Posted by ungraspiness
Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:10:00 GMT
Ola Bini’s Ruby Metaprogramming techniques
is a great summary of the meta-programming techniques in common use today by many of the interesting Ruby libraries.
Namely:
- Use the singleton-class
- Write DSL’s using class-methods that rewrite subclasses
- Create classes and modules dynamically
- Use method_missing to do interesting things
- Dispatch on method-patterns
- Replacing methods
- Use NilClass to implement the Introduce Null Object refactoring
- Learn the different versions of eval
- Introspect on instance variables
- Create Procs from blocks and send them around
- Use binding to control your evaluations
Other good resources on this topic:
Posted in Programming | Tags Metaprogramming, Ruby | no comments
Posted by ungraspiness
Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:14:00 GMT
Resolution 1718 imposes weapons and financial sanctions but is not backed by the threat of military force.
North Korea’s UN envoy said he totally rejected the resolution and walked out.
BBC article
Tags Politics | no comments
Posted by ungraspiness
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:42:00 GMT
Eric Kidd wrote a great article comparing Ruby and Lisp last year called Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP.
Besides the annoyance that he calls it LISP there were many great points and counter-points from the comments. Reading everything behind the link above is advised.
The articles main points:
1. Ruby is a denser functional language than LISP Lisp.
2. Ruby gives you about 80% of what you want from macros.
3. Ruby’s libraries, community, and momentum are good
Some of his examples are not as true as they were last year but I’m sure that the author is aware of this.
So for anyone considering one over the other this is the best on the topic that I’ve seen so far.
Posted in Lisp, Programming | Tags Ruby | no comments
Posted by ungraspiness
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:20:00 GMT
1. People never have to look at the screen or use the space-bar when typing long sentences.
2. Super-computers beep whenever you press a key or whenever the screen changes.
3. All computer panels (e.g. Star Trek) have thousands of Kilovolts running just underneath the panels. Any Malfunction is indicated by a big flash and loads of sparks, a puff of smoke, and an explosion that forces people backwards.
4. Some computers slow down the text output on the screen so that it doesn’t go faster than you can read. An optional pip sound can be produced as each letter or line is displayed.
5. The most technical the equipment, the more (unlabelled) buttons it has.
6. No matter what format of computer disk you have, it will be readable by any system you put it into. Therefore, all application software in movies is usable by all computer platforms.
7. Real-time video communication is possible on small hand held devices and small laptops ; also when using wireless modems, the speed of data transfer is always around 3 Gigabytes per second.
8. Complex calculations and loading of huge amounts of data will be accomplished in under 5 seconds.
9. Whenever a movie character looks at a VDU, the screen image is so bright that it projects itself onto his/her face.
10. The internet connects to everything in the movies. You can edit credit records, search hotel registries, lookup police criminal files, search drivers license databases, edit social security files and more just using the internet!
11. Smashing the VDU will prevent the whole system from working.
12. You can launch nuclear missiles from any bedroom using an analog modem, but only if you know a single secret password.
Tags Computing, Hollywood, Humor | no comments
Posted by ungraspiness
Wed, 04 Oct 2006 21:09:00 GMT
‘What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.’
from an interview in Issue #1 of Cabinet.
Tags GUI | no comments
