Oil Expert To Address Theory That Peak Oil Has Arrived

Posted by MSch Thu, 24 Nov 2005 14:25:00 GMT

Oil Expert To Address Theory That Peak Oil Has Arrived from PhysOrg.com

Princeton University emeritus professor and renowned oil analyst Ken Deffeyes thinks that the all-time production peak for petroleum, or “peak oil,” will occur on or around this Thanksgiving.

According to the article the professor already correctly predicted the US Oil Peak in 1970, so there might be some truth to it, but as the Austrian cabaret artist Josef Hader says: “I can’t stand all the people that rant about people more than 100m away.”

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iRiver H10 USB Connectivity

Posted by MSch Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:00:00 GMT

Today I tried to connect an iRiver H10 to my Windows XP Professional SP 2 Notebook. At first everything went fine, XP recognized the new device and showed the “Add new Device” Dialog, but the driver installation failed. Windows Update didn’t have any drivers and neither did the iRiver Homepage. Firmware updates, check. Manuals, checkk. Drivers, fail.

And to make my day worse it also failed on two different machines in the same way.

That means no iRiver for me.

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Ruby Extensions Project

Posted by MSch Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:04:00 GMT

After reading about the Ruby Extensions Project in Why’s Hopping Through Pipes and Closures I decided to try it out.

I installed it via gem install -r extensions and started reading the documentation.

One of the many useful features I stumbled upon is the autoinit method: In the following example radius, location will be automagically assigned to the corresponding instance variables, while area will have some additional processing applied. And with the saved keystrokes I was able to type this post. 
class Circle
  attr_reader :radius, :location, :area
  autoinit(:radius, :location) do
    @area = Math::PI * @radius ** 2
  end
end

Circle::new(1,2,3)

New with 0.6.0 comes require_relative, which requires a file relative to the file containing the statement.

Finally my_object.in? some_other_object provides a pythonesque way of expressing some_other_object.include?(my_object).

Of course there are many many more features but these are the ones that seem particularly useful to me

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