John Lam on Software

Moving on is hard work!

I barely have enough time to sleep these days as the clock ticks down on our time here in Canada. We’re living in a state of perpetual cleanliness while we wait for our house to sell. I’m telling you – this is no way to live! There are an insane number of details involved with the move – from figuring out how to get our dog there (there’s a travel blackout for dogs on Air Canada over the holidays!) to the tax implications of the move itself. Not to mention doing all of those little things like opening a bank account, getting a social security number and a credit card and figuring out how to forward our mail to another country.

At least the core details: where we’re going to initially live, how our stuff will get there, and who’s paying for all that stuff is taken care of by Microsoft. I’ve got a whole new level of respect for how difficult it must have been for my parents to move themselves (and me) to Canada all those years ago.

Hopefully someday soon I’ll be able to get back to work on RubyCLR.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a lecture series on my 100 mile daily commute to work. It’s called the Long Now and there are many invited lectures on topics that require a long-term outlook (and by long-term, we’re talking centuries). It’s somewhat dark at times – theytackle difficult topics like depopulation and the environment, but there’s more than a glimmer of hope in all of it. Highly recommended, and a welcome break from just thinking about technology all the time.

Unicode and Ruby

I was quite depressed listening to Tim Bray talk about Unicode and Ruby at RubyConf. While Tim did a wonderful job at explaining the problems, he didn’t really provide much in the way of a solution. Which is why I was quite happy when I read Julian Tarkhanov’s slide deck from his Unicode presentation at the Rails Show and Tell meeting in Amerstam where he introduces his Unicode hacks libraries.

I really like his idea about using an accessor proxy on String:

name = 'Claus Müller'
puts name.reverse #=> rell??M sualC
name.length #=> 13

puts name.chars.reverse #=> rellüM sualC
name.chars.length #=> 12

Notice how accessing the same string via the chars accessor correctly reverses the German string.