December « 2008 « Musings

Ruby 1.9.1 RC Released

In his usual understated way, Yuhi Sonoda announced the first Ruby 1.9.1 release candidate earlier today on the ruby-talk mailing list.

Hi, folks

Ruby 1.9.1 has been just released.

This is a release candidate of Ruby 1.9.1, which will be the first stable version of Ruby 1.9 series. Try it early and have a experience of modern, faster, with clearer syntax, multilingualized and much improved Ruby world.

We have fixed 72 bugs and implemented some features:

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-19/issues?query_id=9

If you encounter a bug or a problem, please let us know it via the official issue tracking system (http://redmine.ruby-lang.org ).

I am a fan of Ruby and look forward to every release. My first introduction to Ruby was way back in early days of 1997 just after Ruby 1.0 was released by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz) whose blog, or as the Japanese prefer to term it web diary is here. Since then I have used it from time to time for various small scripts in the same why that I also use Perl. I recommend it to people when asked what programming language they should learn first. My only reservations are that traditionally Ruby tends to be somewhat slow compared to other popular scripting langauges and that there now any number of Ruby implementations which leads to some portability issues. Performance has improved with every release and there is no reason nowadays not to use Ruby in production enviroments.

This release is significant in that it is the first release candidate of Ruby 1.9.1 which is targeted to be the first stable production-grade version of the Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv) series. Ruby 1.9 is intended to be a major evolation of the Ruby language akin to Python 3.0 or Perl 6. Old crud and langauge features that were, in hindsight, poorly designed have been removed. A number of new language features are implemented.&nbsp If you want more information about the changes in Ruby 1.9, a good reference to start with is Mauricio Fernandez’s Changes in Ruby 1.9. With this release, the language features are frozen except for multiligual support is some of the standard libraries which come with Ruby. I have played with beta releases of Ruby 1.9 for some time now and am pleased with the language changes and especially the improved threading model.

As I said previously, there is not one single implementation of the Ruby language.&nbsp The implementation released today is regarded as the official Ruby language implementation in

Korn Shell 93 Auditing and Accounting

Korn Shell 93 is the only UNIX or GNU/Linux shell that I am aware of that, with proper setup, supports a modicum of per-user accounting and auditing. This post attempts to explain these facilities and show you how to access and manipulate the resulting accounting and auditing records.

PowerShell CTP3

There was an early Christmas present from the Windows PowerShell (AKA PoSH) Team. The Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) of Windows PowerShell v2.0 was released on December 23rd just in time for Christmas. The announcement is here. As expected CTP3 builds on the new technology provided in CTP2 which was released in May 2008. You can download CTP3 from the Microsoft Download Center.

Hemant Mahawar, Program Manager for PowerShell, summarized the CTP3 release as follows: This release brings, among other things, performance improvements … things will be faster/more efficient than before. PowerShell remoting now allows implicit remoting where command execution appears to be local even though they are remote. We have added over 60 new cmdlets in this release … cmdlets for adding/removing/renaming computers, cmdlets for event logs, cmdlets for WS-Man functionality and even a WS-Man provider. The “graphical” host, Windows PowerShell ISE, now supports a graphical debugger, context sensitive F1 help and a programmable interface for you to party on.

I tested CTP3 on Vista Ultimate SP1. The only issue I encountered when installing CTP3 was that fact that CTP3 did not honor the execution policy set by me in CTP2 contary to what was stated in the Release Notes. Moreover, it was impossible to set the execution policy to unrestricted using Set-Executionpolicy.

After digging around in the registry hives, the problem became apparant. The PowerShell execution policy is set correctly in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell\executionPolicy] but not in [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell\executionPolicy]. I found this registry entry had to manually changed from allsigned to unrestricted.

One major enhancement in this release relates to remoting and background jobs. Both require that you install Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0 CTP3. Currently WinRM 2.0 CTP3 is supported only on Windows Vista SP1 and on Windows Server 2008. For some reason that I do not yet understand background jobs, even the jobs only run on the local computer, rely on the remoting features of PowerShell.

The othere major enhancement relates to what was known as Script CmdLets in CTP2. They have been renamed to advanced functions in CTP3. Advanced functions are functions that have the same capabilities and behaviors as cmdlets but are written using the PowerShell scripting language instead of a compiled language such as C#.

There are two types of advanced functions, i.e. named functions and unnamed functions.&nbsp Both types use the CmdletBinding attribute to identify themselves as advanced functions that act similar to compiled cmdlets. Both types can also be used within a script file. The difference

Listen to My Posts

You can now listen my posts being read by either a male or female using an automatic text to speech translater developed by Vozme which uses the Festival Speech Synthesis System developed by the The Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Festival is multi-lingual though the British and American dialects of English are the most advanced. Tools and documentation for building new voices are available from the Carnegie Mellon University FestVox project.

I have added two white buttoms to the bottom of posts, one marked Male and one marked Female. Just select whichever voice you want to hear my post in. You can also save the post as a MP3 recording.

Try the service out and let me know if you run into any problems.

UPDATE 07/01/2009 I implemented this when I was using Blogspot. Now that I am using WordPress on my own website, I have not yet decided whether to do the same here.

Fairytale of New York

Well Christmas is fast approaching so I decided to experiment with adding audio and video to my blog. If you are from the United Kingdom, Ireland, or much of western Europe you will be no doubt familar with a folk-rock group called The Pogues and their Christmas song called Fairytale of New York which was first released in 1987 as part of the album If I Should Fall from Grace with God. This song is a perennial favorite for many people at this time of the year. It is a duet between Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan. Kirsty MacColl died in Cozumel Mexico in 2000 protecting one of her sons during a dive from a speeding powerboat which entered a resticted dive site. Incidentially, Matt Dillon is the actor who played the New York policeman in the video which was released with the song.

YouTube is simply amazing. I found over 20 different videos for Fairytale of New York. Here is the original video, as they say, for your listening and viewing pleasure.

Here is the original video with subtitles if you want to read the lyrics.

I expect that Google is quietly working away on automating voice to subtitles. Just like you can now view this post in over 30 different langauges, it would be nice if you could view subtitles for songs and videos in those same languages.

Finally, if you want see Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl perform the song live together on stage.

Enjoy! And a Merry Christmas to all.

Musings

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Archives

Ruby 1.9.1 RC Released

Korn Shell 93 Auditing and Accounting

PowerShell CTP3

Listen to My Posts

Fairytale of New York

Musings

Translate

Archives

Ruby 1.9.1 RC Released

Korn Shell 93 Auditing and Accounting

PowerShell CTP3

Listen to My Posts

Fairytale of New York

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