John Lam on Software

IronRuby on Rubyforge!

I'm happy to announce that we're live on Rubyforge today!

It's been nearly 6 weeks since our initial source code release at OSCON. So what's changed?

• Exception handling
• Parallel assignment
• Instance variables

Added some more library support:

• Comparable
• Enumerable
• Array
• Hash
• String (not quite complete yet)
• Dir

Go get the sources and have a happy hacking weekend!

Update: John Messerly has just checked in an updated Rakefile that fixes some of the problems that folks have had with doing builds externally.

Day 5 of Daddy Daycare

Today was a visit to the Woodland Park Zoo. It was a beautiful day in Seattle, about as good as it gets. The boys were pretty good at the zoo today. The only bad thing that happened was when Daddy forgot that Matthew was sitting on the back of the stroller when he took Ben out of the stroller to see the tiger ... Fortunately nothing really bad happened to Matthew outside of a bit of shock from the fall.

This weekend was a weekend of birthday parties. Our neighbor Sofia turned 2, and the Reptile Man entertained the kids. When Ben saw the iguana, he called it a dinosaur, but when he walked up to it, he changed it to 'baby dinosaur'! The photo above is a quick snapshot of a Komodo Dragon that I took today at the Woodland Park Zoo. Ben was excited to see dinosaurs again!

We also went to Vivek's 720 day celebration at Grasslawn Park. Matthew was excited to be there, but decided to go and climb on the amazingly cool 'spider web' climbing structure at the park instead of participating in the incredibly well-orchestrated games for adults and kids. There was lots of music played at the picnic and the boys spent a lot of time dancing on the picnic tables (don't tell Carolyn about this). Ben was entertaining himself by stuffing wood chips into his sandals, which was fine by me since I was worrying about Matthew's daring climbing exploits :)

Carolyn gets home tomorrow night - just one more day until the cavalry arrives!

Day 3 of Daddy Daycare

Sometimes outings are for the kids, sometimes they're for the daddy. After a couple of days of going to parks, we (well, I) decided to do some shopping today.

I wanted to explore the area south of where we live, so we drove down to Fry's. Ben had a great time dancing to music at Fry's on the patterned marble flooring that they have (lots of circles and triangles), and the boys enjoyed watching the Blu-Ray edition of Happy Feet on a 63" 1080p Samsung plasma TV (OK, I enjoyed it too).

Next up after Fry's, we went over to check out the Costco in Issaquah. There's a pretty cool farmer's market in the same complex as well. One thing that's been on my list to get for some time is a replacement vacuum cleaner. Our 10+ year old Bissell is doing a poor job keeping up with Kobe's seasonal shedding that's happening right now. I bought a Hoover Elite vaccuum for $89. It's a bagless vacuum, so it's rather cool / disgusting to see the incredible amount of gunk that this thing can suck out of carpets. It's much quieter than our Bissell, and I'm pretty amazed by the results.

On the way home, I decided to take a side trip up Zoo Hill. This is a tough climb - it ascends 1200 feet in 2.5 miles - I was a bit worried that the car wouldn't make it around some of the inside corners of the switchbacks! When I ride myself back into shape, that's the climb that I'm going to test myself on. Not sure when that will be (definitely not this season) but it's good to be able to visualize your challenges.

It's been a long 3 days. But I'm getting into the rhythm of this daddy daycare thing, so I'm not as tired as I was on the first two days. Half way there!

Survived Day 1 of Daddy Daycare

I'm at home this week with the two-and-a-half kids (Kobe the dog counts as half a kid) while Carolyn takes a much-deserved vacation at home in Toronto. I've survived day one - five to go!

I saw that Nikon has released the full-frame D3 SLR - the one with the insane ISO 256,000 setting. It's a good thing that I don't own any DX lenses :)

As I approach my 40th birthday, I've started riding again. I spent a lot of time riding as a kid and got pretty good at it. About 8 years ago, I bought a bike that I would have killed for when I was serious about riding, and rode it maybe a dozen times. Now that I live in a bike-friendly town and within easy commute distance (6 miles each way) I've started riding it again. There's no shortage of hills around here, which makes that 6 miles, um, a bit more challenging than 6 miles in Toronto (had to swap out the 12-23 for a 12-27). I figure that I should drop about 25 pounds or so to get into a good power/weight ratio for riding the hills around here - plenty of time to make that happen.

Don't worry, IronRuby is in good hands with our devs. The Rubyforge sync script is done, and we're finishing off a few more foundational features before we go live at the end of August.

Alex Beltran

Last week, I went through a bunch of stuff in our storage room and I found some old photos of my friend Alex Beltran:

We took a ski trip together over Reading Week in 1992 to Lake Tahoe. We were all serious about that trip - spending lots of time training for it. I remember Alex was doing a lot of lunges to get ready for it (not that he needed to - he was one of the finest athletes that I've ever known).

Our first day there was one to remember. We were poor college students, so we were determined to maximize the amount of skiing that we could do on that trip. We flew into Reno on a charter flight, and got into our rental car sometime after midnight. It was still a good 2+ hour drive to South Lake Tahoe where we were staying, and I don't think we got to bed until about 3:30am, since Alex was all being all goofy that night.

Since we wanted to maximize our skiing, we were up at 7am to drive to our first destination: Heavenly. We stopped at McDonalds on the way to the mountain (believe me, this is important). Now Heavenly is a pretty big mountain, with the summit just over 10,000 feet. On our first run of the day we went right up to the summit. We skied down to the first fork in the trail and we both saw the world steadily blacking out - fortunately it reversed itself!

We spent the rest of the day going up and down all faces of the mountain. We decided to skip lunch because lunch was for wimps, and skiied straight through until closing time. We drove back to South Lake Tahoe and set out looking for a place to eat. Now, South Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada side of the border so there was no shortage of casinos with all you can eat buffets - perfect for starving college students. We got to the "chuck wagon buffet" (or something like that) at 7pm and wound up standing in line for an hour before we got in. That hour was probably the longest hour of our lives since the last food we had eaten was at McDonalds that morning.

We ate a ridiculous amount of food. We ate so much food that our tummies hurt, which for some reason made us giggle all the way back to the hotel room while holding our guts. When we got back to the hotel room, Alex was goofier than ever and started bouncing up and down on his bed. He then turned to me and asked "how's your peripheral vision?" We did a quick test (hold a finger in front of one eye and stare at it, close your other eye and move your other hand until you can just see it). We found out that in one eye Alex could see only about 90 degrees or so, compared to nearly 180 degrees for his other eye. I told him 'dude, you'd better get that checked out'; he looked worried for maybe a minute and then started bouncing up and down on his bed while pretending to be a big dog.

That was a trip that I won't ever forget. I had wonderful company, and the weather was about as close to perfect as you could wish for.

Today I decided to Google for Alex since we lost touch some years ago. I was stunned to find this. My condolences go out to your entire family. I won't forget you.

IronRuby Update (or what have you been doing since OSCON?)

Subversion and TFS

Since OSCON, we've made some progress toward integrating Subversion and TFS. Our internal version control system for our team will continue to be TFS, but we need to synchronize edits that we make to our tree and edits made by external folks to the Rubyforge subversion tree.

I'm building a new Rakefile that implements commands that internal and external developers will need to do their jobs. It knows how to synchronize files between the two directory layouts. It knows how to build binaries on both layouts. It knows how to run the unit tests.

The missing pieces of the puzzle is the code to push edits out to the Subversion tree (and deal with potential conflicts), as well as code to push edits to our TFS tree. We'll have this in place by the end of the month.

Language features

We're progressing nicely with some additional language features. Tomas has checked in a new implementation of parallel assignment that we believe should account for all the cases that we know of (and there are a LOT of cases!). He also finished off most of the corner cases for control flow.

John Messerly (a dev who's on loan to our team) has checked in a complete implementation of the Hash class, which currently passes all of the Hash spec in the rubinius spec tree. He also finished an implementation of Enumerable.

Update: John's also checked in a slow implementation of instance variables (all variable lookups via dictionaries). We know that there are lots of optimizations that are possible in this space, but we want to make sure that we are correct first.

We're trying to nail down the story for library implementers by the time we release the code on Rubyforge. We should have complete or nearly complete implementations of Array, String, and Hash by then. Those should give potential library contributors a better feel for how to code the libraries, and how to author tests for those libraries.