Hard hitting reporting I can assure you ^_^.
Hey, I wasn't able to go to the Anime Festival Asia 2009 convention in Singapore that I so gleefully reported on and see the K-On! seiyuus because I was still taking exams, cut me some slack! Or perhaps in this case some stockings. Wait, that didn't sound right. Never mind.
Yesterday I wrote a longwinded post about choosing Ruby/Tk or Java Swing to create a silly Monopoly clone for the family. Alex reminded me of Qt which is still just as easy as ever to install on Mac, but I still haven't got the Qt4-QtRuby bindings working because of a problem with Smoke.
First I got the latest complete Qt SDK from Nokia/Trolltech, then built cmake from MacPorts:
# port -v selfupdate # port -v install cmake
Then downloaded a copy of Qt4-QtRuby and was able to get passed the cmake stage:
# tar xzvf qt4-qtruby-2.0.3.tgz # cd qt4-qtruby-2.0.3 # cmake -DENABLE_QTWEBKIT_SMOKE=off -DENABLE_QTWEBKIT_RUBY=off .
But when I got to the make stage it reported an error in smokedata.cpp and proceeded to print a laundry list of errors.
Writing smokedata.cpp… FATAL ERROR "com.trolltech.Qt.QGraphicsItem") inline void QGraphicsItem::setPos(qreal "com.trolltech.Qt.QGraphicsItem") inline void QGraphicsItem::setPos(qreal "com.trolltech.Qt.QGraphicsItem") inline void QGraphicsItem::setPos(qreal isn't a known type (type="com.trolltech.Qt.QGraphicsItem") inline void QGraphicsItem::setPos(qreal)
This was the reason why I was going to stick with Tk with Ruby because it comes bundled with the language and you don't need to go through all these hoops. Python works great with Qt though, so I might give that a shot instead. Or I'll just keep soldiering on with Swing.
UPDATE: As of 2016, I’ve had more crap thrown at me about this post than any other on *Rubenerd*. “You weren’t supposed to have liked this terrible movie!!!one!!!1!eleventy!!! Well, at the time, I did. Deal with it :).
Just saw the Singapore preview screening of James Cameron's Avatar. Its now 1am (hence the timestamp of this post showing Thursday) and I have to get up early in the morning so I'll be brief, but my initial impression can be summarised as: whoa.
The protagonists were endearing and their situation believable, my heart ached for them to win which often doesn't happen to me in films. While special effects often don't woo me over these did, the colours especially were stunning. Its message so succinctly summarised in the last scene (which I won't give away) was especially poignant given the Copenhagen summit is going on. It had well placed comic relief, it had nerds being tree huggers and it was unabashedly romantic and pulled it off well :).
I get the feeling I'll be comparing other films to this one for a long time.
I thought the CEO was a bit one sided and overly stereotypical and he left with a whimper. Aside from him, I thought the characters were all spot on. I won't say anything more until I know more people have seen it.
UPDATE: Alex has suggested I try Ruby with Qt. Genius!
My family has always had an obsession with the Monopoly board game, and since my mum died the remaining Schade clan has clung onto it even more as a family tradition. Because I have some spare time over the holidays I thought I'd create a computer version of Monopoly but with the place names and chance cards to do with places and experiences we've been to and had. Trouble is, I'm not sure what graphical toolkit and language to use!
The problem is we'll (hopefully) be taking this game to Europe, but our laptops have a smattering of different operating systems and configurations. My sister has a MacBook with Snow Leopard, I have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and FreeBSD, and my dad is still forced to use Windows on his work laptop. Ideally I'd like to have my crappy little game being able to run on each.
Given I've been dabbling in Ruby again and have relearned the joys of Smalltalk like blocks, my first choice was to use Ruby with Tk because its fast to develop, seems to be relatively simple and comes with the default Ruby environment without installing anything extra, but I have far more experience with Swing in Java. As with everything in Java (and with me, ha!) its incredibly verbose to do even simple things, but its not terribly complicated unless you desperately want to do it the "correct" OOP way.
Judge me if you will, but for some reason I also really, really like the Metal Java Swing interface. Some people avoid it like the plague and allow their Swing applications to resemble the host operating system, but I reckon it looks classy.
I suppose I could come right out of left field and use JRuby with Swing, that way I have the familiar widgets and layout engines I'm [relatively] used to with a quicker to develop, RAD and Agile friendly language. Perhaps I'm getting a bit too ahead of myself though, would it be easier just to stick with Java on this one? Object serialisation (which I know how to do in Java but not Ruby) would make it great for saving and loading existing games too. Then again, perhaps I should force myself to branch into something new to learn something different.
Looks like I won't be deciding tonight!
It seems that fix for the Huawei USB SingTel Mobile modem I painstakingly detailed last week has stopped… fixing. Stopped working. Like a Monty Python parrot, it has ceased to exist. What's worse is the error message is informing me I have to contact myself. Don't they know talking to yourself is the first sign of madness? I mean, I talk to myself enough as it is.
Saying Om Malik (tag) is the saving grace of tech network blogging that is mostly populated with loud but homogenous material may be overstating the case, but nonetheless it's been a pleasure to be subscribed to his network of sites over the years. To celebrate GigaOm's eighth anniversary on Monday I finally got around to posting a comment :).
I know I’m late to the party and you’re probably tiring of reading them, but just wanted to pass on my own congrats for an awesome job!
There isn’t much more I can add to what people have already written here, but this one line in your post resonated with me:
But there’s been a downside to this shift, too: A certain uniformity has set in, making one tech blog largely indistinguishable from the next.
I fear it's even worse than a downside, its an endemic problem that only seems to be getting worse. Tech blogs increasingly consist of hastily written posts designed to get clicks, and they're becoming so homogeneous that often citation links to back up claims merely point to other stories from another massive blog network that offer exactly the same analysis and points. There's no original material anymore.
In your post you discuss how tech blogs used to be more personality driven compared to giant networks which I must admit I miss. In the past I could be confident that each site I was subscribed to would have different opinions and takes on issues.
I think this is why I've continued to read GigaOm network blogs while largely giving up on Gawker, CNET, AOL et al, because your writers seem to offer the best of both worlds. I think the quality of the writing is also reflected in the way people are more friendly in comment threads here and there are far fewer trolls and fanboy wars. Some comment threads on the above networks are scary.
Here's to many more conversations!
PS: I'm a Cranky Geeks viewer so I was thrilled when Sebastian joined the team. Now all we need is for you to return to the show to put Dvorak back in his place again! And where can I buy my own GigaOm shirt like the one you wore on episode 162? :)
It's that nonsensical idea we thought common sense and overwhelming evidence against its effectiveness would kill once and for all, but here we are on the brink of the introduction of the Great Firewall of Australia. Whooptie-friggen-do.
From Liam Tung's ZDnet Australia article Mandatory ISP filter due mid-2011:
Mandatory ISP filtering legislation will be introduced around the middle of 2010, after which there will be a one year period to implement and activate the filtering technology.
Also from ZDNet Australia, Colin Ho made similar remarks to what I've been saying about Australia's global standing in his article EFA: Filtering 'damages Australia's reputation'
Civil rights and online free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today criticised the government’s internet filtering report, claiming civil rights implications should be the focus rather than the technology’s impacts on internet speed and performance.
"It damages Australia’s reputation as a free and open democracy and as a technologically advanced and savvy 21st century country" ~ EFA vice president Colin Jacobs
I've talked about this issue many times before using the nocleanfeed and great australian firewall tags.
In case you're unclear as to what my response has consistently been throughout this debacle, allow me to demonstrate with the help of my friend Kyon from Haruhi Suzumiya fame.
I had some trouble finding how to prevent Tk windows from being resized by users at runtime, so now that I've found out how I'm putting it here and passing it off as a legitimate post. Clever, right? :). Entirely pointless introductory paragraphs aside, simply set the resizable attribute of the TkRoot to (0, 0). Looks like a guy with a crooked nose.
For example, if you're a Rubyist using a beautiful block to create your new TkRoot window:
rootMain = TkRoot.new |main| do [..] resizable 0, 0 end
Or if you're doing it the more traditional way with hash parameters:
rootMain = tkRoot.new{ 'resizable' => '0, 0', [..] }
And because I used to be a Perl Guy and still use it for some stuff:
$rootMain->resizable(0, 0);
The next thing I need to find out is how to allow only horizontal resizing while vertical resizing is locked, and vica versa. Any ideas?
Having studied Java almost exclusively at uni for a while, I decided while I had a holiday break I'd mess around with some Ruby goodness. Today was all about messing with YAML for a potential project thingy, to use technical terms.
To get started, the spiffy (though unfortunately named) dump method lets us see how a simple Ruby hash would look in YAML:
#!/opt/local/bin/ruby1.9 -w
require "yaml"
tsundere = {
'Bakemonogatari' => 'Senjoughara Hitagi',
'Clannad' => 'Fujibayashi Kyou'
}
puts YAML.dump(tsundere)
==>---
Clannad: Fujibayashi Kyou
Bakemonogatari: Senjoughara Hitagi
Seems simple enough. What if we created a hash of hashes and exported that? Would we get some nesting going on that makes semantic sense?
moeness = {
'SOSDan' => 'Asahina Mikuru',
'K-On!' => 'Akiyama Mio'
}
animegirls = {
'Tsundere' => tsundere,
'moeness' => moeness
}
puts YAML.dump(animegirls)
==>---
Tsundere:
Clannad: Fujibayashi Kyou
Bakemonogatari: Senjoughara Hitagi
moeness:
K-On!: Akiyama Mio
SOSDan: Asahina Mikuru
Shiny :). I suppose the next step is taking an existing YAML file and import it back. I imagine some nested blocks would be in order, no?
I've written some basic YAML flat file databases for myself before, but not with Ruby in mind. I've been told its excellent for object serialisation that's still human readable, but I'm more interested in being able to read/write preformatted data.
Where are you __why, we need your awesomeness back.
@FakeAPStylebook: The word “totally” is redundant except when describing how rad something is.
Totally.