cat mind > /dev/null

An excellent private video album made by amateur group of friends with mixing of audio “Teri Yaad Saath Hai” (taken from Movie : Namaste London).

Shot with just Nokia-N70 !!!

You will surely feel nostalgic about the days goneby with your close buddies.

a must see….

Pleasure without Conscience

The things that will destroy us are:
politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience;
wealth without work;
knowledge without character;
business without morality;
science without humanity, and
worship without sacrifice.

–Mahatma Gandhi

Programmer to Team Leader:
“We can’t do this proposed project.**CAN NOT**. It will involve a major
design change and no one in our team knows the design of this legacy
system. And above that, nobody in our company knows the language in which
this application has been written. ..So even if somebody wants to work on
it, they can’t. If you ask my personal opinion, the company should never
take these type of projects.”

Team Leader to Project Manager:
“This project will involve a design change. Currently, we don’t have any
staff who has experience in this type of work. Also, the language is
unfamiliar to us, so we will have to arrange for some training if we take
this project. In my personal opinion, we are not ready to take on a project
of this nature.”

Project Manager to 1st Level Manager:
“This project involves a design change in the system and we don’t have much
experience in that area. Also, not many people in our company are
appropriately trained for it. In my personal opinion, we might be able to do
the project but we would need more time than usual to complete it.”

1st Level Manager to Senior Level Manager:
“This project involves design re-engineering. We have some people who have
worked in this area and others who know the implementation language. So
they can train other people. In my personal opinion we should take this
project, but with caution.”

Senior Level Manager to CEO:
“This project will demonstrate to the industry our capabilities in
remodelling the design of a complete legacy system. We have all the
necessary skills and people to execute this project successfully. Some
people have already given in house training in this area to other staff
members. In my personal opinion, we should not let this project slip by us
under any circumstances.”

CEO to Client:
“This is the type of project in which our company specialises. We have
executed many projects of the same nature for many large clients. Trust me
when I say that we are the most competent firm in the industry for doing
this kind of work. It is my personal opinion that we can execute this
project successfully and well within the given time frame.”

Ironruby is a Microsoft initiative to run Ruby on .NET

currently it is in Pre-alpha1 , so only source code is available. You have to compile it to use it

I have compiled and uploaded it at IronRuby-PreAlpha1-BinDistribution-Ashish.zip

which is a just 422KB zip file

Download it and unzip it. Read the README provided into it and start to play. ( You require atleast .NET Framework 2.0 to run it, so download that from Microsoft website.)

HOWTO run:
install .NET framework 2.0 or greater
unzip THIS ironruby binary distributable
run rbx.exe

EXECUTE ruby lines: on the rbx, execute the following
>>puts “Hi Ashish”
will unsurprisingly print - Hi Ashish

EXECUTE .NET thingy from ironruby:
>>require ‘mscorlib’
>>require ‘System.Windows.Forms’
>>System::Windows::Forms::MessageBox.show ‘Hi Ashish’

will show a GUI window (messagebox) with ‘Hi Ashish’ written in it

to quit
>>exit

i am just dying to see it opened up to expand IronRuby

but my only concern is its license which is MSPL (Microsoft Permissive License) , which does not allow any entry to be in any license other than MSPL. though i am no lawyer, my only point of concern is that the ruby.NET initiative by QUT university is using BSD license. Now if one group of developer have developed a significant amount of ruby libraries in BSD, then that will not be distributable in the official distribution of IronRuby. It will lead to unnecessary duplication of effort in the sense of ruby libraries porting to .NET. Whatta say?

Microsoft has committed itself to move it to rubyforge in near future, which is a move to create confidence in ruby community.

anyways, for now rubyists can play with native .NET (without bridges) on ironruby.

I have lots of ant build files, many times i use ant even for tasks apart from building like portable scripting sort of tasks.

Now, if rather than sending those ant files into recycle bin, if i add ruby/jruby power into ant rather than replacing it, then i will be in the best of both worlds.

This straight forward task took me , sometime to figure out, as there was no clear directions nowhere on how to configure it.

1. Install Jruby

2. Install ant 1.7.0 by following method

cp apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.zip /opt
cd /opt
unzip apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.zip
ln -s apache-ant-1.7.0 ant
export ANT_HOME=/opt/ant
export PATH=$ANT_HOME/bin

3. copy $JRUBY_HOME/lib/bsf.jar to $ANT_HOME/lib
4. type the following file hello-from-jruby.xml

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<project name=”ashishPrj”>
<property environment=”env”/>
<script language=”ruby” manager=”bsf”>
<classpath>
<fileset dir=”${env.JRUBY_HOME}/lib” includes=”*.jar” />
</classpath>
print ‘hello world’

</script>
</project>
5. Now, run as

ant -f hello-from-jruby.xml

The output will be something like:

ashish@singularity:~/jrubyprg# ant -f hello-from-jruby.xml
Buildfile: hello-from-jruby.xml
hello world

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

now, enjoy power of ant’s XML tags, java, jruby ALL IN ONE 

We will take up some more complex scripts in next article.

happy jrubying   

install jruby on Linux and then install rails on jruby by the following procedure. I installed it on Slackware Linux 11.0.
INSTALLING JRUBY

download jruby-bin-1.0.zip from jruby.org
copy it to the desired directory, say /opt
cd /opt
unzip jruby-bin-1.0.zip
ln -s jruby-1.0 jruby

export JRUBY_HOME=/opt/jruby
export PATH=$JRUBY_HOME/bin:$PATH

jruby commands “jruby”, “jirb”,”jrubyc”
jruby-bin-1.0.zip comes bundled with gem and rake (the modified ones which search for jruby instead of ruby)

For testing, write a program hello.rb
print “Hello World”
Now run it as,
jruby hello.rb

INSTALLING RAILS ON JRUBY

TIP: do put $JRUBY_HOME/bin in $PATH earlier as specified, so that gem command from jruby will execute, not from ruby installation (if any) on your machine

gem install rails -y
currently it will install gems of rails-1.2.3, activesupport-1.4.2, activerecord-1.15.3, actionpack-1.13.3, actionmailer-1.3.3, actionwebservice-1.2.3

now, goto your application directory, say
mkdir ~/app
cd ~/app

now,if u give the following command:
root@singularity:~/app# rails blogapp

/opt/jruby/bin/rails: line 9: require: command not found
/opt/jruby/bin/rails: line 10: version: command not found
/opt/jruby/bin/rails: line 11: syntax error near unexpected token `(’
/opt/jruby/bin/rails: line 11: `if ARGV.first =~ /^_(.*)_$/ and Gem::Version.correct? $1 then’

To resolve there are two methods:
METHOD1:
HENCE, we gave the following command instead:
jruby $JRUBY_HOME/bin/rails blogapp

METHOD2: This method took me a some time to figure out because i was unable to gauge the crux of the problem initially, but finally it was actually very simple solution to a simple problem
open $JRUBY_HOME/bin/rails file in an editor
you will find the first line is mentioned as(say), #!/opt/jruby-1.0/bin/jruby
change it to #!/usr/bin/env jruby
Now, you can give the normal command:
rails blogapp

Now,
cd blogapp
now start the server by,
jruby script/server

now access the rails page at:
* http://localhost:3000

stay tuned for more articles on jruby specific features ( not in native ruby ) and rails

Here is my ubuntu wishlist :

1.1) Say i have installed from Ubuntu desktop CD and i do NOT have internet connection , BUT i have ubuntu-server CD and kubuntu CD. Now there should be easy and officially documented way to install ALL(say) from ubuntu server CD or kubuntu CD. Note: Add CDROM in synaptic never worked for me. This is the foremost requirement in my opinion that i have official ubuntu-other-editions CDs ( or just a customised AddON, which contains all the .debs , in which may be some debs are dependent on each other, but all the dependencies are all out in that CD or CD dumped on local file system), then i should be able to install WITHOUT INTERNET connection. In my opinion , this is very crucial to ubuntu’s success in countries like India.

“aptoncd” is not official and installed from default CD yet and though it takes backup of apt cached packages , but it does NOT do a good job of restoring it on other machine in a friendly way.

adding file:// and cdrom:// urls in /etc/apt/sources.list has never worked in satisfying way.

Do not mention installing apt-cache, apt-proxy etc. what we are targetting is installing ubuntu on a machine which is in Home (means no other machine in home, which means no network) and no internet. And mind it , out in eastern hemisphere, u are going to find more machines like this than having net. And also having intenet enabled machine, may mean i have dialup machine with per MB download charges, so i may not like to connect to internet for downloading some .deb which is already on a CD in front of me.

and do not mention doing “dkpg -i abc.deb” , because it can not handle package dependencies.

In short i just want to put Ubuntu server CD on a ubuntu desktop machine and then using GUI only , i want to install ALL packages from it or all the build-essential packages (C,C+, make etc). How to achieve it in user-freindly way?

1.2) Now that Sun’s implementation of Java is GPL, so integrate sun jdk/jre instead of others jdk/jre and java plugin for firefox working by default.
basically, no need of doing apt-get install sun-java6-jdk libgcj7-awt

1.3) integrate http://www.webilder.org (Webilder delivers stunning wallpapers to your Linux desktop, directly from Flickr and Webshots. You choose what keywords (tags) to watch for, and photos are automatically downloaded to your computer. Webilder can also change the wallpaper every few minutes.)

Some OTHER extra wishes:
2.1) integrate beryl (ok ok this is already going to be done in ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon)

2.2) just see Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com) linux, which is based on ubuntu itself and integrate some good features from it. For example: Mint menu has search facility to search applications in the start menu

2.3) beagle desktop search engine (http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page). In my opinion , these days all the major OSes (Mac, Win) have gone for integrating the advance search features in the OS itself, not the .
What do u expect or wish from ubuntu (say, ubuntu desktop CD ) ? Tell me. May be Santa this year may bring it to u.

Remember:
people will forget what you said …
people will forget what you did …
but people will never forget how you made them feel …

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” -Albert Einstein

Wanna Try it!
A friend forwarded this link to me atul’s nerdiness percentile
So, I went to nerdtests.com.This houmourus test calculates how nerdy one is compared to others. Here it is:

just fun.