One of my filters removed remove links with non-ascii titles from delicious/popular (no offense, but I cannot read Japanese/Chinese/Russian). This is a broad generalization, but it worked pretty good. I had to search a little bit until I found some good documentation on unicode and RegEx which works with Pipes:

Perl and PCRE do not support the \uFFFF syntax. They use \x{FFFF} instead. You can omit leading zeros in the hexadecimal number between the curly braces. Since \x by itself is not a valid regex token, \x{1234} can never be confused to match \x 1234 times. It always matches the Unicode code point U+1234. \x{1234}{5678} will try to match code point U+1234 exactly 5678 times.

Title: Ruby On Rails I18N Developer
Skills: I18N, Ruby on Rails, mySQL
…
Job description:
…
Chumby Industries is looking for a Ruby On Rails/I18N Contractor to deliver results for the internationalization (I18N) effort on the server.
This candidate would be responsible for externalizing all the text strings (both static and dynamically generated) that the website uses so that Chumby could later change the language of the site based on location.

Skills required:
Previous I18N efforts on browser-based platforms
Strong web-based development experience
Ruby on Rails experience
mySQL database experience
Familiarity of layout issues involved with I18N

My experience so far was great.

Step one: configure WiFi
It detected my local network without a problem. I had to enter the password and was ready to go.

Step two: activate chumby
Create an account at chumby.com and click on “activate chumby”. It shows a 4×4 matrix of dots you have to copy to your chumby to connect you account with your device. This is a nice idea. It’s very simple, easy to use but effective. And surprisingly that’s it.

Step three: add widgets
Just one click. Sometimes the widgets need a some configuration but everything is explained right there.

Minor annoyances

• only two brightness settings: high & low
• you have to press pretty hard on the touchscreen

Plans:
Find a German power supply (should be easy) and start coding a widget

I’m looking for a commitment of at least three months (I would prefer six) and you should be within one or two years of receiving degree. If this sounds interesting please apply here and add a note that you would like to work with Frank Spychalski in Munich.

We used Kara to teach them a little bit about programming. You can create finite state machines to control a bug which runs around and tries to solve different problems. The girls did much better than I expected and finished all the exercises we thought would be enough for a whole day before lunch.

Without much preparation I decided to teach them a little about “real” programming and Ruby because there is a Ruby version of Kara which lets you write Ruby code to control the bug.

The experiment was very successful. The girls solved all the problems again, this time in Ruby and from their feedback they really enjoyed it.

A couple of years ago I taught a programming course for kids at the Volkshochschule in Karlsruhe. At that time I used Perl (it was a loooong time ago and I didn’t know Ruby then) but if I ever do this again I will use RubyKara.

The changes are really simple. Here are the diffs:

--- wordpress/wp-admin/wp-admin.css 2008-03-29 08:21:12.000000000 +0100
+++ ../amazing-development.com/wp-admin/wp-admin.css        2008-03-30 16:47:22.000000000 +0200
@@ -573,8 +573,8 @@

 #wphead #viewsite {
        position: absolute;
-   margin-top: 12px;
-   margin-left: 10px;
+       margin-top: 3px;
+       margin-left: 3px;
 }
 #wphead #viewsite a {
        font: 12px "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;
@@ -590,8 +590,8 @@
 }

 #wphead h1 {
-   font: normal 36px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
-   padding: 11px 170px 16px 12px;
+       font: normal 18px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
+       padding: 11px 170px 20px 13px;
        margin: 0;
        margin-right: 15%;
 }
@@ -635,9 +635,9 @@
 }

 #adminmenu a {
-   font-size: 16px;
+       font-size: 12px;
        padding: 5px 7px;
-   line-height: 30px;
+       line-height: 20px;
 }

 #adminmenu a.current, #sidemenu a.current {
@@ -770,7 +770,7 @@
 }

 #submenu li {
-   font-size: 14px;
+       font-size: 10px;
 }

 #minisub { /* for empty submenus */
@@ -961,6 +961,14 @@
        text-decoration: underline;
 }

+#wpbody h2 {
+  font-size: 12pt;
+}
+
+#titlediv h3 {
+  display: none;
+}
+
 #poststuff h2 {
        margin-top: 20px;
        font-size: 1.5em;

George Malamidis — „Synthesized Testing“

Already 15min behind schedule, but so far interesting.

This has 4 lines of code. It is already a big ruby function.

Vassilis Rizopoulos — „rutema: One test tool to rule them all“

I’m thinking on how to write in a polite way “This talk was boring”. It was. And the tool uses XML Hey, this is a Ruby conference- you should use YAML or even better a cool Ruby DSL.

Tomasz Stachewicz — „Sharing the load“

Sounded interesting but there was a question after the talk which suggested that the guys reinvented the wheel and that BackgroundDrb is a better solution for what he has done.

Petr Krontorád — „Building Rails Playground - using Ruby’s dynamic nature“

Mumble, mumble, small text, cannot read the slides, mumble… Sorry I don’t have a clue what this talk is about.

Tim Becker — „Lessons Learned Writing Native Extensions“

Type-along tutorial on how to write C extension for Ruby. Very interesting, this could actually make me write C code again… He has started talking on cats and tigers and it seems like he wants to teach us how arrays work in C. Booooooooring. Finally he is done with this and is back on the interesting topics like conversion of data types. Overall a really interesting talk. By far the best one today so far. Tim’s post with code samples and links.

Matt Ford — „Aspect Oriented Programming in Ruby“

It’s his birthday. Happy birthday Matt! He talks about Aquarium a neat aspect oriented programming solution for Ruby. Very nice. I have to play around with this when I’m back home.

Dushan Wegner — „Philosophy & Programming“

This first lightning talk. “Imagine I’m holding a beer and put out this ideas”. “Programmers are better philosophers”. A very cool talk about the similarities of programming and practicing philosophy.

Marcin Raczkowski — „Distributed programming with ruby“

Hard to understand but interesting. Sadly it is impossible to read his code when he is showing examples in the editor.

sorry missed name and title Akira Tanaka - „IO.copy_stream“

Interesting talk about IO in Ruby. Great final “status” slide:

Accepted by Matz yesterday @La fabrica
Submitted today to Ruby 1.9

Wow!

Gregor … — „Context-oriented programming for Ruby“

Took a long time to get to the point. Which part of lightning talk did you not understand.

Florian Gilcher — „Patterns (yet another) pattern matching library“

Interesting talk. Can be found at patterns.rubyforge.org.

Raimonds Simanovskis — „Using Ruby with Oracle“

Good quick talk. I never had to work with Oracle so I never had the problems he was talking about.

Daniel Liszka — „One RubyStack to Rule them All“

Strong accent, to much text on the slides. But sounds like a neat idea… www.bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

Ry Dahl — „Ebb Web Server“

Yet another Ruby web server, obviously it’s faster than all the others because what would be the point otherwise. ebb.rubyforge.org

Wouter de Bie — „Capistrano, Webistrano“

The final lightning talk. I’m hungry off to find some food…

Dr Nic — Demo

So it wasn’t the last talk. They squeezed in a short demo on how to use his gem generator. Very cool! I have to use this to play around with native C extensions.

Final announcement

It seems like next year’s EURUKO will be in Madrid. Great! Never been there. See you next year! It’s not decided yet. Krakow and Warsaw are possible sites, too. Hm, I’m still for Madrid

Sumary

I think I should have slept in today like Todd and would not have missed a bit. Here are some pictures from EURUKO 2008 on Flickr and even one with me. EURUKO was great. A big “thank you!” to all the people who have organized it. I’m sure I will be back next year, no matter where.

The first day of EURUKO 2008 is over.

Yukihiro „Matz“ Matsumoto — „Keynote“

Matz talked about the future of Ruby. It was very interesting. He talked a little bit about the upcoming features (I will link to the slides when they become available) and about the design decisions behind Ruby. For me the most important quote was:

I designed Ruby not to work best but so that people can perform best

Koichi Sasada — „Ruby meets VM“

Koichi explained some details of YARV but some points were lost because a few of his slides were in Japanese.

Favorite quote:

(on his “No Ruby/No Life shirt”) for me it’s No Ruby / No Job

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo — „JRuby: Ready For Action!“

Made me download JRuby during the talk

David A. Black — „Per-Object Behavior in Ruby“

I have to reread the slides, because I fell asleep (not due to the talk but to the fact that we are in Prague and had a few beer yesterday)

Nic Williams — „Meta-Meta-Programming with Ruby“

Memorable talk, very funny, great final slide (see @16:35)

Lightning talks session

Two talks on an agile white board and on a Ruby to PHP compiler.

VC with DHH

a little boring, bad sound quality and even worse video

One thing is for sure: as soon as these laptops become available in Germany, I will buy one.

They will host a recruiting event called “nerd night” in Karlsruhe and have put a registration URL on the flyer for www.nerd-night.de. Does it work? No! At least yesterday and today it didn’t. It redirects to http://www1.1und1.de/index.php?page=faq. Yet another professional piece of work from a web hosting company. I guess it was yet another campaign that had to go online on a Friday afternoon.

Update:
The page is finally online. And it contains gems like “Wir sind das Internet.” (We are the internet). Arrogant? Brave? Dumb?

19. 02. 2008 · Matz is coming to EURUKO!
We are very happy to announce that Matz (most probably accompanied by Koichi) is coming to EURUKO! There are currently more than 100 people registered to attend, so thank you all! We will update the website in next couple of days with more details on program, information about sponsors and other stuff.

It has been some time since I used Ruby but it is still my favorite language by far.

Update:

I just registered for EURUKO I will probably go by car so if someone from the Munich area needs a ride, just leave a comment… And a bonus feature: I found this Tech Talk of Matz talking about Ruby 1.9 today…

What’s the problem?

I’m a nba fan and I subscribe to the NBA.com RSS feed (http://www.nba.com/rss/nba_rss.xml) which works fine most of the time but sometimes I get an empty page. Why? Because some lazy developer thought it might be a good idea to add ?rss=true to every link.

If you look at todays feed you can find this item:

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Cavs' Gibson Expected to Miss Four to Six Weeks]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3255778?rss=true]]></link>
<description>…>
</item>


If I follow the link ESPN returns:

<!-- obj null -->


The suffix ?rss=true appears after every link in the feed so I’m pretty certain it’s not ESPN’s fault…

Update:

It’s even better. Not only do they destroy external links by appending ?rss=true, they kill their own links, too:

<link><![CDATA[http://my.nba.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300025597?rss=true]]></link>


My current favorite is the TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS. It has:

• low power consuption (ok, sleep mode: 18.8W; in operation: 44.6W)
• RAID support (way more features than I would ever need: Single disk, RAID 0 (Disk Stripping), RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring), RAID 5, RAID 5+ Hot spare, RAID 6, and JBOD (Linear Disk Volume))
• no encryption

But I couldn’t find any other NAS server with a good price (less than 500€) and this combination of features so I guess I have to live without encrypted disks. If you have any experience with this box or know about another box which has all these features, please leave a comment.

Things to do:

• Watch and try everything from NXT Tutorial.
• Try Ruby-nxt. The project seems stale because status is still alpha and last update in November 2006. I would love to use my favorite language to control the robots I’m going to build.
• Have a look at the NXT firmware.
• Look at all the other ways to program the NXT.