The Traveling Astronomer Problem

Apropos of something I'm not quite ready to talk about, here is an interesting challenge:

How do you optimize your time at the telescope if you have a set of objects that you'd like to observe?

For instance, if you want to see as many Messier objects as you can …

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Cyclomatic Complexity Analyzer for Ruby

Saikuro : A Cyclomatic Complexity Analyzer.

Function complexity does not seem to be a great problem in the Ruby world, but tracking cyclomatic complexity is one of those things that can help pinpoint troubled modules.

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"The Ruby Programming Language" Gets Thumbs Up

Andrew Binstock says:

Ever-dependable O'Reilly just released Ruby Programming Languageimg, which is without a doubt the definitive Ruby reference. Not only is it co-authored by Yukihiro "Matz" Matusmoto, the inventor of Ruby, but it is superbly well edited, so that every page is full of useful information presented clearly. And …

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Ruby 1.9 Available

Ruby 1.9, which involves a number of significant upgrades, is now available. This is development code, probably not ready for use in upcoming sprints / development cyclese, but I will be downloading it if for no other reason than to experiment with its Fibers implementation.

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IronRuby Previews Form Designer

From SapphireSteel, the makers of IronRuby, comes the first peek at an IronRuby visual design surface.

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BS On Rails

Kurt Schrader wonders if he's the first person to hit a point in a Rails app where he wonders if he's "finally hit the point where the cost of maintaining our code in Ruby is higher than the savings by writing it in Ruby in the first place?"

He says …

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First IronRuby Drop Available

John Lam details the first public availability of IronRuby. Couple reasons why I'm interested in this:

  • It's Ruby
  • It's the CLR
  • It's a second data point for how to code for the DLR

I don't think I'm going to be able to resist the temptation to write a compiler for …

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Ruby's ObjectSpace: A Challenge for the Managed Platforms

The Ruby language contains the built-in module ObjectSpace, which provides programmatic access to the entire world of living objects. For instance, in Ruby you can write:

ObjectSpace::each_object(Class) do |c|
 p c if c < Test::Unit::TestCase
 end

which will iterate over every instance of Class in the …

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Why Ruby's The Mansion of Bliss

Scott Hanselman weighed in on the Ruby buzz, saying that no language is all things to all people at all times.  I agree, but think that there are a couple things about Ruby that don't require us to get into language design philosophies. Let me quickly state that these things …

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IronPython, IronRuby Discussion with Jim Hugunin and Jon Lam

I'm dying because I've just had a long talk with two of Microsoft's heavy hitters on the Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) team and have much to discuss, yet I am in a frenzy preparing for a business trip and cannot yet take the time to do the discussion any kind …

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