In Traction

I meant to blog about this for some time now

First some background information: second year computer science students at our university are supposed to do a big project to enhance their programming skills and ability to work in teams. The students can suggest a project themselves, or choose a predefined one from a list provided by the teaching staff.

Around January, I submitted a proposal to write a YAML parser for .NET. There were a couple of YAML parsers available, but none for .NET. A secondary goal was to release the final product under an open source license.

Jonathan Slenders and Christophe Lambrechts chose to do the project. Under the guidance of Tom Van Laerhoven, they produced a working YAML parser, and released it under the LGPL. It was mentioned on the YAML homepage in June. Since then they have received quite some mails from people interested in using their library.

The project will soon be placed on SourceForge. Until then, more information (including a description of the parser’s algorithm and documentation) can be found at http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~christophe/YAML/.

The code is available through CVS.

Edit: the project is now available on Sourceforge.

For some time now, I have had a weird bug concerning an Ajax updater script in a Rails application. The updater worked with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer (IE).

Yesterday I finally figured out IE can only update div or span elements, when I came across this message on the Rails list. I was trying to update a table instead.

After wrapping the table in a div, and updating that div, everything worked.

Would be nice if this would have been documented in Prototype or the script.aculo.us scripts though.

Apparantly, the redesign of the Ruby website will be put online in a few days.

The new design can be viewed at http://new.ruby-lang.org/. I sniffed around for a bit and found some interesting links:

• Ruby Inside
• Planet Ruby
• O’Reilly Ruby
• Ruby Corner
• RubyCocoa Resources
• Gruff

More Ruby-related links can be found on my del.icio.us page.

Today Lode will give the first of a series of internal talks at our group. He will talk about multimodal interaction in virtual environments.

I’m looking forward to it, as these talks should be interesting to start some discussion.

My own talk will introduce semantic web technologies, and is due on September 8.

A few days ago, I saved why the lucky stiff’s Poignant Guide to Ruby as separate PDFs per chapter, and printed it out.

Whether you’re looking for a different programming language manual, or just want to read a motivating, well-written introduction to Ruby, the poignant guide is for you. It is pretty unique in its kind, although The Little Schemer and Casting SPELs in Lisp also sport a similar spirit of playfullness.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean the book only covers the basics. Chapter 6 for example, deals with juicy metaprogramming.

If you are interested in the PDFs, just let me know.

I decided to stop running my blog on Typo SVN and installed Typo 4.0.3, the current stable version.

Everything seems to work fine, except for the fact that it is still running in development mode. I think I’m going to send a mail to the Site5 staff. Fortunately they are very helpful, and quick to respond.

There are still some blog posts in the queue, as always… I hope to finally push some updates through in the next few days.