Miscellaneous Ruby Utility Modules

Grok Headline matches for Miscellaneous Ruby Utility Modules

ZenTest - Ruby Unit Testing Utility

ZenTest - Ruby Unit Testing Utility 03/08/2004 11:27 PM
ZenTest 2.1.2 Released

Ruby/Tk Primer: Creating a cron GUI
Interface with Ruby/Tk

Ruby/Tk Primer: Creating a cron GUI
Interface with Ruby/Tk 07/14/2004 01:49 PM
Christopher Roach: "This article is the first in a two-part series that teaches you how to use Ruby and Tk on your Mac OS X system. During the course of this tutorial, I hope to convince you of the advantages of using Ruby and the Tk toolkit by creating a program that will act as a GUI-based front end to the cron daemon."

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous 03/20/2003 07:45 PM
Developing Movable Type Plugins Timothy Appnel published a fantastic guide to developing plugins for Movable Type. He discusses adding...

Miscellaneous Mac Tidbits

Miscellaneous Mac Tidbits 12/22/2004 01:13 AM

When I use my Powerbook in dark spaces like conference sessions, I find that even the dimmest backlight setting is too bright. By Tom Yager, InfoWorld

Miscellaneous Thoughts

Miscellaneous Thoughts 03/16/2003 10:59 AM

Miscellaneous Thoughts

Highly Recommended: Brueggers Honey Grain Bagel w/ Honey Walnut Cream Cheese.  And its a beautiful day in Boston at least.  Go forth and do not blog !

Miscellaneous Oddments

Miscellaneous Oddments 10/28/2003 11:08 PM

Miscellaneous Oddments

Sorry for being so quiet.  I've been re-architecting / re-implementing our meta tag indexer and suffering through the hell that is metatags.  We try and be flexible but man, oh freaking man.  When I look at the cruft that is metatags I just want to wince, moan, scream, pound my big right toe with a mallet and then scream some more.  Anyway </RANT>.  And don't even get me started on this annoying new thing where rssurls will sometimes have a ? after them and sometimes not.  Hopefully more later.

Via Nelson: Very Useful.

Hey!  Its Me!  ; Thanks Chris!

Some Miscellaneous PHP Stuff

Some Miscellaneous PHP Stuff 09/30/2002 01:19 AM
Some Miscellaneous PHP Stuff Some interesting PHP links I found: ActiveState's PHP Cookbook (not a lot there but a nice class for writing Apache HtAccess files and a really good Selection Box Class) An interesting SourceForge Project, PHPAGA A cool article on PHP Variable Variables (credit for this is 100% to Apokalyptik, not me) OSCommerce which I've blogged before but remains very, very cool And, on a side note, a good friend and Java goddess (or one who knows that "Java is the one true way") has been corrupted to the goodness that is PHP. Here's her OSCommerce shop. I was the one who turned her on to PHP so I will take the credit on this one. What really impressed her was the speed with which PHP apps can be built, the cheap hosting and the quantity of great application building blocks. I say application building blocks, not components, because things like OSCommerce or phpBB are really that.

Miscellaneous Microsoft Web Links

Miscellaneous Microsoft Web Links 07/29/2004 08:00 AM

2004 Miscellaneous Gift Ideas

2004 Miscellaneous Gift Ideas 12/19/2004 02:50 PM

SQL Server Miscellaneous Microsoft Web
Links

SQL Server Miscellaneous Microsoft Web
Links 07/02/2004 02:46 PM

Free drive space by deleting
miscellaneous excess files

Free drive space by deleting
miscellaneous excess files 10/30/2003 11:31 AM
I discovered that my Jaguar partition was slowly getting filled up by accumulated cruft that was not being dealt with by the periodic maintenance scripts (see the man periodic manual page for more info). For example, if you d...

Dark Horse Comics Classic Star
Wars Miscellaneous Cover Gallery

Dark Horse Comics Classic Star
Wars Miscellaneous Cover Gallery 12/02/2003 12:28 AM
Nostalgia week continues in our Comic Book section this week, as we add the Classic Star Wars Miscellaneous series by Dark Horse Comics. Classic Star Wars: Devilworlds was a 2-issue series that reprinted the hard-to-find stories originally published in the Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly title. Also debuting today is The Vandelhelm Mission, which reprinted a Marvel tale from creators Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson.

Miscellaneous Updates/Corrections,
Several of Which Aren’t
Substantial Enough to Constitute a Full
Article by Themselves, but Which Were
Assembled Together Mainly as an Excuse
to Use This Preposterously Long Title

Miscellaneous Updates/Corrections,
Several of Which Aren’t
Substantial Enough to Constitute a Full
Article by Themselves, but Which Were
Assembled Together Mainly as an Excuse
to Use This Preposterously Long Title 02/01/2005 09:03 PM

Follow-ups related to Software Update advice, the cost-per-megabyte of Apple hardware, and Apple’s other new “dashboard”.

Dark Horse Comics Miscellaneous Comics
Cover Gallery

Dark Horse Comics Miscellaneous Comics
Cover Gallery 12/20/2003 12:15 PM
Before I wrap up our series of Dark Horse Comics updates, let's take a look at the Miscellaneous Comics that have been published over the years in anthology titles, reprint giveaways, and one-shots.

SAS Modules I 0.0.12

SAS Modules I 0.0.12 11/18/2003 10:21 AM
Modules for the Site@School content management system.

SAS Modules I 0.1.0

SAS Modules I 0.1.0 12/03/2003 07:34 AM
Modules for the Site@School content management system.

XML 4 Merge Modules

XML 4 Merge Modules 09/19/2004 05:52 PM

from components to modules

from components to modules 01/11/2004 07:52 AM

Right now I'm refactoring/rebuilding the user interface of a new release coming out soon (oh right... Note to self: talk about that) and I'm facing the fight against "sticky" APIs. Or, in more technical terms, their coupling.

Ideally, a certain component set that is self-contained (say, and HTML component) will be isolated from other components at the same level. This makes it both simpler, easier to maintain and, contrary to what one might think, often faster. While I was at Drexel, at the Software Engineering Research Group, I did work on source code analysis, studying things like automatic clustering (paper) of software systems, that is, creating software that was able to infer the modules present on a source code base using API cross-references as a basis. Since then I've always been aware (more than I was before that, that is) of the subtle pull created by API references.

The holy grail in this sense is, for me, to create applications that are built of fully interchangeable pieces, that connect dynamically at runtime, thus avoiding compile-time dependencies. In theory, we have many ways of achieving this decoupling between components or component sets; in practice there are some barriers that make it hard to get it right the first time. Or the second. Or...

First, the most common ways of achieving component decoupling are:

1. Through data: usually this means a configuration file, but it could be a database or whatever else is editable post-compilation. This is one of the reasons why XML is so important, btw.
2. Through dynamic binding: that is, references "by name" of classes or methods. This is useful mostly with OO languages, as you'll generally end up dynamically allocating a superclass and then using an interface (or superclass) to access the underlying object without losing generality (and thus without increasing coupling).

Achieving decoupling in non-UI components is not too difficult (the data model has to flexible enough though, see below). But UIs are almost by definition something that pulls together all the components of a program so they can be used or managed. The UI references (almost) everything else by necessity, directly or indirectly, and visual components affect each other (say, a list on the left that changes what you see on the right).

In my experience, MVC is an absolute necessity to achieve at least a minimal level of decoupling. Going further is possible by using a combination of data (ie., config files) to connect dynamically loaded visual components removes the coupling created at the UI level, but that is difficult to achieve, because it complicates the initial development process (with dynamically loaded components bugs become more difficult to track, the build process is more complex, etc.) and development tools in general deal with code-units (e.g., classes, or source files) rather than with modules. They go from fine-grained view of a system (say, a class or even a method) to a project, with little in between. We are left with separating files in directories to make a project manageable, which is kind of crazy when you think how far we've come in other areas, particularly in recent years.

The process then becomes iterative, one of achieving higher degrees of decoupling on each release. One thing I've found: that the underlying data model of the application has to be flexible enough, be completely isolated (as a module) and relatively abstract, not just to evolve itself but also to allow the developer to change everything that's "on top" of it and improve the structure of the application without affecting users, etc.

Yes, this is relatively "common knowledge", but I'm a bit frustrated at the moment because I know how things "should be" structured in the code I'm working on but I also know that time is limited, so I make some improvements and move on, leaving the rest for the next release.

Final thought: Until major development tools fully incorporate the concept of modules into their operation (and I mean going beyond the lame use of, for example, things like Java packages in today's Java tools), until they treat a piece of user interface as more than a source file (so far, all of the UI designers I've seen maintain a pretty strict correspondence between a UI design "form" and a single file/class/whatever that references everything else), it will be difficult to get things right on the first try.

E-Xoops Modules

E-Xoops Modules 01/02/2004 07:17 AM
Welcome

Tivo VLC modules

Tivo VLC modules 03/26/2005 04:46 PM
Tivo VLC modules first release

MORE Blog modules!

MORE Blog modules! 07/07/2004 12:55 PM

Imagine my shock and delight as I trolled through Roland Tanglao's page yesterday and discovered Flickr's 'Zeitgeist!

It's YA blog gutter display module - picking up where Laszlo's Photoblox leaves off. Now instead of having to build XML files of your slide show/photo album - it takes the images directly from your Flickr collection - PERFECT!

Another win for integration! Aren't built-in constructs fun - once you KNOW they're there?

Then I found a post by Stewert Butterfield on it. This all happened while I was down and off-line (fighting malware), so my apologies to Stewert and the rest of the Flickr team.

Great job guys and gals!

Now my Flikr photos get sent to this coolio checkerboard, puzzle display (even if it's done in Flash - it's still cooolio - the Flickr people are Flash masters.....)

My only request is for a larger and even largest size. I can get over 50%-60% more display space in my gutter! I hate wasting space.

Here's Stewert's post.....

Unrealircd modules

Unrealircd modules 01/25/2004 04:13 PM
updated modules

Childsplay 0.71 (Game modules)

Childsplay 0.71 (Game modules) 06/29/2004 12:23 PM
A suite of educational games for young children.

MOM FAQ: NetIQ AppManager Modules

MOM FAQ: NetIQ AppManager Modules 04/11/2004 05:02 PM

Jon's Python modules

Jon's Python modules 04/11/2004 12:04 PM
jonpy 0.06 released

Gutter modules redux

Gutter modules redux 07/22/2004 01:30 PM

Julian Bond has submitted a great idea to the LazyWeb - I guess assuming that one Ben Hammersely will jump through the proverbial hoop and hack it right up - with some of those sexy shell scripts he and Danny O'Brien love to talk about.

Here's Julian's idea......

Imagine a block in the margin of Joi Ito's weblog.

Last update: 9:23am.
Location: Geneva Airport.
Listening: Monkey Radio.
Last seen in IRC: Channel #joiito 1m43s ago.
Phone: On a call.
Last Meeting: Davros.
Next meeting: Supernova.
Mood:Inspired

That sounds like to me - a lot of what MeNowDocument could handle, with new kinds of micro-content inside of it, with new kinds of collaboration inspired by it.

It also reminds me of a contest we tried to do with CMP back in '95-'96 "Where's Barlow?".

All in all - I'd say blog gutter stuff is coming into it's own. Credit Jason DeFillippo with much of this. His Blogrolling.com (now owned by Tucows) was the first service I ever saw which utilized this idea of blog gutter 'stuff'.

I was so inspired - I came up with a wh ole strategy for Jason.

So now we have Tribe Cast, Ping.net, Blogshares, Technorati, Laszlo's BlogBox and various forms of RSS feeds.

Isn't life getting interesting?

Oh yah - and Google AdSense.

Childsplay 0.70 (Game modules)

Childsplay 0.70 (Game modules) 06/08/2004 05:23 PM
A suite of educational games for young children.

Payroll Perl Modules 0.7

Payroll Perl Modules 0.7 07/30/2004 07:21 PM
A Perl API for calculating payroll taxes.

Rukus Industries CMS modules

Rukus Industries CMS modules 06/16/2004 10:10 AM
Welcome to the project site!

Installed Perl Modules in RSS

Installed Perl Modules in RSS 07/09/2004 08:32 AM
Another interesting use for RSS for your delectation and pleasure. This one is for Perl coders, and is proving deeply useful. Installed Perl Modules in RSS. Automatically listing which modules you have installed yourself, and linking to their documentation. Very...

Payroll Perl Modules

Payroll Perl Modules 01/19/2004 04:16 PM
Payroll 0.6 released

Linux: the GPL and Binary Modules

Linux: the GPL and Binary Modules 12/08/2003 04:38 AM

AVRbased Robotic Modules

AVRbased Robotic Modules 04/12/2004 01:00 PM
Release of AVR ISP

Kernel Modules that Lie About Their
Licenses

Kernel Modules that Lie About Their
Licenses 04/27/2004 11:54 AM

Payroll Perl Modules 0.8

Payroll Perl Modules 0.8 08/12/2004 10:17 PM
A Perl API for calculating payroll taxes.

Modules drop in for v1.2 Bluetooth

Modules drop in for v1.2 Bluetooth 06/17/2004 05:09 AM
Electronics Talk Jun 17 2004 9:52AM GMT

InterBase 6 Merge Modules

InterBase 6 Merge Modules 09/11/2004 02:15 PM

Ruby DBI

Ruby DBI 04/22/2004 04:07 PM
Ruby/DBI moved to RubyForge.org

Ruby 1.8.2

Ruby 1.8.2 01/04/2005 03:22 PM
An object-oriented language for quick and easy programming
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Miscellaneous Ruby Utility Modules

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