Informational

I have decided to no longer continue to blog in English on this site. I will still be blogging in Dutch.

It's been increasingly difficult for me to maintain a certain continuity here. It's been a great experiment, and a lot of fun, but I feel it's time to let this one go.

I'm working on a new site with a much more narrow focus, something this site dearly lacks. It might still be a while before it sees the light of day, so I'm not revealing too much about it yet.

A while ago the fabulous folks from Ubuntu released the latest version of their popular Linux distributions. The version number of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu is now up to 7.10 (being the year and month it was released). More often however Ubuntu versions are referred to by their alliterating nicknames. I'll go over my experiences upgrading from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon.

De OPML export van Planet Ugent, het bestandje met de lijst van alle feeds die op de site weergegeven worden, bevat geen links, waardoor je er niet erg veel mee kan doen.

Langs deze weg wil ik dus graag deze bug rapporteren. Hopelijk wordt er iets aan gedaan. In afwachting heb ik er zelf maar eentje gemaakt. Zeer handig als je alle Planet Ugent feeds wil lezen in een feed reader a la Bloglines of Netvibes.

Today I released my very first public Ruby project!

Pinyin is a pure Ruby library with a specific focus : converting between various transliteration systems for Mandarin Chinese.

Over time various systems have been devised to capture the phonetics of the Chinese language, often as a teaching aid.

This is the first public release. Pinyin for Ruby can currently convert between five different systems, with more to come.

Important 2007-12-01 : This article is deprecated. The location of the repository changed and I haven't had the time to update my scripts to reflect this. With version 0.50 approaching an easier way of trying out Nitro is on the horizon. I'll write a new article soon that will supersede this one. If you need help getting Nitro up and running please ask advice on the Nitro mailing list.

Nitro is seeing some action again recently, which is mighty good, obviously. Nitro is a free software framework (under the liberal BSD licence) for building wep applications quickly, utilizing the lightweight Ruby language.

The 0.42 release is very outdated compared to the repo version, so we're all preparing for a dazzling 0.50.

This is a little library I wrote to convert between various romanization systems for Chinese. It currently supports Hanyu pinyin, Wade Giles, Zhuyin Fuhao (BoPoMoFo) and IPA (international phonetic alphabet).

A number of different systems to represent tones are supported : numbers, stand alone tone marks, accents or no tones. Take note that not all combinations make sense. E.g. ipa + accents will not yield useful results. However, numbers and standalone marks can be used with any system.

To get it do this

I'm finding myself slowly emerged in the Nitro community. Nitro is a ruby framework for the rapid development of web applications. Another such framework, Ruby on Rails, has gotten a lot of press. The alternatives are less known :

• Camping
• IOWA
• Ramaze
• Nitro

Het is stil geweest op deze blog. Te stil. Maar ik heb niet stilgezeten, misschien heeft dat er wel iets mee te maken.

Flowability was een groot succes, en in tegenstelling tot vorig jaar zijn we deze keer wel uit de kosten geraakt. Als ik nu nog eens een uurtje tijd maak om de DATs over te zetten op PC, dan kunnen de mensen thuis ook eens horen hoe het geweest is.

Niet langer student zijnde voel ik me nu echt een inwoner van Gent, en dat voelt best ok. Voor de rest hard werken, maar dat went, en de tijd kort.

I'm seriously looking into unicode stuff in ruby. Ruby strings are essentially just arrays of bytes, so they're not very encoding aware. Many have been asking for proper unicode support in ruby, but....