Al Hoang

This is a nice chart explaining the choices a network admin has for dealing with shaping bandwidth in a large campus.

I’ve been slowly reading the Design Patterns in Ruby: Rough Cuts on Safari and have been finding it a pretty good read so far. I have to admit I’ve slept through the original Gang of Four Design Patterns book since it looked so excruciatingly boring and I wasn’t really convinced I needed such patterns for most of my boring run of the mill scripts. (Sure sure, crucify me now)

The book is roughly broken into

* A quick quick intro to Ruby (thank the heavens he made this short since I am getting sick of reading so many of these Ruby intros)
* The traditional Design patterns and how they would look like in Ruby
* Design Patterns suited for Ruby

I’m still reading through the traditional Design Patterns section but am enjoying how the author shows a small implementation with a pretty good example then goes on to refine it and point out how some features of Ruby make certain pieces of the implementation irrelevant or could be shortened. He also spends time explaining common gotchas and emphasizing the use cases for the particular pattern.

I can definitely see this occupying a place on my bookshelf as a nice reference guide for Ruby. It’s getting nice seeing more books that cater to people who aren’t complete Ruby newbies (while that market is important too, don’t forget the journeymen if you want to sustain a community). I’ll add more as I read through more of it but even as a Rough Cut it has been an enjoyable read so far.

Go get yourself a Safari account and start reading

This past Saturday I tried checking out the Second Life version of the November TLUG Meeting due to some previous obligations barring me from attending in person.

So I went through the rigmarole of installing Second Life on my Linux machine at home and getting it configured to work properly with these things called SLurls which seem to be some way to handle URLs that can send you directly to a location in Second Life.

This HOWTO was awfully handy in configuring Firefox. (You need to play with the about: URL) So now I’m all ready to listen in on the conversation and run into this bug

Basically, voice chat won’t work under Linux at this point in time. So I was basically having my avatar hang out in this room with some occasional text messages coming by with other people complaining about the sound. But I had zero sound… wonderful. I quickly disconnected since there are better things to do than watch a virtual presentation with virtually no sound. Bleh…

The main site says this about the Lively Kernel project

The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to web programming that we have known in desktop programming for thirty years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have.

Basically it is Morphic [1] [2] crammed inside your web browser. I guess technology moves in interesting ways when such an interface can easily be duplicated in Javascript alone. It does tax your web browser when you play with it and some parts of the UI were cut off for me but I guess we’ll see where this takes things.