I recently obtained a mobile broadband device that has a built in GPS receiver and can emit NMEA sentences. My old Garmin portable GPS can emit NMEA also, but it’s a pain to hookup to the laptop. Combining a GPS unit in a mobile broadband device is a great idea.
Ruby is a very flexible and expressive language. A recent question posted by a Ruby newbie got me looking through my IRC logs for a discussion about the performance of various dynamic method invocation approaches, so I thought I’d share some performance results.
Update 10/16/2015: Please see the Racket Version also.
Peter Norvig wrote a simple spelling corrector in 20 lines of Python 2.5, so I thought I’d see what it looks like in Ruby. Here are some areas I’m not pleased with:
Now that I’ve switched to a Macbook Pro with OSX Leopard as my primary desktop, I’ve located my Ubuntu machine in another part of the house to be accessible to my children. Not wanting to walk to the room where it’s located just to flip the power switch, I researched how to get “wake on LAN” working, so I could power it up remotely.
UPDATE 12/24/08: This article is now out of date. I just installed Ubuntu 8.10, and getting Emacs with nice fonts is now much easier:
This has been a long time in coming. Paul Graham and Robert Morris have released an initial version of the Arc programming language.
I’ve learned a number of programming languages since I began programming 25 years ago. Earlier in my career, my choice of which programming language to learn was largely driven by external factors such as a class or job requirement, or the expectation of job demand in the future.
I recently installed the software that came with a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit onto a Mac Mini running OSX 10.4. I was somewhat concerned when the install program prompted me for an admin password, so I attempted to install the software into a directory in my home directory instead of the main Applications directory, but it still prompted for an admin password. Since LEGO is a large reputable company, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and figured the admin password may have been necessary to install Bluetooth drivers or some other feature. I should’ve learned a lesson from the Sony root kit debacle with respect to blindly trusting large corporations. In the Sony case, maliciousness was involved, in the LEGO Mindstorms case, I think only incompetence is to blame.
Someone posted a question on comp.lang.ruby recently asking for help with solving anagrams. The poster originally asked about ways of generating permutations and several people pointed him to the facets library which has some permutation utility functions. As it turns out, I benchmarked the following naive permutation generator as 3 times faster than the facets library code:
I came across a little programming puzzle on comp.lang.ruby.
The author blogged about the original paper that got things started, but I haven’t had time to read it in depth yet.