Now just to figure out what to do with it.

With our medical exceptions, they have to talk to one of our Security Officers who can use a variety of methods to tell whether it presents a problem including test strips, and hand-held detectors that are highly effective, even with closed and sealed bottles.

…wait, what?

Compare and Contrast to Babylon 5′s Nightwatch program:

As you can see, I’m on my way to riches…

Oh, that’s horrible. Mainly because it uses GNU/Linux. The FSF keep attempting to stick their names on things for no real reason other than to attempt to stay relevant. They’re still bitter that GNU/Hurd missed the boat entirely, and is completely irrelevant now. Looking at the root CVS folder, the most recent check-in was ten months ago, with some over a decade!

Haiku, the attempt to make an open-source binary compatible version of BeOS, has more success. They’ve at least released an Alpha, with bootable CDs and VM images.

Clang is getting ready to completely replace GCC/Binutils in the short-term. Coreutils can be replaced by BusyBox…what about that setup is GNU/..?

Most embedded systems don’t have make, gcc, binutils, et cetera. And they use busybox rather than coreutils/find/sed/et cetera. So they can have a complete system with no FSF/GNU tools, and proponents of the FSF still want to slap GNU/ on it.

Sigh.

But if it was “UNIX | GPL > LINUX”, okay, that I can get behind.

For various reasons, I decided to take a serious look at Ruby this weekend. Reading over the initial documentation, it’s your fairly straightforward object-oriented language, you can have inheritance, super methods, automatic getter/setter functionality, et cetera. A few of the unique things about it is that the only primitive type is an Object, and everything inherits from this. This sets it apart from most other languages I’ve encountered.

Java, with its attempt to do rigid OO design, it still has byte, short, int, long, float, double, boolean, and char. So it’s a byte-code compiled language that is throwing primitive C datatypes at us still. Marvelous.

Python is a little odd. It does actually store all the primitive types as objects, but it seems to hide that from you, into thinking that they aren’t objects. For instance, when we view the public methods of an int object:


>>> foo = 1
>>> type(foo)

>>> dir(foo)
['__abs__', '__add__', '__and__', '__class__', '__cmp__', '__coerce__', '__delattr__', '__div__', '__divmod__', '__doc__', '__float__', '__floordiv__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__getnewargs__', '__hash__', '__hex__', '__index__', '__init__', '__int__', '__invert__', '__long__', '__lshift__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__neg__', '__new__', '__nonzero__', '__oct__', '__or__', '__pos__', '__pow__', '__radd__', '__rand__', '__rdiv__', '__rdivmod__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rfloordiv__', '__rlshift__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__ror__', '__rpow__', '__rrshift__', '__rshift__', '__rsub__', '__rtruediv__', '__rxor__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__sub__', '__subclasshook__', '__truediv__', '__trunc__', '__xor__', 'conjugate', 'denominator', 'imag', 'numerator', 'real']


We see we have the typical integer methods, let’s use abs (Absolute Value), it’s a fairly common one. …except we can’t, because it’s a class method. For Python, we have to do the following:


>>> abs(foo)
1


The only methods we can call with the object are conjugate, denominator, imag, numerator, and real. All the normal functions one would typically use on an integer are class methods, therefore making it not seem like a true object.

Ruby’s a bit different.


>> foo = 1
=> 1
>> foo.class
=> Fixnum
>> foo.public_methods
=> ["%", "odd?", "inspect", "gcd", "prec_i", "<<", "tap", "div", "&", "clone", ">>", "public_methods", "object_id", "__send__", "instance_variable_defined?", "equal?", "freeze", "to_r", "to_sym", "*", "ord", "rdiv", "+", "extend", "next", "send", "round", "methods", "prec_f", "-", "even?", "singleton_method_added", "divmod", "hash", "/", "integer?", "downto", "dup", "to_enum", "instance_variables", "numerator", "|", "eql?", "size", "rpower", "id", "instance_eval", "truncate", "~", "to_i", "singleton_methods", "modulo", "taguri", "taint", "zero?", "times", "instance_variable_get", "frozen?", "enum_for", "display", "instance_of?", "^", "to_yaml", "taguri=", "method", "to_a", "+@", "-@", "quo", "instance_exec", "type", "**", "upto", "to_f", "<", "step", "protected_methods", "<=>", "between?", "==", "to_yaml_style", "remainder", ">", "===", "to_int", "nonzero?", "pred", "instance_variable_set", "lcm", "coerce", "respond_to?", "kind_of?", "power!", "floor", "succ", ">=", "prec", "to_s", "<=", "fdiv", "class", "to_yaml_properties", "private_methods", "=~", "tainted?", "__id__", "denominator", "abs", "untaint", "nil?", "chr", "id2name", "gcdlcm", "is_a?", "ceil", "[]"]
>> foo.even?
=> false
>> foo = 2
=> 2
>> foo.even?
=> true
>> foo.abs
=> 2


We have instance methods! Rejoice! If your primitive types merely have class methods, that’s designed to make you think you’re still dealing with primitive types, it’s just hidden behind the curtains for you. Ruby bares all.

So we’ve established Ruby actually takes Object-Oriented programming further than Java and Python do. Perl’s is downright abysmal, it’s easier to do OO in C using structs and function pointers than dealing with Perl’s OO. So will it past the only other true test of a programming language? (That I care about at least…)

RegExes.

Perl is the Holy Grail of RegEx expressions, they didn’t make up PCRE for nothing. And I’ll even accept sed-level compatibility, but I’d prefer less leaning toothpicks. So we’ll take a simple Programming 101 Question, and do it with RegExes.

Write a routine that replaces any multiple character appearances with a single character. So, “Mississippi” to “Misisipi”, or “Foooooooo” to “Fo”, et cetera.

Perl and sed are easy:


Perl:
perl -e '$foo = "Mississippi"; $foo =~ s/([A-Za-z])(\1)+/$1/g; print "$foo\n"'
Misisipi

sed:
echo "Mississippi" | sed 's/\([A-Za-z]\)\(\1\)\+/\1/g'
Misisipi


What about Ruby? Well, after some initial stumblings, learning that in order to do complex back references nicely, you have to pass in a block into Ruby…


>> foo = "Mississippi"
=> "Mississippi"
>> foo.gsub!(/([A-Za-z])(\1)+/) { $1 }
=> "Misisipi"
>> puts foo
Misisipi
=> nil


It works! I can do my marvelous RegExes with minimal syntax change, no compiling of expressions! And get my lovely Object-Oriented design!

I’m in love.

Sigh. So I logged in with my older GMail account, which now presents the issue of sometimes Google thinks I’m logged into one account, sometimes another one. Great.

And I’m greeted with…something.

I’m still not sure what Google Wave is. I still need to watch the video. But this is an insane amount of hype about something which most people still have no idea what it is. GMail? It’s e-mail, got it. JotSpot acquisition? It’s a wiki. GrandCentral/Google Voice? It’s a cool call-manager type thing.

Google Wave? …it’s…a thing. That does…things.

Right, time to start reading and watch the insanely long intro video.

I used Bugzilla at a previous job, and when you could open a core-level bug that spawned five sub-project bugs and then another sixty sub-sub-project bugs, and you had to manually close each one, it was just horrible. That may have been the way it was managed, but it completely turned me off Bugzilla.

Trac seemed interesting, but the one major issue with it, is that you could only do one project per Trac. That’s just not going to work for a company with multiple projects which are only related in that they are used together, but share no code whatsoever. So having a dependency for one project depend on a bug being fixed in another project is excellent, and Trac doesn’t initially seem to do that.

So I settled on Redmine. And what a severe pain it was to set up. First off, the shared hosting service I’m using is using a different version of Rails than was needed for Redmine. So I had to use gem (Ruby’s package manager, a la Perl CPAN) to get that installed. Easy enough. Then debug some undocumented error that requires a certain secret to be set for cookies. Okay…then realize that apparently the application startup time for a Ruby on Rails application is horrendously slow. And that there exists several different webserver and modules in order to even run Rails, the particular hosting service I’m using uses Passenger. Then trying to understand the varying levels between Development and Production mode that’s standard to Rails installations, plus the Rakefiles, not to mention the rake migrations.

Painful. Ruby as a language looks cool, but Ruby on Rails, initial foray into installing such an application, I have a headache from. It seems an extremely complex way to do things. Even reading the Ruby on Rails Getting Started guide is painful.

And I’ve debugged autoconfig. That’s saying a lot.

However! Success was made, and the issue tracker for Impact Linux is running!

For general national news, I follow the CNN Twitter feed, which is sometimes quite poor. I learned about Ted Kennedy’s death hours before on reddit before the CNN Twitter feed reported it.

And the Austin American Stateman’s Twitter feed seems to be about the same, ranging from personal “LOLs” to sometimes noteworthy news.

I don’t subscribe to cable television, even though apparently my apartment complex offers it for free, it requires me to pay for a digital converter box or CableCard set up, so I don’t bother. Eventually I might invest money in a TiVo or build-my-own solution, but it doesn’t follow my general watching habits.

I want an RSS feed, basically. And while there are a few blogs that keep me up with certain events, such as the Burnt Orange Report, its aimed more towards politics, rather than general news events.

I am not sure if other newspapers around the United States or world actually have an RSS feed. This would be ideal with CNN, rather than a Twitter feed, same with the Austin American Statesman. But I haven’t found one locally as of yet. Because I don’t want to have to click on something to get the news, I just want an RSS reader to grab it and let me read it along with a post about Super Mario Brothers 2 Hardcore!.

Which is okay, it’s still a fairly new project, but I was hoping to move away from GCC mit hast.

But this was just the clang front-end, I still need to see about the LLVM backend, and if there’s anything I can do with that.