Jon Smirl's article "The State of Linux Graphics" gives a great overview of the existing and future graphics display tech for Linux.

"GetFoxie is a new plugin available for IE that can make Internet Explorer resemble Firefox by adding tabbed browsing capabilities and an integrated search box. Moreover, the plugin improves IE's privacy and security by integrating a firewall designed to block out Internet exploits, phishing sites, spammers, spyware and worms, with a special HTTP filter that removes private data, and an anti-spyware tool that can identify and remove all pests in less then 10 seconds"

Example Ruby code snippts:

• Bigbold Code Snippets for Ruby.
• Bigbold Code Snippets for Rails.
• PLEAC-Ruby
• CodingInRuby
• RubyOnlineCookbook

Rubylicious presents bindings to Del.icio.us to Ruby scripts.

Erik Veenstra has written a tool in Pascal that combines all of the modules, library, and interpreter needed to run a Ruby script into a standalong executable.

"RubyScript2Exe transforms your Ruby script into a standalone, compressed Windows, Linux or Mac OS X (Darwin) executable. You can look at it as a "compiler". Not in the sense of a source-code-to-byte-code compiler, but as a "collector", for it collects all necessary files to run your script on an other machine: the Ruby script, the Ruby interpreter and the Ruby runtime library (stripped down for this script). Anyway, the result is the same: a standalone executable (application.exe). And that's what we want!"

Lucas Carlson's SimpleRSS - A new simple RSS/Atom parser Ruby Gem as a drop-in replacement of Ruby's RSS parser.

Cartographer has implemented effortless Google Maps in Rails.

This found on the Ruby on Rails Weblog post about Cartographer.

Tony Stubblebine, Lead Engineer at O'Reilly Media, sent me a note to let me know relative URLs were being generated into my index.rss

"I was doing some O'Reilly Connection work to display the most active writers on the site, you're #1."

I'll take that as a compliment; there is actual content in those posts, I'm not just splogging (really!)

Apparently, the "url" variable in bloxsom isn't evaluated the same when generating static content as it does when bloxsom is running as a CGI.

So, from this point on, everything gets redirected to the /blog/ dynamic URL that calls bloxsom directly. Ick. So slow..

Bloxsom also has this nasty bug when running as a CGI - Markdown processing chokes when more than one link is added on a line. I've cleaned up all of August, but earlier months need some attention to address this "bug". That, or the Markdown plugin needs fixing, and it's some frightful perl.

This only inspires me to write my own Ruby on Rails blogging engine in the same vein as bloxsom. I like my blog in a filesystem, not in a relational database. It should prove fun to make an ActiveRecord backend for a non-relational store.

Anyway, back to the blogging madness. You'll see more of a Ruby focus for a while.

"Apple is planning to hold a major press conference next week (September 7th) in San Francisco

The rumours say that it will be the unveiling of a new:

iPod cellphone(NYT)

"The phone will incorporate the popular iTunes software, be built by Motorola and marketed by Cingular Wireless."

"a source involved with making the commercials for the new handset has confirmed for us that it will only hold 100 songs because Apple is worried about cannibalizing iPod shuffle sales. Our source also says that these first iTunes phone ads will be 'music-based spots with people calmly walking down the street on the phone with their shadows and reflections dancing wildly beside them.'"

More SHA-1 breaks found by researchers in China. Potential attacks are now 64 times faster.

"The methods are also applicable to attacks against the weaker hash algorithm known as MD5. A run-of-the-mill PC can currently produce a collision within MD5 within hours, Wang said. Using the new techniques, that time could be reduced to minutes, she estimated."

Google has published many of their whitepapers.

There are a large number of other published documents to read as well.

Nutch is a search engine patterned directly after the Google model: NDFS instead of GFS, and a Java based MapReduce like system instead of a C++ based MapReduce.

This OSCon'05 presentation has a great presentation on nutch:

Nutch OSCon'05 Presentation

It's Java based, but interesting nonetheless. For MapReduce, I'd much rather use something like Ruby.

Back in 1999, Hilltop was devised as a way to rank expert documents based on authority.

Looking at Guido van Rossum's "The fate of reduce() in Python 3000" announcement on his blog, I started to wonder what the Ruby equivalents would be.

Benjamin Ferrari posted a great followup article "Reduce Any Map And Filter All Lambda" that explains this to a non-LISP developer.

NEW: Benjamin posted a followup article with a mention of the all? and any? Ruby methods I was not aware of. I am updating the examples below.

Breaking these down into Ruby equivalents (based on Benjamin's wonderful article):

Map

map takes two arguments: a function and a list. It then

• walks through each element of the list
• passes the element to the function
• creates and returns a new list that contains the return values from each function call.

A Ruby example:

list=[1,2,-3,4,5,-9]
squared=list.map {|x| x*x}

The Ruby Array "map" method _is_ map, by definition.

Filter

filter is similar to map: it also takes a function and a list. But unlike map, the function passed to filter returns a boolean value. If, and only if, the value is true, the element is copied over to the new list:

Here is the Ruby example:

list=[1,2,-3,4,5,-9]
even=list.select {|n| n%2 == 0}

we can also add an alias to defined a "filter" method to keep things more readable by LISP folks:

module Enumerable
    alias filter select
end

The Ruby Enumerable "select" method, an alias for "find_all", is functionally equivalent to filter.

Reduce

Reduce is slightly different:

• like map and filter, it takes a function and a list as parameters.
• like map and filter, reduce also walks through all the elements of the list and returns something

But this time, the method takes not one but two arguments: the first argument is the current element of the list, the other is the result from the previous call of the function (if there was one).

As of 1.7, Ruby has the following reduce method:

module Enumerable
    # Reduce has been added to the Ruby 1.7 library
    def reduce(init)
            result = init
            each { |item| result = yield(item, result) }
            result
    end
end

and here's a Ruby example of its use:

list = [1,2,-3,4,5,-9]
result=list.reduce(0) { |a, b| a + b }

this returns zero, because ( ( ( ( 0+1) + 2 ) + (-3) ) + 4 ) + 5 ) + (-9) ) = 0

Lambda

Lambda is just another way to define a function.

The longhand Ruby syntax for defining a function code block would be:

def foo(a,b)
    return a+b
end

Ruby has a lambda function to define a code block:

foo = lambda { |a,b| a+b };

Lambda is (partly) useful if you need a short function that will be used only once.

Ruby iterators make Lambda generally useless, unless a more dynamic functional behavior is needed.

Any and All

Guido's article also introduces two new functions that will come with the upcoming python 3000: any and all.

Any

"any" walks through each element of a list . If any of these values evaluate to true, any returns true.

Ruby has an Array "find" method that is functionally equivalent to "any".

list = [ 1,2,3,5,7,9 ]
bool = list.find {|x| x == 5 }

This would return 5, or not false (ergo true), as 5 is in the array list.

Ruby also has an any? method I was not aware of until Benjamin pointed it out:

[:a,:b,:c,:d,:e,:f].any?{|x|x == :a} #=> true

All

all does the same as any, but, you guess it, all values must be true.

Ruby has the all? method, which I was not aware of until Benjamin pointed it out:

[:b,:c,:d,:e,:f].all?{|x|x == :a} #=> false

I hope this effort helps someone out there (it sure helped me clear things up)...

For blocking connections from machines listed on blocklist.org,

Peerguardian is a cross-platform IP blocker.

CrystalXP is a nice shell and XP theme that turns an XP machine decidedly Aquaish.

Scoble goes to Google, I'm still laughing.

Cell Phone Finder is a really neat way to look for a new Cell Phone. It's an Ajax'ed interface that works in all phones, carriers, and plans to let you select a phone that is right for you.

Neat single and dual-screen fractal backgrounds for your desktop.

Dema has created a new mixin:

acts_as_taggable - an easy way of adding tagging to any of your classes.