This sample code will first launch “Things” application and tells the “Finder” to hide the window. In order to run this script at login as well as hide the script icon on the dock at start, there are several steps required:

Prerequisite: download iBackground Scripts application. This small application will help us to hide the running script icon.

1. Open the script with apple script editor, and save as Application.

2. Drag the saved .app file on iBackground Scripts, and select “yes” in the pop up window.

3. Go to Accounts panel in System Preferences, drag the script into the ‘Login Items’ tab.

We are done. Try to logout and login again, see if this works.

Forum Pattern (Genetic Mutation: Inversion)

The first pattern I call it “Forum Pattern” as those startups, social networks are sort of transformation from web forums. Common web forums are subjects and topics oriented, the attraction focuses on the discussion. The easiest way to imagine how transformation occurred is to think about design of data behind the scene in abstraction.

Data Model (above)  / Chromosome Inversion Mutation (below)

The only differences in brief is the organization of the data. Facebook abstractly relocated the user attention from the topics to users themselves. Twitter has the similar pattern. Twitter is still a topic oriented, however, it added two restrictions(length of topic title and no detailed description of the topic); the replies are transformed to a topic like entries. Essentially, Facebook and Twitter are still forums, should we call them new generation forum? It’s almost like evolving creatures. We are named human, but our kids has evolved genes and different characteristics.

Forum Evolved Pattern (Genetic Mutation: Inversion)

I shouldn’t name this pattern as “forum evolved pattern”, but my point is that it’s still in a forum form. We have discussed abstracted Facebook and Twitter. In comparison of Twitter and Foursquare, Foursquare has a new born genetic as known the location which organizes each Twitter entry in groups of unique locations.

Apps Pattern (Genetic Crossover)

This pattern means that the platforms allow installing (adapting) new applications (genes). Wait, this doesn’t sound new, does it? I used to see a lot of ancient web forums allow developers/administrators to install plug-ins. It was firstly adapted to Facebook that allows users to install third party applications in a much much more easy way; Apple adapted the Apps Pattern and moved it from Web to the iOS.

The purple is the platform itself and third party applications crossovered with the platform and evolved to a new genetic. Now imagine that we have thousands and millions of those red genetic and there is only one type of purple.

I felt it was so clear that some other social networks and startups are evolved in similar patterns. There are new creatures has the similar characteristics but living in a different way, one of the example could be Foursquare (focus on local business) and Gowalla (focus on social & friends). There are so many examples out there and the rest you name it.

It’s like this two brothers, they could end up differently.

The Question

Here are some final words. The questions is how long they are going to survive. As long as my memory tells, those good old forums were hot. They weren’t that hot because the Internet wasn’t so popular at that time. Now, anyone who has a little knowledge of computing can setup a forum in a few minutes, will that happens to those evolved forums? My answer is Yes. StatusNet is an open-source Twitter like micro-blogging(remember it’s still a forum) platform and people could set it up easily within their own organization.

Now, this makes me headache. I’m thinking about generation loops.

Again, this is based on Monte Carlo Localisation and Place Recognition. The implementation is based on RobotC. There are several challenges:

• The robot will be placed randomly by the examiner in one of the five marked waypoint position. The orientation of the robot is also randomly picked.
• The robot has to work out where it is placed and then navigate as quickly as possible to each of the five points and navigates back to the start point.
• Design of the robot is on our own choice. The choice of methods will not be judged, but performance of the robot counts.
• Kits/Sensors allowed is the what it comes with the standard education pack. Thus, only one sonar sensor, three motors and two light, two touch sensors are allowed.

The video below was how our robot performed for the first try. The robot first correctly figured out the current waypoint position and its direction using sonar sensor, then started its navigation to other points.

Notice that each point has a precision measure, if the centre of the robot moves preciously to the centre of the points (marked red), we get 3 points. Otherwise, lower precision will result 2, 1 or 0 marks.

Standard ML of New Jersey interactive compiler
SML/NJ is an implementation of the Standard ML programming language.
Standard ML has many features, including type safety, polymorphism,
algebraic data types with pattern matching, higher-order functions,
and a sophisticated module system. It is especially well-suited for
writing compilers and other language processors.

This package includes the interactive compiler (sml), the compilation
manager (CM), and some essential libraries. It is a “working”
version, but believed to be stable.

Install this package if you want to program in SML.

Type in command line:

The sml will be installed under /usr/bin/sml

link_to_remote

Most common way is using link_to_remote which constructs an Ajax call, but the drawback is you have to handle the params[:message] using RJS template (or please let me know if I was wrong). Here is the example:

As you see, the :with option will eventually become :with => "message=hello_world". A new parameter is accessible by calling params[:message]. But what if I only want to render another page?

capture block

Capture block captures a variable for the view which can be reused. The idea is to call the JavaScript inside capture block to pass it as a Rails variable in view. The @param variable is readable in the view.

link_to_function

Remember that we have already passed the JavaScript value to @param variable, it is used here. An inline redirect_to does the trick, that redirects to the new action and value is accessible by calling params[:message].

I’m sure that you will have other ways of using these tricks in difference situation, but hope you get the idea and use them whenever is suitable.

This tells the test that :login_required always returns :true and the variable @current_user returns a mock model that is not nil.

• RailsBrain provides a free downloadable (free) offline documentation for rails. It has the lastest version 2.2.2 available for download. The ajax feature allows developer search method, class or file name via a input box. It’s a sufficient tool and I am using it now for development.
• Gotapi is an online API collections. you can manage/view/search all the API you are currently using in any languages(e.g. PHP, Java, .net and of course rails). Similar features are privided as RailsBrains, but it’s only available online.
• Railsapi.com is a recent new project and is hosted on GitHub. It has better search capabilities. Intresting to note that it does not support Internet Explorer is currently (may be more specific version or not been IE tested). Apart from that, it’s smart, tidy and downloadable Rails doc. (Added on March 24 2009)
• rails.raaum.org Taylor suggested a very compact Rails documentation site. It’s actually a site that lists some useful information for developers including good podcasts, links and posts. So check this out see if you can find any good topics.(Added on July 21 2010)

Presenter: David Thomas
Background: Last RubyConf attended was in 2005, started working on Ruby back in 1999. He wrote books, talked at many events and went to a lot of conferences. HE recently went to many Rails conferences.

Why Fork Ruby

There are a lot of active project forking Ruby interpreter, e.g. JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, but they are not forking the Ruby language.

Problem with Release Time

1.0 -> 1.2 tookk 14 months -> 1.4 (8 months) -> 1.6 (13 months) -> 1.8 (48 months) -> 1.9 (54 months)

• As you can see, bigger changes we make, the bigger challenges they are, more time required for next release.
• The bigger changes make developer difficult to adopt to these new features.
• Less people use the new release feature, release team will not be able to find problems.

Some (Potential) Projects Ideas

RubyLite

RubyLite is a light version of Ruby. The idea is that moving those listed less used features into Gem, developer install those gems only when they needed.

• One of the things we can do with RubyLite is to lose some language features that we normally don’t use (e.g.):
  • %q delimiters
  • implicit string concatenation
  • alias
  • nested assignment
  • :: sign for method call
• And other features we can get rid of: class variables, global variables, many combination of $ sign, unless/until, protected, proc
• One encoding will make library much smaller, so how about support utf8.
• Losing Built-in classes and modules: Complex, File::Stat, FileTest, Mutex, ObjectSpace, Process::Gid/Status/Sys/Uid, Rational, TreadGroup
• Losing Built-in methods, a lot of methods are vibrations that produces the same result.

Parallel Ruby

Ruby already have the construction to produce parallelism: a, b = b, a

Ideally, Dave suggested that we could perform calculation using this parallel feature in separate threads or processes: a, b = calc1(x), calc2(y). He used some sample code of finding longest word in English, which demonstrated that a few lines code produced Map/Reduce.

Optionally-typed Ruby

Closure-based Ruby

This Is the Ruby with block, and it should be easy to create lambda. Suggestion is to remove {} sign for hash. Maybe we can express methods and classes in blocks.

Conclusion

There is nothing wrong with Ruby, “but that shouldn’t stop us from having fun”. The community should fork Ruby and experiment with it. If the result is positive, they will be put in main Ruby release. The Ruby release itself should not be part of the experiment.

Jeremy分析了不同层面极端的几个方案：

• 将所有的 IE6 访问者踢出你的站点
• 完全遵循标准开发，并且没有任何针对 IE6 的测试
• 只使用 Dean Edwards 的脚本让 IE6 支持额外的 CSS
• 编写针对 IE6 的样式解决大部分问题（比如布局等）
• 让站点在 IE6 以及其他浏览器上看起来一摸一样

并和Cennydd Bowle一起推算出一个数学公式(使用 t 表示总的开发时间、t6 表示花在 IE6 上的时间；所有的访问者数目表示为 a、 a6 则表示正在使用 IE6 的访问者)：

p = 50 [ log ( at6 / ta6 ) + 1 ]

运算出来的p概率可以判断是应该应用 Dean Edwards 的 IE 脚本:

当然在某些极端的情况下，比如公司的政策内部一定要运用IE6，作为内部网络软件开发人员，应当要保证IE6的100％正常运作。在浏览器支持的问题上，Yahoo YUI发布过一篇很好的文章”Graded Browser Support“, 作为好的开发人员，这篇文章应该是必读的。

当然这些都不能解决本质问题，为软需要加大力度让客户门升级自己的IE。在2008年低，我们的AJAX技术不能单单的存活在1997年的浏览器技术上。

To get UK research fund for international student become rather difficult. Unfortunatly, I’m in this hassle right now together with this economic down time.

So finally I’m off there for three days. Hoping to get some answers, ideas and help.

The conference was mainly about giving insite view of computer science research. For those who are looking for a reaseach career, we were taught a few tips. Some conference seminas are absolutly fabulars!

Why comics is important in research?

The seminar I enjoyed most was “The Power of Procrastination” given by Jorge Cham. He earned PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and turned out to be a comic producer. He’s the creator of Piled Higher & Deeper (PHD Comics). The comics is based on some stories/conversation between gradudate students and PhD students. It makes people laugh in the case that some scene are happening in student life. Go to the PhD comics website, check out those archived comics.

Microsoft Research

One of the MS research branch is located in Cambridge, of course they presented and demoed some latest high tech(facial detection). They have more information on their Research website.

Google Research

This was a fun part. Actually, Google doesn’t have a specialised research branch, so, why they presented and sponsored the conference? One of the presenter, a Google engineer manager, said that their engineers do both engineering and research work at the same time. For example, their production server disk format is developed by their engineer to handle large a mount to search requests and caching, even operating system is speciallised designed for super large amount of requests. There is a wide list of unresolved issues to research on. So actually, even in this layoffs season(see yahoo action), it’s pretty amazing Google still have spares to hire more people, of course they have to be top notch.