World: r3wp

I can just imagine taking this thing to the hospital outpatients 
to do my clinics :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GhNXHCQGsM

An open source camera based object tracking system.

Hmm, Czech Republic. However - I wonder how does it differ to OpenCV 
library, which has quite extensive functionality?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-yR5ozxw4E

There's even a book about it, it seems there is also C, C++, Python 
binding, etc.

New toys to play with - Tabula, new FPGA king?


http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/tabula-scores-108-million-to-bring-cheap-programmable-chips-to/

So in the near future, we can buy microwave ovens, fridges, tv's 
etc. that isn't completely ready for market, but need upgrade afterwards, 
like with games today. That'll be fun! :-)

Many TVs today are the same. Many TV or DVD player "repairs" are 
really software upgrades.

Yes, and this tendency seem to spread to all electronic equipment.

If just we had resource economy ... ;)

if we had resource economy, we probably would have better things 
to do than stare at TVs. :-)

maby not... the stuff on TV would be much better  ;-D

and everyone would have a 60 inch OLED screen  :-D

which would still dissipate a lot of heat, so ppl might not want 
it just because it's bigger

I dont' mind the heat... it'll heat the house in one of the 9 months 
I need to   ;-)


bah, they can always get a smaller OLED screen... its still prohibitively 
expensive.
http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-monitors/cat-oledmonitors/

Looks like Amazon EC2 have had an outage lasting 30 hours + :(

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20110422/tc_nf/78265

Wow. Recent ACM and IEEE issues have had a number of articles on 
just how fast we've moved to the cloud, and that it will only accelerate. 
They also discuss technical issues that need to be addressed, but 
I don't think any of them have said "the big cloud providers could 
go down for 30 hours."

A few weeks ago I couldn't upload to S3 for a number of days. I was 
gearing up to sort out some unknown new-version incompatibility when 
it just started working again

Even though my instances and EBS volumes were in the affected zone, 
I'm not aware of any down time for  me

Kaj, what were you using to try and upload?

Amazon are blaming some network issue .. EC2 didn't actually go down, 
but the EBS did.  There was some type of cascading failure possibly 
as some type of replication went out of control and used up all available 
storage.

Anyway the post mortem will be interesting .. and hopefully Amazon 
will have a more durable product as a result.

I was using S3Sync, which is written in Ruby and more or less abandoned, 
so I was suspecting an incompatible protocol change, but I couldn't 
find anything

Last year at the startup weekend in Singapore I was showing Rebol 
to a couple of Amazon guys. They were amazed... I was proposing I 
would create a Rebol commandline tool set for them if they could 
get some donation, but nothing really happened... yet :)

I can imagine very well that complexity issues were also noticably 
delaying this latest downtime resolution...

Yes, I have been thinking the same. Amazon is very good at keeping 
their web services simple, but over time, complexity adds up anyway

By the way, S3Sync is abandoned because the guy was fed up with the 
Ruby language implementation. He wants to do a new version in Java, 
which is useless to me

:) useless guy..

Ruby is one of the cleaner languages out there, so that's telling

maybe it's a money issue?

Kaj, the Ruby language itself is pretty clean. The *implementations* 
of the language mostly suck, and there are some problems with the 
underlying semantics that made some of the implementation problems 
inevitable. The language was designed to look pretty. However, they 
are working on making the implementation better - that's why there 
are so many implementations - and there have been some efforts to 
clean up the semantics too. It's slow going though, and they are 
slowed down in their efforts by having most of the implementations 
not run on Windows very well or at all, which cuts down on the developer 
pool drastically. It is not uncommon to have projects written in 
Ruby be converted to other languages when they get useful. Java is 
a pretty common target for these conversions - this is one of the 
reasons JRuby is relatively popular.

I have friends who program in Ruby for a living, and every one of 
them has independently asked that I redo the language from scratch, 
similar to Red or REBOL.

BrianH: ur friends asked u to redo what language from scratch?

(i was using ruby for living too, just this current project let's 
me use rebol -- so far..)

Ruby. I've been asked at least 6 times, by people who didn't know 
I've been asked before, but knew about my work on REBOL. One friend 
even made sure I learned Ruby just so I could tell him about the 
semantic issues of it, and possible workarounds.

btw, im seeing windows guys switching to linux or mac because of 
ruby and it's higer and higer in demand, so the developer pool is 
expanding pretty well (which i can tell u as a core member of the 
singapore ruby brigade ;)

That happens a lot. What happens more is developers not being able 
to switch away from Windows for other reasons, and so using a different 
language instead. That is why Ruby gets used more for server/web 
stuff than for client-side stuff.

client-side as in native gui?

Yes. Most business work is still native GUI nowadays, and most programming 
is still business work.

Web programming is still a very small percentage of programming work 
(5% as of the end of last year).

Interesting. Where did you get those stats?

It was 4 months or so ago when I read them, so I don't have the link. 
I was looking at job stats at the time to see what to learn next. 
I wouldn't be surprised if the trend was to more web programming 
in the future, because a lot of developers are looking for excuses 
to use Linux on the servers, and ways to support the OSX laptops 
they do their audio stuff on, while the businesses they support are 
all running Windows on the client. I've seen a lot of consultants 
try to push web-based stuff because they hate Windows, but it doesn't 
work very well a lot of the time. Still, developer pressure is cumulative, 
so eventual change seems likely.

Was it a trustworthy source?

Yes, one of the analysis companies, and it wasn't pushing an agends 
(not hired by MS).

Most of the Ruby programmers I know have Mac laptops because they 
make electronic music on the side, and picked Ruby because of its 
OSX support. The rest run Linux on the desktop. Some do both.

If it's true, it would hardly be a reason for MS to abandon their 
desktop toolkits and push HTML5

MS is pushing HTML5 in order to convince developers to not abandon 
IE. Programmers who have to do business work have to run their stuff 
on web browsers with no HTML5 support. Despite what MS says in the 
HTML5 presentations, they aren't abandoning desktop development tools 
or Silverlight any time soon. The HTML5 guys are in a different, 
competing department, so they have no say over whether the desktop 
development tools go away. Only the developers who are outside of 
MS and use their tools have any say.

For that matter, MS's Windows 8 plans are going to depend a great 
deal on improvements to their desktop/tablet/phone development tools, 
since it will have to support 3 platforms: x86, x64 and ARM. The 
.NET tools are critical to that, the same way that LLVM is critical 
to Apple.

Kaj, why not use Rebol for uploading files to S3 ?

Also, when you interact with the AWS api, you specify which API ( 
date ) you are using.