Tuesday, August 31, 2004

GFS && Coral

Two interesting Ideas: GFS, is a gmailFS which is a neat idea, but still something that I think violates a person's agreement with google [since I don't see any way it couldn't spider]. A link is here.

The other thing, is that there is this new, in beta, P2P network called Coral . The whole idea is to cache various webpages so that a person never has to a) suffer a slashdot effect b)not be able to find a site. As someone pointed out, it doesn't handle dynamic content so well, but as most of the stuff that I read isn't dyn-generated, I don't care.

Oh and be on the lookout for bookmarklets both the ones listed here and in general. I've got a feeling that this could be something that's going to catch fire.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Finally! A system for converting old English money

Here is a listing of the old english currency before they changed to the decimal system in the 70's! Wacky Brits. God Bless em all.

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Ruby Gems Intro

This is important! If you don't read this and then go ahead with trying something like ruby_servlet.rb from RubLog you'll get all sorts of indecipherable errors. [Well actually the -I imperative works as well, but if you wanted to create a new program from the newly acquired gem, you'll be S.O.L]

Rdoc Markup

Ok, this is a link to the RDoc specification . While it isn't all that important to anyone not using the ruby, it's something that I appreciate having. And it's a neat markup language spec in some ways. Neat in that it's simple, easy to mneumonically remember various markup tags, and easy for a human to read. Generally I find that most of the markups tend to only get two of those points right.

The original Starting page

This was the original page that I started looking at yesterday when I was starting to get sort of serious about learning Ruby. Yeah it's neat. And it has tons of jump points for a person to go galavanting off into the ether and learn all sorts of new things about this language.

Jabber and Ruby

Oh it's getting neat in here. This is an interface library that lets a person talk to jabber servers via the Ruby language. While some people might not think that this is all that cool, imagine a world where each of your computers has a little personality sitting in it waiting your commands or telling you when something "odd" has happened. And all you need to do is have another client listening to a jabber server. Oh, and the other neat thing is that jabber allows for a person to have transports. What's a transport? Well it's a way for a message sent to a jabber server to be translated into another Instant messenger protocol. So a person can just sign into their jabber server and then be able to send a message to someone using ICQ or AIM. How neat is that?

Rublog and it's fun

So the drawback. UsingRubLog.rdoc isn't included in the gem. So imagine my suprise when I got the ruby_servlet.rb up and running (using
ruby -I/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rublog-0.8.0 rublog_servlet.rb
) and it wouldn't show a new page. Nothing. Nada. Zip. The Big Nought. Well, it showed the sidebar and a search box. Which was cool. But I had read that the UsingRubLog.rdoc was integral to an understanding of the package [ie it had more to show and talk about, like a man page].

Turns out rublog requires a data directory in whatever you run it as [so I mkdir'ed a dir code/Rublog and in there mkdir'ed data/Rublog/]. From there I went here and downloaded the rdoc. Put it in, started up the webrick server and it just ran. Got a really nice picture and a rendered page. Too cool.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Fowler

Chad Fowler is a cool guy. And he's posted some code for rublog that can be invoked [I think] by itself. I found a copy while googling for webrick and rublog and the link to the find is here.

Notice how a lot of my links are [here's]?

Genius!

So I'm trying to learn Ruby. A neat language in and of itself, and it has a new paradigm, which I'm always in the mood to learn. In fact it has been keeping me up till 1:00am several times this week alone trying to learn the ways of the samurai.

One such tidbit is listed here. It's how to start your own web server in a line of Ruby. I remember Chad Fowler [blog] had this in his talk of rublog. Neat. Now if I can just figure out how he tied webrick and the rublog together and I'll be one step closer to getting one of my projects finished. Oh and it's a personal project, nothing that has to do with sysadmin. Thank God.

Oh one more book to recommend: The Poignant Guide to Ruby It's a intro to programming in general and a lovely description of various things of the ruby language. if they haven't already the Pragmatic guys *really* *really* need to get this author on board. His style is wacky and out there, but I tend to read it and really get what he's trying to tell me. And it's neat when that happens so easily. Oh and Ruby has regular expressions of the form of perl. yay. No re.compile('\s') for me!

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Network Console of Doom

Well not really The idea is so that when your machine dies a horrible deatth you can see/hear it's last gasps for all posterity. Neat idea. Wonder if 2.4 kernels used the same syntax....

Monday, August 09, 2004

Chocolate

Ok, after reading this, I'm kind of mad if it's all true. The idea of people cutting my chocolate with veggie oil sickens and disgusts me. And this is so a sine nobiltae site. But eh, it's still neat .

Caffeine vs Theobromine

So, someone tell you that caffeine is in chocolate? Well not naturally then. It's called theobromine. And the reason why it's bad for certain animals? They can't metabolize it very quickly, if at all, so it just sits in their system taking up real estate and possibly to toxic levels.

Newton, Newton, Newton!

The project for Newton's work can be found here. It is some page/idea and it's interesting to find out that the great man who brought/refusted to co-claim calculus to the masses also did other things like talk about religion and alchemy. I had always read about this other side of Newton but I had thought that this was something that was rather, ahem, made up. Oh well, at least the fiction of it all is just as real as th reality. Now let's just hope that the "calculus of angels" part isn't actually made into reality.