-bird. I bought it at 512 MB with a 60 GB hard drive for $700. It’s ancient, but it now has a full GB and a 250 MB hard drive.

The same goes for my 1.7 GHz Athlon XP notebook. It’s fine in 512 MB — the only slow thing on it is the hard drive when I boot up Windows XP Home on it!

When it dies, I expect to replace it with a $700 Windows notebook and nuke Windows entirely in favor of Gentoo Linux. And I expect to get five years out of it, just like the one I have now and the T-bird.

so i thought it wasn’t about which musician was “better” — i don’t especially like either of those songs, personally — but about which musician’s product was currently more “in demand.”

The reason that fixed price is “simple” is that it removes the question of price from the customer’s mind while they are shopping. They already know the price, and if they are shopping, they have (at least tacitly) agreed to it. The shopping experience thus becomes something that is _only_ about finding something they want.

With variable price shopping, of course there are sales where a user wants a song, and pays a higher price because they want it right now, and the music execs feel like they’ve done their job of optimizing revenue.

But focusing on track-by-track sales optimization is short-sighted. Apple’s approach takes a longer view, and I honestly don’t think it’s just about keeping content “cheap” so that they will sell more iPods. Apple’s approach is, psychologically, removes the money from consideration in the customer’s mind, and I am betting that Apple believes that this will lead to more purchases per individual, and thus more purchases overall.

I dunno if that means more profits (after all, you have to pay out to more artists), but it will mean more revenue, and I know that personally it has lead to more customer satisfaction.

Radiohead may have hit on the right way to handle variable pricing, but that only works when you know you’re sending the majority of your money directly to the band. Most people don’t want to make the soul-suckers at the labels any richer than they need to be.

When Derek made the decision to switch to Ruby over PHP he did it as a PHB impressed with hype. When Derek made the decision to switch back, he did it as a business owner who realized he’d made a PHB-style mistake.

The moment you make a technology decision that doesn’t consider the people who have to maintain it — including yourself — you are acting like PHB management.

An example: I would much rather write my team’s auto-test environment in Ruby. It’s easier to maintain, easier to develop, and would be easier to extend than C#. The moment I do that, though, I force everyone else on the team to learn Ruby before they can do anything related to providing automated tests. Because I recognise this, we wrote the auto-test environment in C# because it’s one less technology they have to learn.

We have other pieces of code that have been written in Ruby because the value-add of Ruby outweighed the learning curve, but those are specialized.

(sorry Derek, you might still be getting your hands dirty with code, but you’re still management).

I’m sorry, but that’s just an asinine comment. Derek built a huge, many-million dollar business with thousands upon thousands of users largely with code he wrote by himself. I’d say that makes him an okay programmer, far better than ones that have no business sense.

Careless, disdainful sideswipes like this exemplify the childish elitism rampant in much of the Ruby community.

didn’t Forbes give him the money he wanted ?

oh I see, that’s why he’s throwing parties now.

come on, Austin :-)

And Freshbooks has a contest… http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2007/09/20/iphone-contest/

Virtue Lord Purple

Matt: My post elided over a number of things. I’m right at the junction of Lakeshore and the Gardiner, so the closest Go station to my home is Long Branch. Because of traffic, this is at least a five minute drive from home, and at least a ten minute bike ride (which I could do now, since I bought a bike this summer). Work is literally at Winston Churchill and Dundas, leaving me between Go stations with a 5–8km ride from either one with uncertain road access for bikes. If we assume that it takes me 20 minutes to bike from the destination Go station, I’m still much faster actually driving to work as I have done for the last three and a half years. My longest commute home has been 90 minutes because of an accident; my shortest commutes have been 22 minutes. I wish I could use transit; it doesn’t make any sense for me to do so given the sorry state of transit now.

If you live in Parkdale-HP you have the Gardiner -QEW which is attractive going out of the city and understandle when faced with limited transit options since it sounds like you’re reverse-commuting.

I am writing to invite you to participate in Bloggers for MMP , a project of the Vote for MMP campaign to help raise awareness about the need for change, the referendum, the question and why voters should support MMP.

All you need to do is display one of our logos or banners prominently on your blog. We’ll add you to our blogroll. The voters have an historic opportunity for more effective representation, fair results and vote that counts. They like that. We can win this if we can expand into new networks. Bloggers like yourself can play an indispensible in helping to spread the word and get people involved in the last days of this once-in-a-life opportunity to make meaningful change.

Yours truly
Debra Drainie
Vote for MMP Campaign

–
On October 10th, Vote for MMP.
http://www.voteformmp.ca
a campaign by Fair Vote Canada

if the sole interest of the movie is to plant a rehash of pop culture elements to discover, it’s more of a geek play interest than actual art (pop or otherwise).
if the movie uses pop culture elements combined to provide some extra layer of semantical value, then that’s art, probably pop-art.

I haven’t seen it yet, but a friend recommended it:
‹if only for the Bono cameo appearance singing “I’m the Walrus”
Coo coo ca choo, ca coo coo ca choo›

Also, the hosted version of FogBugz is available in a “Student and Startup Edition”, where it’s free indefinitely if you have only one or two users. Just switch over to it in the Your Account area of your trial.

I’m looking for someone to take over PDF::Writer, color-tools, and Transaction::Simple. I do not

No, It hasn’t.

“I know that your initial articles that I read last year were…I don’t have anything nice to say about them, truthfully, I think they were that bad.”

Your right to your opinion. I’ve written much more critical articles on other programming languages. Not sure why criticism of Ruby causes so much reaction. I should say that my criticisms are not all negative. I trust I am critical in the true sense of the word.

“On the other hand, you have committed some pretty serious resources with Sapphire in Steel, so I know you like Ruby.”

I have devoted approximately 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for about 18 months to developing the Ruby In Steel IDE for the Ruby language. I certainly am not in the habit of devoting so much effort to something to which I feel negative.

“As far as editorial responsibilities, I think that you do have a responsibility to ensure that what an author writes is both sensibly written and doesn’t contain gross errors. Editing does not mean that you change the authors’ words for them. You let them know when something isn’t clear or likley to be misunderstood.”

I did ask Mr Huntbach to rewrite a few sentences for reasons of clarity. I did not ask him to modify any of his views, however. Nor would I ask any writer to do so, no matter what their opinion.

“This was the policy at Artima’s Ruby Code & Style under James Britt.”

Fair enough. It’s not my policy. I’ve been a journalist, publisher, broadcaster and editor for about 25 years and the policy seems to have worked for me so far, so I doubt if I’ll be changing it any time soon ;-)

best wishes

Huw

I think it might be worthwhile to reiterate that MINASWAN is one of the guiding principles of the ruby community.

Rudeness is offputting and it doesn’t leave a good impression with anyone.

Also, I’m very well aware that Ada was something of a bastard language designed by a committee. Thats my point – there was a short time, which happened to be the time when the famous “silver bullet” article was written, when it really was put forward as the answer to everything. I mention this only, again, to urge caution – a language which looks good at one point may not look good a few years later, don’t believe the hype.

You talk about “Computer Science departments gushing for it” meaning Java, which really is nonsense. Very few academics have been particularly enthusiastic about Java. It’s turned out to be a reasonable language for teaching in an object-oriented way, but many academics have had to be convinced that OOP was more than a fad, quite a few at the time Java came into being, were still smarting over the functional and logic languages favoured by academia in the 1980s never hitting mainstream. Java was always pretty much a compromise, adopted because industry had taken to it, not adopted because academics were “gushing” over it.

I took some some to look over Ruby, try a bit of coding in it, read some of the tutorials on it. I wasn’t as impressed as many people seem to be with it, and I said so – it didn’t seem to me to be as radical as some claim. I was also concerned that its dynamic nature would lead to messy code that would be hard to maintain. Why do you hold it to be “embarrasing” that I say that’s my impression?

My own experience of teaching introductory programming suggests to me that using Ruby wouldn’t make the task any easier. The idea that substituting dynamic typing for static typing will solve the well-known problem that intro to programming classes have a huge failure rate struck me as very naive. Reality is that all sorts of programming languages and approaches have been tried as a “way into programming”, but every time, and the world over, and whoever teaches it, the outcome is the same – a few in the class are bitten by the programming bug and take to it, a high proportion of the class just don’t get it and fail. There were some who were saying Java was the answer to tis problem when it was first used for teaching. I thought it worthwhile to mention this because I suspect most Rubyists fall into that minority category of people who take to programming and naively suppose that’s the answer – just like everyone else who has ever had a new programming language they liked has supposed. Did you really miss that was the point I was making? I’m just urging caution over some of the hype – why do you claim that to be “embarrassing”?

The first thing people need to realize is that it’s not necessary to respond to every person who doesn’t like Ruby. Even if people disagree with their reasons for not liking Ruby, they shouldn’t feel compelled to respond. Better to ignore them, really. The very act of responding lends them a degree of legitimacy we probably don’t want to ascribe to people like this.

Second, I learned long ago that there’s no convincing certain types of people of the merits of dynamic languages – mainly academics and 20+ year C/C++ veterans. It’s just not going to happen. They’ll either hate the lack of typing, or they’ll hate the semantics, or the syntax, or *something*. So, don’t even try.

As the editor of Bitwise, I can tell you that when I asked Mr Huntbach to write his views on Ruby, he was given absolute freedom with no editorial control over his article. If anyone with appropriate experience wishes to write an article from a different perspective, I would be glad to hear from them.

As for your suggestion that we should more actively edit the content of writers, this is an idea upon which I would not look favourably. Each time the original author’s words are edited, the meaning of those words is changed. Having worked in magazine writing and publishing for 25 years, I myself have repeatedly been subjected to aggressive subediting, with the end result that my articles have been Bowdlerised before they are read. If somebody objects to an author’s views, I would prefer that they read the author’s words rather than words that have been cut or interpolated by subeditor.

best wishes

Huw

I disagreed with Huntbach’s post, but I didn’t see anything in it that would warrant the venom in the response. I was taken aback, especially since some of it was coming from people whose names I recognize, and who I know aren’t adolescents.

Really annoying – I understand there’s a LOT of traffic, but Rubyforge seems to be falling apart more and more often, lately.

RubyConf 2006 started today in Denver, Colorado. I wasn’t able to go this year, but fortunately

And best of luck with the wedding planning! Lots to think about, that’s for sure…

Here is how I’d map that to a programming language:

Outcomes over Features: the language should be small and extensible.

Looks like Ruby is still Agile!

We must put matz into a huge bottle which is all kind of secure so these accidents dont happen!
We also will continually have to feed him food and water!

Perhaps a solution would be to instead make the existing object simply a proxy (or wrapper) for the restored object, forwarding all of its method calls to the restored object. This seems a bit more ruby-ish to me.

Feel free to correct any bad assumptions I’ve made.

Thanks…

————————————
parent = Parent.new
parent

Just to make sure that Marshal worked the way I thought it did, I tried this:
—————————————-
parent = Parent.new
parent

I’ve never user “transaction-simple” before, so I’m not sure what methods it provides. But it seems that there should be a way to marshal the entire data structure and then restore it (a deep-copy versus shallow-copy).

BTW: Thanks for writing PDF::Writer. I love it! :)

However I did go back and re-read Ola’s messages and … well … I just don’t hear the arrogance etc that clearly you do. He mentions duck typing, in the way I remember from the pick axe book, and, well, an exchange of opinions ensues. Matz seems to agree this is a reasonable interpretation of the term, and he knows more than I.

Ola’s blog post contains some hyperbole, but it isn’t nasty by any stretch of the imagination. There is a worry that a community can get dogmatic, set in its ways. Happens to the best of us.

I read a minor slight from a concerned developer, you read an unpleasant attack from a zealot. For all I know you could be right; maybe my principle of charity is acting up. But Ola seems like a good guy generally.

I pointed out all of the name-calling in my post here; I don’t appreciate being told that I obviously don’t understand a technical matter when (1) that matter never came up, (2) I in fact do understand the technical matter at least as well as Ola did. Ola’s response was, to borrow a phrase from M*A*S*H, horse hockey. It was arrogant and dismissive of anyone who disagreed with him. It was a zealot’s argument.

As it happens I thought Ola was overreacting, having just wandered into a terminological minefield which he didn’t anticipate (something many of the replies failed to clarify). However this post seems to justify some of what he said. I hope this post is an abberation in the ruby community. Play nice :-)