Finally Ruby broke the silence...

Recently ruby got my attention and spent time learning it. It has beautiful syntax and several cool (not new) features like blocks.

What made me speechless was addition of methods at runtime to a class or to a particular object.
May not be very useful but its kinda cool ;)

Dynamic addition of methods to Ruby:

E.g a simple class like this.

class Demo
    def doWork()
        puts 'Work'
    end
end

and an object of the above class

d=Demo.new

and now comes the magic...

def d.doPlay()
    puts 'play'
end

d.doPlay() # method added and only for that object.

Its been a while i wrote here.I am now in Seattle on a work assignemtn for 2 months. The highlight of this trip was the freedomHEC conference in seattle.Its not just the conference but the venue too. It was the tallest point in seattle(76th floor) and the view was amazing.

Met GregKH [ Linux USB subsystem Maintainer] and other opensource hackers ( I was the odd man out :D).
The best part of the conference was its name. Its called "Unconference". The thing is there is a WinHEC conf that just ended a day before freedomHEC started. All the attendee of WinHEC have no fee.( rest of them didnt have too ;)..

The event started with "Writing a real device driver". It was first of this sort am participating,where you are given a device [ GoTemp USB Thermometer] and you are guided step by step to write a device driver and at the end voila!. you have a linux device driver for a thermometer written by ourselves. I got myself a thermometer for $25. And got a great book 'Writing great code' that too gratis.

That was the whole show that day and it was very interesting.

Recently started reading the book The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth and i am really really impressed by
the content and at the same time felt mathematically disabled!!.. So many algorithms rooted at mathematics..

I feel that math was/is taught wrongly in schools.math can be lot more fun.
i should blame myself too for not having learnt the real math..but in state boards schools
a challenging question outside the book is considered OUT OF SYLLABUS ( yay!! you get full marks for just attending those questions)
and what do you expect....

Recently saw a TV ad by Microsoft on one of its so called 'Media Center PC' .The highlight being the ability to pause LIVE TV.While
they are trying to create much hype with this , MythTV its opensource counterpart has been doing this quite sometime.
MythTV can not only pause live tv but also FastForward and Rewind. This FastForward'ing live tv is bit misleading...

some sources say they buffer live content say for 5 mins and then play it as live and you can forward it.

Offlate microsoft just tries to do what is done ages before in unix world...

eg. Moving Graphics outside kernel, user and group permissions for files.dir etc.

I have heard people boasting in blore that traffic system is so strict that getting a licence is not easy.But it turned out chennai is far better in this. One atleast needs to put '8' ( ettu podradhu ) ,but nothing of that sort in bangalore... and also the 4 wheeler licence is again CRAP.

been there done that.