Pablo Lorenzzoni: Annoyed by F10 key in gnome-terminal?
@binding-set NoKeyboardNavigation unbind "<shift>F10" * gtk-key-bindings: NoKeyboardNavigation
@binding-set NoKeyboardNavigation unbind "<shift>F10" * gtk-key-bindings: NoKeyboardNavigation
Recently there has been some major developments in DebConf11 organization. In short, I will list some of the most important.
Official DC11 website has finally been completed and now contains a great deal of information for those interested in attending this years conference. Some of the most notable changes include:
Frontpage now contains a small menu with links to most important parts of website, like About, Registration, Contact Sidebar menu is now divided in 3 categories:
Site is now available on Bosnian language for native speaking attendees, should they have problems with English version. Every page is available on both languages, which can be changed by clicking on ba/en flag in upper left corner, or DC11: Bosnian Version.
As you may have noticed, the official page received a small face lift. New header with the Government building, a small token of appreciation for all the help the Government is providing; as well as some minor changes in CSS and color scheme. While talking about design, we d like to thank Leandro G mez for his help with the header.
As agreed on the meeting, which took place on 22. of February, [Meeting logs], following sponsorship levels will be used for this years conference:
Main reason for lowering amounts is due to last years results of high increase in the same. As for the benefits of these levels, the only thing changed is t-shirts / bags places; we believe t-shirts are much more noticeable than bags, and have therefore been promoted to Silver, while bags have been downgraded to Bronze. For a full list of requirements and benefits, please visit: DC11: Sponsorship Sponsorship Brochure
Sponsorship brochures have finally been completed and are available for a public distribution. The brochures are available in 3 qualities: low, high and original. Low and high quality brochures, ~6Mb and ~8Mb respectively, are for normal distribution to our sponsors, while original quality, at around 240Mb, is intended for maximum quality printing. Just as with the website, each quality is available in both Bosnian and English. Current version of the brochure is 1.1 and is most likely the final one. These brochures are available at Documentation page: DC11: Documentation >> Documents made by Local Team Or download them directly:
Also, I d like to thank Mirosal Remetic for making a great template and Pablo Duboue for some very valuable suggestions regarding the structure of the brochure.
Many questions have been raised regarding Bosnian visa regime. We got in contact with the embassy and they clarified who can enter our country with(out) Visa. The list can be found on DC11 Wiki: Visa regime. It also states, which countries have a privilidge of ID-only entrance. If your country is not listed, that means you will need visa. If you want to know what exactly you need to get one, please visit the this official Government page and chose your country from a drop-down menu. As for the visa itself, as well as the list of Customs Rules, please read DC11: Visa.
Also, thanks to Darjan Prtic for getting the list from the Government officials.
If you think, that is it for now, you are dead wrong. At this very moment following is being organized and developed:
Well, these are pretty much the highlights of some recent and some future developments of DebConf11 organizational team. Mind you, there s a lot more going on, but I tried to give a small summary from the inside. Should you be interested in attending, helping out, sponsoring or just have some questions, feel free to ask them on our mailing list at: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org. I should inform you that this is a public mailing list and its archives are available for a broader public. If you do not wish for your mail to be made public, please direct any enquiry directly to me trough the Contact Form or any other member of Core Local Team, Adnan Hodzic or Velimir Iveljic.
Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.
Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.
bash$ gem install xmpp4r-observable -s http://gemcutter.org
Happy Hacking.
require_gem
construct and consequences on packaging, summed
up by the debian/ruby team
here.
#python
if len(a) > 0:
v = a[0]
a = a[1:]
else:
v = None
over Ruby s ternary if
#ruby
v = a.empty? ? a.shift : nil
Hey! Come on Ruby s ternary if is not mandatory It was copied from C just as a syntax sugar. You can do without it, just as in Python:
#ruby
if ! a.empty?
v = a.shift
else
v = nil
end
Better yet! you can use if s return as v value:
#ruby
v = if ! a.empty?
a.shift
else
nil
end
How beautiful is that!
Python lacked ternary if for a long time, and when it finally acquired one via PEP 308 its syntax was made different from every other language! Although I don t think that is a problem, some people might think it would be better not reinventing the wheel.
Next, Kanwei goes over a famous problem of Ruby: the lack of a sum method for Array. I admit it s strange, but that is completely coherent: Ruby s Arrays are ordered collection of objects and not mathematical arrays. How do you sum objects that are not numbers? Many different people will have many different answers to that, so Ruby leaves this decision for the programmer and provides basic methods to deal with collections of anything (that can be used to apply sum to numbers, if wished). So, in Ruby you have to use Array#inject to perform a sum:
[1,2,3].inject(0) sum, value sum + value
Array#inject (actually Enumerable#inject) was borrowed from Smalltalk and allows you to loop through an array, building up an accumulator value as you go. When it s done, the final value of this accumulator is returned. Very useful for combining array elements, whether by summing them, building up a pretty display string, whatever. In the example above, I am initializing the accumulator with 0.
If you use Array to mathematical operations and you want your arrays to work that way, you can always add a sum method to Array class:
class Array
def sum
self.inject(0) sum, value sum + value
end
end
Maybe it would be better if you just use Arrays as containers (as it was intended to) and implement that sum inside your own class I completely agree with Reg Braithwaite here.
Kanwei also mention Python is faster than Ruby. That is true, but was more true some time ago. First of all, Python is older and has had more time to improve its speed. Ruby, ITOH, just now acquired a good VM and improvements to it finally can run parallel to improvements in the language itself, so I am expecting this to be less true every release. Python is already not getting much faster between releases, unlike Ruby (the differences between 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 are really impressive!). IMHO this is not a good reason to choose one instead of the other: if you really need speed, go for C :-)
Now this is something I find interesting Kanwei has mentioned: Python is more production ready . He argues that Google is using it, so it must be good. Well I cannot argue against that: Google is really using Python. But IBM, Oracle, EA, Cisco, Siemens, etc are using Ruby so that is just a matter of preferring one or another company. Both are production ready I agree, though, that Ruby 1.9.1 has many differences from 1.8.7, and that that may be seen as some inconsistency, but Python also has changed a lot since its 2.0 version, for that matter. And the changes to Ruby brought many benefits I think they worth it.
At last, Kanwei compares Python and Ruby docstrings. Here I also have to agree with him: Ruby docstrings sucks. Actually that s why everybody uses rdoc instead (and that is much more powerful than Python s docstrings). Again, I don t think that is reason enough to ditch Ruby (actually, the existence of rdoc, rubygems & friends should bring people to Ruby instead), but that is a matter of personal taste.
Surely, Kanwei s reasons were easy to argue against. There are areas were Python shines much more than Ruby (and vice-versa), but those Kanwei mentioned are not among them.
I think both languages are powerful enough, and both are way better than Perl or PHP, so either one you choose would be fine. Better if you don t have to choose and use both ;). If you have to, ITOH, pay more attention on how you feel while coding in each one, and not to some cheap reasons such as above. If you are a programmer, what matters most is that you ll spend a lot of time coding with any given language let that be something pleasant then.
Next.