Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 435)

I have spent the whole weekend writing the first draft of an article about newlines for Perl.com. That's an article I have been eager to write for a long time. Misunderstandings about how line terminators work often show up in help channels and that article aims at being a document worth reading for beginners. As many others, that is a topic that is simple once your ideas are ordered, but that is sort of misterious until then.

I even know people who after years of programming for a living do not understand how line terminators really work. Some are completely lost in front of a file with ^Ms, some use \n in Java strings and don't get why that is not portable, in Perl some think \n is CRLF on Windows, etc.

Yesterday Barcelona.pm held our monthly meeting. Besides regulars Salva could attend, we met in YAPC::Europe 2005 in Braga and it was really nice to see him again. I gave a talk about attributes in Perl (in Catalan).

redi, when my account switched to Master (a level I do not deserve and one that does not comply with the definition) the certs I received were from regular contributors in general. That was November 2004. It was after some time that a lot of fake accounts started to appear and certified people, I guess to influence Google results.

I tried rake stats in the RoR application I wrote as freelance and was really impressed.

This is a very simple application for internal use in some company that has several centers all over the country with salesmen and supervisories. Its purpose is to ease commissions calculation and do some forecasts. A very simple web application, but well it does some things. There's authentication, CRUD and listing of users, employees, and centers. CRUD of two types of commissions per employee, uploading and processing of Excel, generation of CSV, a few computations, Ajax in several places, error handling everywhere, and the persistence of all of that.

The figure is ~1250 LOCs (336 in models, 680 in controllers, 237 in helpers), and no XML whatsoever. That's the merit of Ruby, plus ActiveRecord, plus RoR itself, which is damn brilliant. The only configuration is the database and some settings for the mailer. I think that's pretty amazing.

Rails 1.1 is out:

The biggest upgrade in Rails history has finally arrived. Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.

See a nice summary of what's new here.

Quote of the day

Reading the fascinating The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers I came across this quote by David Hilbert:

That I have been able to accomplish anything in mathematics is really due to the fact that I have always found it so difficult. When I read, or when I am told about something, it nearly seems so difficult, and practically impossible to understand, and then I cannot help wondering if it might not be simpler. And on several occassions it has turned out that it really was more simple!

Perseverance, rigorous honesty with oneself, transpiration.

What (will be) new in Rails 1.1

Here's a summary of new stuff in the upcoming Rails 1.1. I've been writing RoR on a daily basis for a few weeks (of overnight coffee-boosted extra-work as freelance) and it will be hard to use any other web application framework without feeling you are going backwards.

reAnimator

My friend Xavier Caballé sent this regular expression automata visualizer a couple of days ago. Impressive, I'll surely mention it in the next course.

Very Busy(tm)

Besides my regular full-time job I am writing a Rails application as freelance at home, so I am lately working like crazy.

Pandora

I recently discovered Pandora, a really good way to discover music you like.

The usage is simple, which is something I love: you start a "station" giving the name of someone you like, and the system starts streaming complete songs of that artist and soon of artists they think you may like as well. For each song, you can send feedback in the form "I like it", "I don't like it" they use to tune suggestions. You are not required to give feedback though, so if at some point you don't want to interrupt your flow just leave the station streaming music.

I have two stations by now, the seed for the first one was my favourite female black singer, Erykah Badu. The second one was started with pianist Chick Corea. Suggestions are superb, and I have discovered people I do like, like Denny Zeitlin, which is the whole point. Moreover, I listen new music I like for hours non-stop. The implementation is based on an idea that sounds like crazy, but dude, it works. My humble congratulations to the team.

Miscellanea

• This week I sent a patch with a small fix for the documentation of the core Perl module PerlIO.pm. It was applied.
• Mark Jason Dominus (of Higher-Order Perl fame) started a fascinating blog some days ago.
• Besides some more prosaic and slightly commercial objectives for this year, my boss at $work gave me instructions to prototype whatever idea I may have or be told in the company, and to freely choose whatever technology I want to implement it, including of course any scripting language I consider suitable for the problem at hand. Hey, in a Java-based company, isn't that trust?
• I am totally hooked to Programming Language Pragmatics, 2nd Edition, the topics covered here are a hole in my theoretical background I need to fill, and boy I like this formal stuff. It will certainly give me a better understanding and some perspective on language design and implementation.

I published a maintenance release of Algorithm::Combinatorics.