I’ve became recently interested in new types of data visualizations. Flight404 created some nice examples with music. Michael Ogawa created a program to view the history of software project : each modification of files, documentation, modules and such is animated, though time. He call that type of visualization “Organic information visualization”.
It’s pure eye candy.
code_swarm - [...]

A few things about ruby

If you use emacs, live on the edge with the emacs-rails SVN trunk, that plays better with RoR 2.0+
The faker gem is handy if you have to create dummy data/pages
If you have trouble with the error unexpected tINTEGER after creating a new model, you may have used a ‘type’ column or [...]

If you’re using the 1.2 beta of CakePHP framework and played a bit with Ajax, you may have encountered that problem. For the impatient folks, one way to fix it is to set the security settings to medium (you may put that in your config/core.php) :

// Ask CakePHP to be less picky about security
// notably [...]

André Michelle did an incredible work in creating this neat simulation of Roland TR909. He even made the source available.

Alexandre Vassalotti made some handy emacs-snapshot package with XFT support included for nice anti-aliased fonts. It can’t be easier to install.
Instructions there : pretty-emacs @ peadrop

I just found Spreedsheet::WriteExcel on CPAN. I’ve created the following program to convert CSV files to xsl. Call it with CSV files as arguments and use this options :

–output filename.xsl
–sheet “Sheetname A for file A”
–separator ‘;’

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;
use Getopt::Long;
my %options=(output=>’stats.xls’,sep=>’,');
GetOptions(\\%options,qw/output=s sheet=s@ sep=s/)
or die “$!”;
my $workbook =
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new($options{output});
my $n=0;
for my [...]

I’m loading iso-8859-1 and utf-8 files in the same emacs session, and until now I had to use universal-coding-system-argument (C-x C-m c). Very annoying if you’re loading a lot of files. Emacs got a handy way to force coding system according to filename. If you’re into RoR like me but still have to load iso-8859-1 [...]

A yummy way to learn ruby.

Happy birthday CPAN !