Via slashdot I read this essay by Jonathan Lethem. It is a stunning, jaw dropping piece of work. I don't know what to say to add to it.

I do Ruby Rails development as part of my day job, and one of the nice parts of Rails is the ActiveRecord Object-Relational Mapping framework. Today I've been playing with QtRuby using a Qt::AbstractTableModel based on ActiveRecord, and it's really simple to implement and works really well.

The Qyoto project has made some good progress over the past few weeks. We've now switched to the .NET 2.0 gmcs mono compiler, with support for generic types amongst other neat features. Q_PROPERTYs are mapped onto C# propertys, which makes the code look a lot nicer. Arno Rehn has implemented a C# version of the Qt Designer uic tool called 'uics', and the code it generates uses the new properties. And another important change has been switching to cmake, and so we have a nearly sane build system.

The highlight of our Foton company Christmas party was playing with a Wii for the first time. We got one rigged up via a projector onto the wall, so there was a nice large image, and then put the sound through a little stereo so it had a bit of punch. The game we tried first was Wii tennis, and it was amazing to watch people moving around and using the controllers just like bats in a physical real world game.

On the #kde IRC channel tonight there was some discussion about how bad english spelling rules were. I found out via google that there is a 'Simplified Spelling Society'. From the site, here is a description of how English spelling was invented:

The recent Novell/Microsoft agreement purports to give what they call 'Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developers' the rights to use unspecified Microsoft patents. The terms are given in this Community Commitments - Microsoft & Novell Interoperability Collaboration. They define a 'hobbyist' as this:

I used to use my trusty original Macintosh in the 80s to learn new programming languages. Every year or two I'd get some a Mac version of something like Lightship Scheme, Allegro Object Logo or AlphaPop Pop-11 and a few books about them, and then work my way through learning stuff. One of my favourites was a nice GUI version of Ralph Griswold's Icon programming language. I was sad to read on LtU that he has recently died.

I was interested to read this article on how Sun have set up a pavilion in Second Life, and are using it for virtual meetings:

Tuesday, Sun became the first Fortune 500 company to hold an 'in-world' press conference to show off its new pavilion in Second Life, the popular 3D online world. Sun said it plans to invest in the Sun Pavilion as a place for developers to try out code, share ideas and receive training.

This week I've been converting the QtDBus examples from Qt 4.2 to Ruby, and getting the various Qt::DBus* classes working. Now QDBus support is pretty much complete and it will be fun hacking up some interesting apps like bridges to web services like I tried with DCOP. I'll have to get kde4 kdelibs and whatever else builds so I've got some sample apps with DBus support to experiment with.

I just read Pat Eyler's blog Reading Ola Bini writing about some interesting discussions on Ruby metaprogramming and how it compared with Lisp macros for writing Domain Specific Languages. In one of the references Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP, amongst other things people discuss how to implement prolog as a DSL in Ruby or Lisp. A long time ago some of my 'hobby programming' projects were writing prolog interpreters in various languages; I started off with a Pascal one and added things to it, translated it into Modula-2, and I did a Object Oriented one in Objective-C. I've started translating the Objective-C one into Ruby, and it's quite fun seeing how the code compares in the two languages.