Latest News >> 2008-12-25

Dear Reddit,

2008-12-24

Ruby Is So Nice

2008-12-16

My RubyFringe presentation is available online at InfoQ:

2008-12-15

Back in the day I took an electrical engineering course at UBC on the five senses and what
we can do with them using technology. When it came to sound, we had to sit through this
excruciating series of videos of nerds trying to rock out with wands, sticks, balls, helmets,
pretty much anything that wasn’t an instrument. Every video demonstrated a horribly dressed geek
waving his little thing around at random with no rhythmic sense making noise. It was awful,
and when it was over I said, “You know, the problem with all of that music is you just can’t
dance to it.”

UPDATE: There seems to be some interest in Idiopidae too and I’ve been
neglecting the Idiopidae project page while working
on Vellum. I’ve updated that page with information and updated install
procedures, so please check it out again if nothing worked for you.

There’s a Vellum bug fix release 0.16
out you all can grab
if you’re using it. Due to a slight change in the forall command where
I stopped using raw regex and used the fnmatch instead, the unit tests for
that command weren’t actually running. This meant that bugs found their
way in and now the latest version of Vellum 0.16 should fix all of that.
It fixes that and just adds a bunch of documentation really.

Speaking of documentation, I’m still writing the big
Book of Vellum and now have the first
draft of Appendix A where I do a complete walk through the Vellum
code. You’ll notice that it matches the code I just changed two
minutes ago in the forall command. This is the advantage of
Idiopidae. Simply changing the code and re-running
the book build gets me everything instantly updated.

Grab the updated copy (still without much editing yet)
and read through if you haven’t already. I’ve also built this one with
Emacs colors for all my friends from Reddit and YCombinator News since I
know all you Lisp whores can’t stay away from your editor designed for a
man with 8.5 fingers on each hand.

I’ll be rotating the color scheme each time I release vellum just to have
fun with it.

You can install this latest drop of Vellum in all the usual ways, and
you can also grab from Bazaar:

LGPL?

There’s also been a few good submissions from some folks with suggestions
for typesetting improvements, Pygments patches and improvements, Vellum
bug reports, and the PIDA project wants to use
Vellum as their build specification system. They’ve asked if I’d change
the license to LGPL so I thought I’d toss the question out and see how
people feel about the licenses.

My main motivation for going with GPLv3 is to prevent the common situation
where corporations take the work, modify it, and don’t give it back. I’m
also pretty down on corporations in general these days, so I may even
consider a dual license of BSD for non-profits and GPLv3 for corporations.

Any thoughts on the subject of licenses for Vellum are welcome.

Bazaar Problems

If you just updated your Bazaar and you use Paramiko, you’ll find that
Bazaar blows up because the Paramiko folks removed a function (in a
fucking minor version release at at that). The easiest fix for me was
to simply remove the offending package and then do:

sudo easy_install paramiko==1.7.2

You can review the bug report at their launchpad site
for more information.