ronin

Looks like I’ll have to swallow my pride and head to a Corney and Barrow at some stage since they now serve a Monteiths. I don’t recognise the bottle or label though, some investigation is needed.

Invade my photos, fine. But now a programming language?

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

xkcd’s body double, Wellington Grey. My favourite so far Infinite Loop explains my current lack(3 years and running) of productivity.

After reading this headline:

  Wales victory leaves Wallabies searching for answers

I thought Wales had beaten Australia. Reading on however I find:

  ...Australia struggled to eke out a last-gasp 29-23 win over Wales on Saturday.

In the comments for an earlier post Martin Paljak has posted a follow up to the original info about the Estonian OpenID project.

An InfoQ article on Ruby threading and the implications of the approach taken in YARV. Nicely written up. I think I would probably prefer an Erlang approach which seems much more high level and would suit Ruby more than native Threads.

Looks like there’s going to be an OpenID for every Estonian. Cool.

Simon Willison asks how Smart Cards help with Phishing. I believe it’s because they are a form of 2FA where only one of the 2 Factors is ever exposed and hence all the credentials can’t be phished.

I’m not an expert though, and of course a quick google search turns up some examples of 2FA being phished.

btw, I first read this as “OpenID for all Etonians”, which I thought was kind of weird, but not totally out of the question.

The XML configuration madness continues. Serialised XML for application configuration? That can’t be good.

I guess that the development process goes like this:

• Write config file in xml, test, change, test change.
• Serialise file
• Release to test environment.
• Discover problem
• Deserialise file, investigate.
• Edit source xml, test, change, test, change.
• Serialise file.
• Rinse, repeat.

At some stage we’re all going to drown under the sea of xml configuration files piling up all around us.

Charles Nutter makes some good points about how he would change Ruby. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives of somebody actually trying to implement Ruby in a new environment.

Found this blog entry by Rick DeNatale about improving Ruby, I pretty much agree with everything said there.

I was going to add my own 2 cents but being the careful person I am(not) I actually went and read the original article and a couple of the different entries to the competition.

I found that this article by Jamie Macey pretty much says everything I was going too. Simplify the syntax, simplify the libraries, add unicode.

If there was one thing further I would say it would be related to what Avi Bryant has said before. Rewrite all of the Ruby libraries in Ruby, and then make Ruby fast enough to run them. IMO this is a precursor to making Ruby run on more platforms, much like Squeak has a small amount of C to bootstrap it and then the rest is all Smalltalk.

Btw, the Smalltalk class, metaclass, object relationships that Rick DeNatale was talking about in his post are(I think) encapsulated in the diagram below(which I lifted from the Bluebook).