tricks on SWiK

WhatLanguage: Ruby Library To Detect The Language Of A Text

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:08:47 -0700

WhatLanguage is a library by Peter Cooper (disclaimer: yes, that's me) that makes it quick and easy to determine what language a supplied text is written in. It's pretty accurate on anything from a short sentence up to several paragraphs in all of the languages supplied with the library (Dutch, English, Farsi, Russian, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Pinyin) and adding languages of your own choosing isn't difficult.

The library works by checking for the presence of words with bloom filters built from dictionaries based upon each source language. We've covered bloom filters on Ruby Inside before, but essentially they're probabilistic data structures based upon hashing a large set of content. They're ideal in situations where you want to check set memberships but the threat of false positives is acceptable in return for significant memory savings (and a 250KB bloom filter is a lot nicer to deal with than a 14MB+ dictionary).

WhatLanguage is available from GitHub (and can be installed as a gem from there with gem install peterc-whatlanguage) or from RubyForge with a simpler gem install whatlanguage. Once installed, usage is simple:

require 'whatlanguage'

"Je suis un homme".language      # => :french

# OR...

wl = WhatLanguage.new(:all)
wl.language("Je suis un homme")  # => :french
wl.process_text("this is a test of whatlanguage's great language detection features")
# => {:german=>1, :dutch=>3, :portuguese=>3, :english=>7, :russian=>1, :farsi=>1, :spanish=>3, :french=>2}

I wrote the library initially a year ago but have only just made it available for public use, so if there are unforeseen bugs to fix or things that really need to be added, fork it on GitHub and get playing.

This post is sponsored by AlphaSights Ltd - AlphaSights are recruiting. If you're looking for a Ruby on Rails opportunity, can work in Cambridge, UK and enjoy the buzz of a brand new well-funded startup then look no further. AlphaSights are recruiting from entry level to senior positions and offer very competitive salaries and a great working environment.

NeverBlock: Fast, Non-Blocking IO In Ruby Without Changing Program Flow

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:08:46 -0700

NeverBlock is a Ruby (1.9) library developed by eSpace - an Egyptian Web 2.0 development team - that could make your life a whole lot easier if you have to deal with blocking IO operations that hold up all your Ruby threads.

NeverBlock makes it easy to get the benefits of non-blocking IO (IO operations that aren't held up by mutexes) in your Ruby apps without having to take the usual route of redesigning your app to be event-based. You get all the benefits of event-based code (lower CPU overhead, lower memory use, less hangups) but with the benefit of a normal program flow model.

The catch? It's Ruby 1.9 only - relying heavily on fibers - and the documentation isn't particularly strong yet so it'll take a bit of work to figure out. It could be worth it, though, as in benchmarks on the NeverBlock-based Postgres library, throughput is shown as significantly increased where a percentage of queries are complex and slow (and would usually block up the client).

If you're still interested, NeverBlock is available on Github - there's also an official home page and documentation available.

BOSSMan: Build Your Own Search Engine With Yahoo And Ruby

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:07:06 -0700

Recently, Yahoo! launched BOSS - the "Build Your Own Search Service." In all but name, it appears very similar to their older Yahoo! Search API, as it allows you to query Yahoo's search index programatically. Under the surface though, Yahoo has removed the 5,000 query per day limit, you're unrestricted in how you present the data returned, you can re-order the data, and no attribution is required.

For Rubyists ready to play with BOSS, Jay Pignata has developed BOSSMan, a library for interacting with the Yahoo! BOSS Web service. Either get it with Git or install with RubyGems like so:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
gem install jpignata-bossman

Once you've got the library, make sure you've got an application ID from Yahoo (this is unavoidable, alas) and then you can start to play:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bossman'
include BOSSMan

BOSSMan.application_id = "Your Application ID here"

news = BOSSMan::Search.news("Barack Obama", 0, 3)
news.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.title} [from #{result.source}]"
end

BOSSMan supports Web, news, and image searches out of the box. You can dump to JSON, XML, or YAML and access all of the relevant attributes through methods. Superb!

This post supported by Notifixious - Notifixious - a new notification service startup based in San
Francisco - needs a Rails expert to become its CTO! Knowledge of messaging technologies (XMPP) and REST API development is a must. You can learn more here.

Set Gmail as your Default Email in Firefox 3 : ultimate geek girl

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:37:54 -0700

ultimate geek girl blog

How to disable slow iTunes Backup for iPhone/ipod touch on Windows

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:06:40 -0700

10 Eclipse Navigation Shortcuts Every Java Programmer Should Know " The Curious Schemer

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:05:49 -0700

Form Elements: 40+ CSS/JS Styling and Functionality Techniques

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:06:02 -0700

Zolved - How to reduce the memory usage on Firefox?

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:05:24 -0700

The Ultimate Tweaker's Guide To Firefox3

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:09:57 -0700

Cloning Ubuntu Hardy image in VMWare Fusion

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:10:10 -0700

Having spent the better part of a day googling and struggling, I figured it would possibly benefit others if I took a minute to post the steps I took to clone a VMWare Fusion image. The image in question is of Ubuntu Server (Hardy). I’m using VMWare Fusion 2 (beta 2).

Just find your “Virtual Machines” folder (should be in your Documents folder), and copy the image in question to a new location. (The images are actually folders; a simple “cp -R” worked fine for me.)

Then, open the copied image in VMWare Fusion and boot it. VMWare Fusion will ask if you if you copied or moved the image—be sure to say you copied it (that let’s VMWare set up a new MAC address for your image).

Go ahead and log in once the server boots. You’ll find networking is all hosed. To fix networking, this worked for me:

“sudo hostname blah”, to set the hostname. This doesn’t change it permanently, so you’ll also want to:
“sudo vim /etc/hostname”. Change the contents of the file to the hostname you want. Then:
“sudo vim /etc/hosts”. Replace all mentions of the old hostname with the new hostname.
“sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules”. There will be two entries in this file. The first points eth0 at the old MAC address, and the second points eth1 at the new. Go ahead and delete the first entry, and change “eth1” to “eth0” in the second (and now only) entry.
“sudo shutdown -r now” to restart your virtual machine.

Once your machine comes back up, you should have a network again! Now, if only VMWare Fusion could bake all this in somehow… :/

(Related: installing VMWare Tools on Ubuntu server. It’s from 2006, but it still worked well enough for me, though I followed the instructions for tweaking the network that the VMWare Tools install gave at the end, rather than what this gent said.)

12 iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:05:35 -0700

Shoes - Ruby’s Cross Platform GUI App Toolkit - Grows Up

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:14:36 -0700

It was about a year ago now that Rubyist extraordinaire Why The Lucky Stiff first showed his "Shoes" Ruby cross-platform GUI application toolkit off to the world. Since then, he's not let up with the development.

Previously, we've featured the release of The Shoebox - a Shoes application repository - and Nobody Knows Shoes - a short book about Shoes, done a roundup of Shoes tutorials, and looked at how to write a drawing program with Shoes on OS X.

Now, Shoes has a new official homepage - located at http://shoooes.net/ (yes, that's three os). Complete with a picture of an Amstrad CPC and gloriously pixellated logo, there's now a reasonably non-technical place to go to download Shoes, get into the wiki, and get access to the book. There's also a really good illustrative tutorial that walks you through some basic Shoes examples.

Quit dallying - go check it out. It's quite possibly Why's best work yet.

DevSnippets

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:11:42 -0700

hibernate.org - Tips and Tricks

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:04:41 -0700

[from martti] 100 Vim commands every programmer should know

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:04:23 -0700

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:05:18 -0700

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:05:18 -0700

Buzz Kill - stopping iPhone GSM speaker noise

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:05:20 -0700

Every GSM cellphone user is familiar with the annoying Bzzzhtzttt noises that tend to emanate from random electronics anywhere you take your device. The iPhone is no exception, but the problem is exacerbated since most people have it sitting on their desk with a speaker close by playing music at reasonable amplification. It sucks.

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:06:29 -0700

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:06:29 -0700

Hibernate Querying 101 : tips and tricks

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:04:35 -0700

8 More iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:05:05 -0700

woork: 25 Awesome tutorials for web designers

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:04:41 -0700

woork: 25 Awesome tutorials for web designers

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:04:54 -0700

Hack Attack: Play games on your iPod for FREE

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:08:43 -0700

12 iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known : iSmashPhone

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:14:25 -0700

Add Contact Pictures Using the Facebook iPhone App - JoshCampoverde.com

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:15:07 -0700

Apple - iPhone - Tips & Tricks

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:13:57 -0700

browser experiments

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:11:36 -0700

TechDadBlog - 10 iPhone Tricks that you might not know

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:13:33 -0700