United Arab Emirates Deports HIV- and Tuberculosis -patients

United Arab Emirates deports sick people instead of providing them with health care. People were detained for up to a year without access to medication and HIV-positive migrants were deported.

Must be a really poor country. Only I am not sure if this is economical poverty?

Read all about it: http://business.maktoob.com/20090000376082/UAE_deports_1_500_HIV_sufferers/Article.htm

G20 - The End Of The Freedom of Assembly?

Freedom of Assembly... No, not the computer-assembly.

In Pittsburgh, police have attacked basically anyone in public, at the pretense of people rioting. Tear gas, riot gear, sound cannons, bright lights, intimidating with police violence.

Seems like all over the World the interest of the few richest corporate industrialists are protected at the expense of the thousands of local residents.

Why is it all these G20 or G8 meetings need such high level of security? I mean, isn't all well and swell in the World? Why on earth would anyone want to oppose or change the way these industrialists are running their business! Surely they are working for the best of all of us, for freedom and equality through global corporate matrix! Why would anyone need to demonstrate against them?

And why would the police need to allow such demonstrations? Appalling idea! Trying to use the right to express ones opinion, demonstrate, or hell, just hang and assemble around should not be tolerated!

Here are couple of links:
Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RlVKgIfqsk&feature=related
New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/world/26pittsburgh.html?em
World Socialist Site (!?) http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/g20r-s26.shtml

Ps. Go Steelers!!

Next - the new rubyword for today

I learned a new word in ruby today while reading the brilliant Ruby Quiz, namely quiz #162 - The Turing Machine.

'Next' works with loops like '.each' or '.times', starting the next iteration of the loop. It is useful for conditionally ending the current iteration.

File.open(file).each_line do |line|
  line.gsub!(/#.*/, '') # remove comments
  next if line =~ /^\s*$/ # skip blank lines

  line = line.split(/\s+/)
  @state = line[0] if @state.nil?
  @program[line[0..1]] = line[2..4]
end

Funny, but next hadn't stuck on me before. Maybe this time.

LXDE making noise

It looks like LXDE-desktop is coming up fast.

I first bumped into LXDE a year or two back when it was used in gOS where it made some lasting impressions on me.

Now it looks like there is going to be an Ubuntu flavor with LXDE - Lubuntu. The Eeebuntu -distribution has a LXDE-Eeebuntu in beta 2 at the moment. Aside from those there is U-lite, and naturally you can install LXDE in dozens of other distros aswell.

LXDE includes:
Openbox - Lightweight, standard-compliant, and highly-configurable window manager.
PCManFM - file manager, tabbed, desktop icons
LXPanel - desktop panel, menu, quick launch icons, systray, clock, graphical conf.
LXSession - Standard-compliant X11 session manager
LXAppearance - GTK+ theme switcher for themes, icon themes, and fonts.
LXLauncher - topic oriented desktops (?)
GPicView - lightweight image viewer featuring immediate startup.
Leafpad -text editor, tiny!
LXDE Common - default configuration files.
LXTerminal - VTE-based terminal emulator
XArchiver - file archiver
LXRandR - display conf tool.
LXNM - network connection manager.
LXMusic - music player.
GtkNetCat - netcat gui.

CIA Torture Memo analysis, Part 4

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, analyzes ten particularly disturbing facts to emerge from the four memos, purporting to justify the use of torture by the CIA, which were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in August 2002 and May 2005, and released by the Obama administration last week.

Lisp, lisp, scheme, sicp...

Revenge Of The Nerds, Paul Graham - The pointy haired boss and Java, Lisp and Python.

Why Ruby Is An Acceptable Lisp, Eric Kidd

Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs, Abelson, Sussman, Sussman

How To Design Programs, Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, Krishnamurthi

rvm hoards different rubies for you

After a nigth of troubleshooting 3 different people ruby 1.9.1 problems with gems on debian or ubuntu, looks like theres a project that just might provide some help with that in the future: rvm.

They say that "Easy installation and switching between available Ruby versions and runtimes, without messing up your current Ruby install! rvm also allows you to use multiple versions of ruby in separate terminals concurrently!" - quick, go get a load of this on http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

Costs of hacking the genome falling

Hacking the wetware will happen in the kitchens nearby sooner than we think. The Economist claims that hacking is about to go squishy.

How internet changes culture, part 1

Time spent doing nothing and watching television are among the disappearing activities Matthew Moore lists 50 things that are being killed by the internet in his Telegraph article.

Ruby gems 1.9 apt-gotten

On Ubuntu and Debian -boxes I keep having the same problem over and over again. Rubygems are installed by apt-get in 'non-usual' place, and once you have 'sudo gem install'-ed some gem someplace, it wont load with "require 'gemnamehere'" -- you end up with the fun error

LoadError: no such file to load -- narray

So, once again its been enough time, four months or so that I dont remember how I solved this the last time. I did find some old source where I simply required the gem lib directly ("/var/lib/gems/1.8........") but thats not very smart.

So, I am writing this for myself as a troubleshooter:

1. Assert 'sudo gem install blah'. Not as user.
2. See in irb if gem shows with '$:' command.
3. If in irb, and installing gems, restart it before trying to 'load' or 'require.

This time it was the 1 and 3. Silly me.