OSDL reorganizes, refocuses

Open Source Development Labs reorgs, refocuses

A few people including CEO Stuart Cohen have left. They are reorganizing and refocusing more on enterprise-y stuff.

- Vasudev Ram

Adobe FlashPaper: make a PDF or Flash doc out of "any printable file"

Looks interesting. Can make a PDF or a Flash document out of "any printable file".

Adobe FlashPaper

- Vasudev Ram

Free chapters from book "iText in Action"

Just saw this on comp.text.pdf from Bruno Lowagie, the book's author (and original author of iText):

Free chapters from book "iText in Action"

One chapter has lots of screenshots of PDF files created with iText, the other chapter discusses the background, history and different kinds of PDF.

Vasudev Ram

Building a web spider on Linux

Building a web spider on Linux

A good article by M. Tim Jones on IBM developerWorks.

Shows a few different examples, starting with simple screen scraping upto building an actual
spider. Uses Ruby and Python as the languages.

The article.

- Vasudev Ram

Ruby for Symbian OS released; Symbian hits 100 million

Ruby for Symbian OS
released (by Symbian).

Sounds good. Now people can develop apps for mobile phones using Ruby, for a big platform.

Of course, specialized libraries will be needed for the different features on phones as compared to PCs. Symbian is working on a proof of concept module which will include rendering, messaging and persistence. More should follow over time if there's enough momentum. A market of 100 million phones, hopefully, should provide some incentive to people to develop need libraries, etc. for it :-)

About Symbian

- Vasudev Ram

SketchUp and Google SketchUp

Saw this via Phrogz.net.

Looks like an interesting app. 3D for everyone, is the tagline ...

SketchUp

Google SketchUp

SketchUp Products

Google SketchUp is free for personal use.
No registration is required.

Download it here

3D Warehouse
With this, you can can search, share or download 3D models for your design.

- Vasudev Ram

Ruby: Tracing every method call with set_trace_func or Needle

Saw an interesting thread on comp.lang.ruby.
The original poster asked how to trace every method call in a program.

Using Kernel#set_trace_func and Needle were two ways suggested.


- Vasudev Ram