There’s been a lot of hype this year about Ruby ‘replacing’ other programing languages and seducing their developers. I think this has masked something far more interesting and much less confrontational: different programing languages are getting much better at working together.

Ruby runs on its own dedicated interpreter but recently there’s been a lot of activity on porting the language to run on VMs predominantly used by other languages, specifically the Java JVM, .Net’s CLR and Perl6’s Parrot. There are also ‘bridges’ that let a non-Ruby application embed a traditional Ruby interpreter. Either method allows developers to mix and match other languages with Ruby.

The main JVM effort (JRuby) is going well:

Sun hires JRuby developers

Ruby running in a Java applet

Ruby on Rails almost running properly within Java

Deploying Ruby on Rails inside Glassfish

And the Ruby Java Bridge lets you use Java classes from within traditionaly executed Ruby apps.

It’s even possible to extend Java classes using Ruby

Microsoft’s .Net developers can join in the Ruby fun too:

Microsoft hires Ruby .Net developers

There are at least two working .Net compilers for Ruby: Ruby.Net and Iron Ruby.

There’s a Ruby bridge for .Net too, called Ruby CLR

Perl’s Parrot VM was the first to talk about re-implementing Ruby and promises great things but sadly has made relatively little progress. Of course, Perl6 itself is taking its time too.

The current Parrotised Ruby is Cardinal. One day Parrot will allow you to build an application from a mix of various languages, including Perl 6 and Ruby, all snuggled up together.

Perl being Perl, there is of course a Ruby bridge for Perl 5.

The BBC have launched two new TV series recently.

Robin Hood - Utter rubbish. Not one redeeming feature, even the political references are heavy-handed and dull. Somehow manages to be less believable than Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. Avoid.

Torchwood - Take Angel, Ultraviolet, maybe bits of Highlander, flavour with Doctor Who, and set in Cardiff. It isn’t great. It somehow isn’t terrible either, despite often looking as if it’s actually trying to be crap. Torchwood is absolutely not a British ‘X Files’, but it might well become a British ‘Angel’.

One episode involves a cyberman that slowly chases people around in circles, trying to grab them with its sparky-hands-of-death. Avoid that one.

This weblog has been very busy in the last three months, but sadly that mainly involves hundreds and hundreds of spam comments stacked up in a moderation queue. Don’t they even bother to check if the comments are being blocked? Grrr. Anyway, as a result, if you did post a comment it’s in the list somewhere, and I’ll tidy things up eventually. I’m going to either add some sort of fancy Bayesian filtering/blacklist plugin thing or just make the comments “member-only”.

The same problem applies to email. I managed to get a backlog of 14,000 emails at my ISP, again mostly spam.

One blog I’d like to match in quantity and quality is the same one I cruelly kicked off my web account last year. It’s since gone from strength to strength so I’m plugging it again.

Samwise Rides Again

It’s the world’s top blog in the Yorkshireman Moves To Hawaii To Program Big Telescopes category.

Now that things are getting settled after all the overtime, the September crunch at work, the house move, and the exploding home server, I’ve been meaning to start posting again with one of those traditional Why I’ve Not Updated My Blog excuses. Later today. Maybe tomorrow. Just after I’ve finished what I’m doing.

Today I read this disturbing account of what can happen at UCLA if you don’t have a student card with you when using a PC. The embedded video didn’t play, but I’m used to that.

Then I saw this horrifying video of the event on the front page of YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs]

The police repeatedly tazer a screaming student because he can’t stand up after being tazered. Cops threaten to tazer other students who ask for their details.

I hope the staff and students at UCLA stand up and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

My favourite* Bible story is now available as a colourful and cheeful animation.

Link: Extreme Bible Stories: Don’t Dis Elisha

(* This is only partly because I’m also bald, or that I quite like the idea of being able to summon up angry bears to solve mild everyday problems.)

I’ve just stumbled upon this excellent list of logical fallacies. Please print out this list and keep it near the TV so you can play “Spot The Person Talking Rubbish”* while watching the news.

I think that all children should be taught about logical fallacies and how to reason properly. I doubt you can get much good from democracy (or even free markets) unless people can tell valid statements from complete nonsense.

Although nowadays it’s easy to point at Bush and Blair and find horrible examples (“You are either with us or against us!”) logical fallacies are used by campaigners on every issue. I’m sorry to say that some ‘sciences’ have rather guilty pasts - the ‘dismal science’ of Economics and safety testing using animals spring to mind.

Link: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies

• A game that really needs a better name and a scoring system

Monument to Vimto Originally uploaded by BinaryApe.

The Icons of England website has used my photo of Manchester’s Vimto statue. I feel like a proper photographer now.

Go there now and vote for Vimto and many other things, including bubble and squeak, Marmite, tea, mushy peas or even the Argos catalogue.

The Mermaid’s Pool
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe.

This little patch of marshy water was the inspiration for a long walk last Sunday. It used to be be larger (you can see the earlier shape of it) and rather significant.

Local folklore says that a mermaid lives in the pool, and if seen at Easter she will grant extended life (or even immortality) to some, and drag others to their deaths under the marshy water. Some story tellers rationalise the mermaid by claiming that the pool is somehow connected to the Atlantic…

It’s almost certain that this tale is a folkmemory of the earlier religious role of the pool. There’s evidence that the pool was a Celtic religious site, and the scene of sacrifice (some articles hint at human sacrifice, and one I can’t find anymore talked of the broken sword ritual) The Celts viewed standing water as a connection between this world and others. They also had a fear of bogland as a fearsome, haunted, wild area. Burial in bogland was a way of sending people to another world and preventing them from returning.

This pool is almost directly beneath the waterfall, and surrounded by the curve of cliffs that mark the boundary between this world (trees, sheep, fields, people) and the otherworld of the high moor above (wind, bog, stones, spirits). It’s a place to mediate between both worlds.

When the folktale talks of a mermaid who grants life or takes life at Easter, the start of the old year, it doesn’t take much imagination to realise what probably went on in the shallow water of that pool.

The mermaid lives on, even beyond the occasional visits of folklorist, neo Pagans and Forteans to the pool. Well and spring ceremonies still continue in many town and villages in the Pennines, often closely associated with the Virgin Mary, Christianity’s new name for the Mermaid.

I should add that the modern day inhabitants of Hayfield are exceptionally nice and quite unlikely to perform human sacrifices in bogs.

• Mermaid Stories
  
• Haunted North Midlands
  

I can remember when kittens just had string and wildlife to play with.

(This doesn’t play for Linux users yet - I hadn’t realised)