I sat in on most of DHH’s Ruby on Rails presentation this afternoon, and I have to say I’m in danger of catching the religion. Like a good cult leader, Hansson is energetic, intelligent, and unwavering in his faith that his is the right path. Within 30 minutes of the end of the session I had installed Rails via DarwinPorts, though my schedule hasn’t left me much time to play with it.
I have a hunch that the OSCON crowd has more than its share of people with nostalgia for classic arcade games. If that’s you, check out the list of classic video games and pinball machines at Ground Kontrol, “the Pacific Northwest’s best collection of arcade and home video game classics.” It’s just a stone’s throw from Powell’s Technical Books (who are offering a 20% discount with your conference badge, if you haven’t heard). And it’s cool – hell, they use a private wiki to keep track of work on the machines. Play some games, have a beer, and reconnect with the world of proprietary software. I’ll see you in the pinball loft.
Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL’ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.
In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing – with 30 downloads in one week, our “Activity Percentile” rose to 99.33%. Unless I’m misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.
This nifty little app just got installed on my PowerBook for extra peace of mind as I’m traveling next week. It’s a rescue utility designed for single-user mode. A couple of its functions are simple wrappers for fsck and diskutil repairPermissions; but it also can clean up cache and virtual memory files, and check the integrity of preference files. Read the reports from MacFixIt and xlr8yourmac for more info if you’re curious.
Making the rounds today is a perceptive mailing list posting from Rasmus Lerdorf explaining how simple Ajax really can be. I particularly like this bit:
Before you blindly install large “AJAX” libraries, have a go at rolling your own functionality so you know exactly how it works and you only make it as complicated as you need.
Python for the Nokia Series 60 tempts me to get a Nokia phone. Meanwhile I stare at my Palm and mourn the once-amazing, now moribund Pippy.
Larry commented on Mon Nov 14 19:02:17 2005:
Yes, a small palm-specific subset of python with appropriate palm extensions, like plua. Too bad plua’s not ppython. Doesn’t PalmSource understand the marketing boon a professional quality (free on palm os) python interpreter would be to them. -l
According to their blog, the Open Source Intiative (OSI) is holding a public meeting at OSCON on Thursday July 3 at 7:30pm. I’ve been wondering what has transpired since they issued their statement on license proliferation back in April:
Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success… The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close.