Earlier this year I blogged about installing Rails 2.2 on Leopard. I recently upgraded my MacBook to Snow Leopard, so it was time to do the MySQL dance all over again.
Rather than reiterating what I did, here are the three resources that I found most useful in getting things sorted:
As with my previous experience, the most difficult & frustrating part of the exercise turned out to be getting the MySQL gem working properly. I found the commentary in the last post to be particularly helpful in getting the MySQL resolved.
Recently, I was invited by Dr. Michael Gannon of the DCU Business School to present a lecture to one of his M.Sc. classes as part of the grandly titled “Innovation, Marketing and New Technology Foresight” lecture series.
Apparently, somebody somewhere thought that I knew something about those topics.
I must admit that I know very little about the process of printing books, but I came across an absolutely fascinating video on how John Carrera reprinted Pictorial Webster’s.
Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at TCD, has been awarded Ireland’s premier science award, the RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence, for his pioneering work on the molecular understanding of innate immunity and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Following the conferral of the Medal, Professor O’Neill will give a public lecture on his groundbreaking discoveries and his passion for science. He will describe what drew him to science as a career – from the desire to satisfy curiosity about the big questions of who we are, where we came from and where we’re going – to how science is a superb pursuit and why scientists are the best of people.
He will describe his own discoveries in the field of immunology and explain why Charles Darwin, Ilya Mechnikov and Gary Larson are his heroes. The practical benefits of science and his own research, how essential it is for governments to support fundamental scientific research, and how science can save the world will be discussed also.
Well worth checking out if you can. You need to register to attend, and I suspect that it will be well attended.
Google have just released a new systems programming language called “go“. The syntax has a vaguely 80’s C style to it, which is hardly surprising, given that Rob Pike and Ken Thompson are listed among the designers of the language.
I’d be interested to hear if anybody has used go to do anything useful?
Ironically, the kinda lame name that they chose for the language will likely make it difficult to google for useful webpages on it.
As a general rule, I’m not a huge fan of keynote, invited talks – in my experience, they tend to be dry, hastily prepared and badly delivered.
Chris Horn has posted the text from an invited talk he delivered at a COMREG event yesterday on his blog, and this talk (at least in its written form) defies my stereotype. Well researched, thought provoking, and as he says himself, a little provocative.
Researchers in DCU have developed a robot fish called WANDA – hard to resist a corny movie reference, I guess. WANDA stands for "Wireless Aquatic Navigator for Detection and Analysis".
DERI, the SFI-funded CSET in semantic web technology, has announced the launch of Sig.ma, which they describe as giving live aggregation of semantic web data. Sig.ma is based on another piece of DERI technology – Sindice, the semantic web search engine.
To quote from their post:
In Sig.ma, elements such as large scale semantic web indexing, logic reasoning, data aggregation heuristics, pragmatic ontology alignments and, last but not least, user interaction and refinement, all play together to provide entity descriptions which become live, embeddable data mash ups.
I haven’t had an opportunity to play around with Sig.ma yet, but it looks interesting, and I plan on doing so.
