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

I just stumbled over an announcement about OLPC Germany. Last Tuesday was my first chance to play with an OLPC laptop. Everything but the keyboard feels incredibly solid and well made. The only thing I didn’t like was the user interface. I found it quite non-intuitive but perhaps this gets better if I spend a little more time with it. And if not: I can always put Ubuntu on it.

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

I tried really hard not to trash my former² company 1&1. But they are such an easy target Read the rest of this entry »

I just found out about EURUKO 2008. It will take plaze in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 29th to 30th. From what I’ve heard are EURUKOs fun events and I would like to go this year if I can find the time especially because of this announcement:

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…

…please learn about well formed URLs. And if it’s really too hard for you to figure out, I would be happy to come over and help for a Finals ticket or two

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>


I was thinking about buying a NAS (network attached storage) server for some time and looked at different products. My requirements are low power consuption, RAID support, and disk encryption.

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.

I moved to Munich a few month ago - well actually I move to Munich only a few days ago but my stuff is here for a few months already. But anyway, I don’t have DSL yet. There are 6 or 7 WLANs in my building but these damn neighbors know how to set a password. This means I feel like living on a remote island far away from civilization when I’m at home. About an hour ago I brought my GF to the train station and luckily there is a Starbucks with a hotspot. With my iPass account I can access it without paying to 8EUR/h and get my fix of internet today

I got a nice Lego mindstorm box for Christmas. It’s extremely cool. The graphical programming interface is a little bit childish but good enough to build the first few robots. Funny that nowadays building the robot is the most difficult part for such a project

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.

Today I tried to run JRuby on Android. I failed. This article is more like a lab report so expect more boring details… Read the rest of this entry »

As you can see I’m toying around with the android SDK. I guess this will be my first 20 percent project here at Google.

So far I’m impressed with the state of the SDK. There is a ton of documentation and up to now everything worked at once.

I have a couple of ideas I would like to try on android but unfortunately all of them involve bluetooth and there is no bluetooth support for the emulator (yet?).

If you have a great idea you would like to see as an app for your next cellphone, just leave me a comment or implement it on your own