About a year ago, I'd talked extensively about how great Ruby is. I've now had a year in which to play around with the language, and it has continued to grow on me. I even started playing around with the latest, hottest thing on the development scene - Ruby on Rails. Okay, it's not the newest thing out there, but it solves a lot of problems very quickly. I've been using Ruby quite heavily over the past few months, trying to write up a complete library for some scientific endeavours, and the use of TextMate has been invaluable. It's a great editor. Unfortunately, it's got a 30 day trial, so I'm stuck without it at the moment. The academic version is only €29 though, so I should have no qualms about buying it. If you were to mug me for some qualms, you'll find that indeed, I have no qualms with spending the money. It's just PayPal has a lot of problems with taking my money. I've just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to accept my payment, and failing miserably. Why is it that I could pay for my Flickr account with PayPal, but it just refuses to accept my payment for TextMate? I'm coming to the realisation that the name PayPal is a complete misnomer - since you can neither Pay, and they are not very Pal like.

In the end, to actually get a license for it - I've had to ask Bhautik to buy the license for me. I suspect the problem lay in the credit card numbers not matching up with the physical location of the IP. I mean, I'm all for security, but you're making it very hard to make impulse purchase on the Interwebs. It's not like anyone would be overseas, or have multiple credit cards, or speak another language while living in a third party country, right?

Update: 6:30 Wednesday night - Just in case anyone asks, don't use the default install of Ruby on Tiger. Observe!

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
.F
Finished in 0.049977 seconds.

  1) Failure:
test_simple_monosaccharide(TC_SugarGc) [tests/tc_SugarGc.rb:31]:
<[0, 1, 0]> expected but was
<[0, 1, 1]>.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [universal-darwin8.0]

This first run of the test fails. It's counting memory references of instances of a particular class (Monosaccharide in this case), starting at 0, going up to 1, and then going back down to 0 when the object goes out of scope again. I also call the garbage collector, since I'm not willing to wait around for my laptop to run out of memory. It looks like the garbage collector isn't working though, as it keeps that memory reference around.

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
..
Finished in 0.04419 seconds.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i686-darwin8.6.1]

The garbage collector works on 1.8.4. Lesson learnt? Avoid the default install of Ruby on Tiger like the plague.

I've decided to take a leaf out of Ben's book, and just give up writing a long explanation of why exactly I haven't been writing stuff for the past two months. You guys get a slightly expanded bullet point list:

• The World Cup - That was a lot of fun. The character of the country certainly changed a lot, and you were never short of things to do on most nights. Yeah, usually that thing you ended up doing was going down to the Uni in the old town and watching it on the big screens there, but everyone was doing it. Also - Italy, I haven't forgiven you yet.
• Visitors - When I wasn't watching the games (or at work), I was hanging around all the various kids who had come to visit me. Thanks for coming Yun, Henry, Mark, Mum & Dad and Fredrik - apart from the whole staying in Ziegelhausen thing (more on that later), I hope you had a good time in Heidelberg. Anyone else planning on coming up here, I'd suggest no more than two days to come and visit - you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to do if you stay around for much longer. Also - Yun, I haven't forgotten about Lesbian Unicorns, it'll be on it's way to you as soon as possible.
• The Warren Workshop in New Hampshire - I kind of got a last minute call to go to a workshop just north of Boston at the start of July. It was generally pretty interesting, and it was also very cool to meet some really smart people working in the (general) area of my PhD, and having some people to bounce ideas around off. Also - Sherry, I did manage to watch Primer, and yes it's a cool, albeit challenging movie.
• Beach time - OK right I know, technically I'm landlocked, but there was sun, sand and water. I'm a bit too stupid to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I took the beach at face value. I also managed to get a slight tan at the beach. Well, it's a tan, or it's been warm enough for circulation to return to my extremities. Also - Bhabhi, it doesn't really compare to even one afternoon of Jervis Bay. Can we go there when I come back?
• Neckarwiesen - There's been a solid stream of BBQs on the river bank for the past two months. The nice thing about CEST is that it's still light at about 9:30, meaning you can sit out on the river till really quite late. It really feels like a proper European summer. Also - Fredo, I don't think the Bulgarian rowers find our casting options to be very flattering.
• Macbook - I've got a new Macbook I'm typing this on (2GHz White). It's an amazing upgrade from my old Powerbook, and after I threw in 2GB of RAM, it's absolutely flying along. Hell, I even think that Eclipse runs semi-decently as an application now. Google Earth, iPhoto, Word, well - pretty much any application runs nicely on this. Also - Traini, it still isn't mooing.
• The New Place - Ziegelhausen is out in the middle of nowhere. Anyone who has been here to visit can stand testament to that. At about the end of May, I began searching for a new apartment. After a few false starts, I eventually settled on an apartment slap bang in the centre of town. I'm still in the process of settling in there, but I don't think the feeling of walking out of the front door, and being amongst everything will ever get old. Just as a point of general interest, the building is about 300 years old. There'll be pictures up at some point of time, probably once I've finished unpacking everything. Also - whoever is planning on staying at my place next, you may want to bring a sleeping bag and air mattress, as you'll be sleeping on the floor.

I've got a request to the software kids behind Adium, MailTags, Skype, Camino and (Update) NeoOffice Aqua. Please release your next versions some time soon. I've been keeping track of the features that are going to make it into the next versions of your software, and it all looks really good.

I realise the Music section isn't quite working well at the moment. There's something wrong with the part of the page which contacts Audioscrobbler to retrieve my journal entries from there. It'll get fixed once I get internet access again at home.