Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 501)

Essay: Towards a universal language

As much as I love Catalan, I wonder whether Internet may be an inflection point towards the gradual emergence of a universal language.

I have mixed-feelings regarding the premise that human languages have a value as cultural patrimony. Languages are a historical accident, they arise essentially because people communicate with people in a small radius and that makes things diverge. It happened that evolution gave us languages, but for me that's heritage with no intrinsic value. On the contrary, for me it means separation.

Languages are a symbol for nations as well, when someone gets conquered the language of the victorious is imposed, and the one of the defeated persecuted. That's destruction. No value over here to look for, well not for me anyway.

When communication is the goal people forget about that, and just jump to whatever works. Normally that's English. If you speak English with people at a conference you are not perceiving your local language as being attacked, or your rights as a citizen of somewhere being violated. You just speak with people and whatever works is fine, because language is then just a mean.

I think it could be the case that the globalization in communications brings as a consequence a fix for Babel. When my daughter grows up she will be able to make online friends in the entire globe. I think next generations will gradually detach from the emotions we associate to languages nowadays, and by themselves derive towards something that works. I mean that's not going to be imposed, decided, or voted, in my idealization that just happens. English may be the de-facto standard due to its inherited inertia.

I believe that's gonna happen, and that would bring us to an epoch where humankind is bilingual in general. Communication and transportation will be much ubiquitous, and people will naturally speak some universal language, together with their mother tongue.

I wish those mother tongues eventually die or last as a cultural curiosity of past times, and people can freely communicate all over the Earth.

Rails Guides

There's a new project that aims at producing Rails documentation as a series of guides called Rails Guides.

A wish list of topics to cover is published. People may pick one and write a guide, if that one is accepted he gets a prize. Details in the rules of the page linked above.

I think Rails will benefit a lot from this initiative, and I am very pleased to be a reviewer, together with Rails core member Pratik Naik and Hongli Lai, author of the outstanding Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Writing this from Berlin, ready for the RailsConf Europe 2008 that starts tomorrow morning.

Contributing to Rails these days, a few code and doc patches.

Gotcha: Ruby and Perl conflicting regexp flags

Both Ruby and Perl have /m and /s regexp flags, but they are different in each language.

• To have the dot match newlines you use /s in Perl, but /m in Ruby.
• To enable multiline mode, that is ^ matches beginning of line, you use /m in Perl and nothing in Ruby. In Ruby that's the only existing mode, you can't switch it off, ^ asserts beginning of line always. Beginning of string is \A and end of string \z or \Z as in Perl.
• If that was not confusing enough, Ruby has a /s flag which means the regexp is in SJIS encoding.

Adam Kennedy in Barcelona

Perl wizard Adam Kennedy is doing a tour thanks to a TPF grant, and was with Barcelona.pm last Thursday. He gave a talk about PPI, a distribution of him that solves a hard problem.

After the talk we went out for dinner and had a great time. It was a real pleasure to meet him.

Hat Tip at Frederick Cheung

I admire the public work of Frederick Cheung.

He for example has been giving first-rate help at the rubyonrails-talk mailing list for a long time. Giving support in mailing lists, IRC, or Usenet is not something all people are able to do at that level. Of course you need to be correct and give quality answers, but also you need to have true respect for any question, of any level, and you need to have an intuitive way to guess the level of the OP from a few clues in his wording to tailor your response appropriately. That comes from a genuine willingness to help, to contribute, and from other skills not everyone in public forums have. Excellent job there.

Frederick has been also an important contributor to the Rails core. His work there ranges from small patches, to the entire non-trivial rewrite of eager-loading that saw the light in Rails 2.1.

In addition, he has started a series of articles in his blog that cover fundamental Rails stuff in-depth. For example, everyone knows params in Rails, but I think any developer, no matter he's an apprentice or an expert, should read this recent article.

Keep up the good work Fred!

Alive

Not much activity in this diary lately, I'm very busy with the company and an intensive summer course to add some epsilon to my very weak English speaking and listening. Unfortunately my reading rate has decreased in the last weeks as well, though there's always room for a good Mario Kart for Wii races with my lovely daughter.

I got a wonderful brand new car recently, enjoying the seaside each weekend with my family.

Now that the English course is over I hope to be able to catch up with Life.

Unicomp Customizer

I've always been a fan of IBM model M keyboards. I worked with one for some time and additionally had the luck of having very forgiving coworkers with plenty of patience (eh Noyda??? :-), because, you know, they are certainly noisy.

The one I have doesn't work very well with my Mac and IBM stopped building them a long time ago. But fortunately a company called Unicomp purchased the license to build keyboards with the same technology, I knew about Unicomp and their Customizer from this positive review and ordered one right away.

Bingo, an excellent keyboard with those lovely mechanics and feedback. The PACK! of the return key is exactly the same, it sounds unique! It has been a few days since it arrived and man I love typing with this keyboard.

brian d foy in Barcelona

Tomorrow Thursday Perl guru brian d foy will give a talk to Barcelona.pm. That's in the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Barcelona, classroom B6, 7:30 PM (map). The talk is open, feel free to join us!

brian d foy in Barcelona

brian d foy is going to come to Barcelona next week. He will give a talk about Perl 6 to Barcelona.pm next Thursday 29 in the afternoon at the University of Barcelona. I'll post more details next week. Feel free to attend!

Euruko 2009 will be held in Barcelona

Barcelona is going to host the next European Ruby Conference 2009 (Euruko 2009), hoooray!

Spanish Ruby Users Group

The Spanish Ruby Users Group has been born as a byproduct of the effort to prepare the candidature of Barcelona for the Euruko 2009. There's a strong group of proactive people as founders of the group all over Spain, I am sure this will be an active and efficient association. I am honoured to have been elected president of the group.