Dr Nic

Today is the 24th of November.

On this day in history [1]:

1859 - Darwin’s “Origin of Species published”

Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called natural selection. Even today educated people still can’t cope with the concept that Adam and Eve were monkeys.

1642 - Tasmania discovered

Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania). I was born and raised on this island in Australia. Thanks Abel you happy sailor you.

1867 - Barbed wire

Joseph F Glidden patents barbed wire. Centuries later Pamela Anderson makes a movie with the same name. Different date.

1991 - Freddie Mercury dies

Lead singer of rock group Queen, dies of AIDS aged 45.

** 2006 **

You submitted a proposal to talk at Railsconf 2007. I hear you’ll be really good too. Can’t wait to watch.

Go here. Fill in the form.

[1] Data from The History Channel and Wikipedia. Incredibly witty comments are mine.

RJS seems like a nice idea. Its Ruby with embedded Javascript.

Now put away the crayons and get back to pure Javascript with embedded Ruby with “MinusR” - RJS minus the R (for Ruby).

This is especially useful if you want a clean way to support non-Prototype/Scriptaculous frameworks, like jQuery. You can call the raw Javascript for these libraries, and embed your Ruby objects using Erb and a handy js helper to convert Ruby to JSON.

Its clean, healthy fun. Like carrots.

Makes me think about jogging, its just that healthy for you.

Show your love for the Railers of the world at Working with Rails. Forget the name of the site - really this thing is a precursor to a MySpace of Railers and Rubists, in my opinion.

I want to put videos on my profile. And change the theme to a dark pink perhaps.

Actually, I have no idea what to do with a MySpace for Railers profile page.

The New Gem Generator rocks. Type newgem <gem_name> and you get all standard scaffolding for a gem. They look just like plugins, or vice versa. And the -b option bangs out new command line apps. Sweet.

It also generates a Rakefile for you filled with rakey goodness. You just need to setup a few values - author, description, etc - and then you can repackage your gem, install it, and upload it to Rubyforge as much as you like.

But on the other side of the InterWeb, there is a man intent on gifting your gems with more Rake commands than you could poke a stick at. Or a rake, perhaps. A man so over exposed to raw rakedness that it would be folly for the New Gem Generator to ignore his raked presence.

The man: Ryan Davis. The rakey loveliness: hoe.

So, you might ask: What’s a hoe?

To get the latest newgem and hoe do:

> gem install newgem \-\-include-dependencies

Simply, your new gems are now imbued with more Rake tasks than you could poke a hoe at. As of hoe-1.1.4, you get:

> rake -T
rake announce         # Generate email announcement file and post to rubyforge.
rake audit            # Run ZenTest against the package
rake check_manifest   # Verify the manifest
rake clean            # Remove any temporary products. / Clean up all the extras
rake clobber          # Remove any generated file.
rake clobber_docs     # Remove rdoc products
rake clobber_package  # Remove package products
rake debug_gem        # Show information about the gem.
rake default          # Run the default tasks
rake docs             # Build the docs HTML Files
rake email            # Generate email announcement file.
rake install          # Install the package. Uses PREFIX and RUBYLIB
rake install_gem      # Install the package as a gem
rake multi            # Run the test suite using multiruby
rake package          # Build all the packages
rake post_news        # Post announcement to rubyforge.
rake publish_docs     # Publish RDoc to RubyForge
rake redocs           # Force a rebuild of the RDOC files
rake release          # Package and upload the release to rubyforge.
rake repackage        # Force a rebuild of the package files
rake ridocs           # Generate ri locally for testing
rake test_deps        # Show which test files fail when run alone.
rake test             # Run the test suite. Use FILTER to add to the command line.
rake uninstall        # Uninstall the package.

Have things changed because of Hoe?

Yes, now pay attention.

Note, with support from hoe, when you add additional command line apps to your bin folder, you do not need to update your Rakefile. All files in bin are assumed to be executable apps. [1]

Additionally, the files you want bundled into the gem must now be added into the Manifest.txt file. Your initial Manifest file is generated for you, you need to update it for any additional files.

[1] The railties gem is an anti-example: its bin folder is filled with template executables; only the rails script is actually an executable (this is the script you use to create your initial rails application scaffolding; similar to the newgem executable for gems).

Take 100 photos of an area - some close-ups and some panoramic shots. Then try to figure out how they all fit together. Since digital cameras came out and memory got cheaper and cheaper, taking 100 shots of one location is entirely possible. But why bother? You’ll never want to look at all of them again.

Until you get to dump them into Microsoft’s Photosynth software. It will recreate the whole 3D area and allow you to navigate through your images in 3d space.

Its currently one stage better than vapourware: demoware of someone else’s photos. But its brilliant.

Find a PC. Load up Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Go here: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html

It has all the novelty value of Google Earth when we all first got our hands on it.

Only negative that popped into my mind without prompting was the initial preview of each pane is blurred until the real picture is loaded. I don’t like looking at blurry pictures. My eyes try to focus on them, and then start looking at them cross-eyed as if they were a Magic Eye puzzle and there is an eagle hidden somewhere.

Truly lovely implementation of a wonderful idea.

Update: Nice video introduction