Author: grant

Maglev Ruby

Ruby is often compared to Smalltalk; and I’m sure a bunch of folks have always wondered when someone would implement Ruby either on top of Smalltalk (or even in a similar manner to Smalltalk, aka Rubinius).

Avi Bryant wondered as such, and seems to have gotten a job out of it in producing Maglev Ruby (it is a video).

Maglev seems to be the combination of a Ruby VM implemented along with a distributed, concurrent object system to support the needs of Ruby on Rails.

I heard Avi speak at OSCON 06, and he seems to be a nice fellow; I’ll be interested to see how this pans out.

Strangely, I haven’t heard Maglev mentioned by anyone I know, perhaps Ruby VMs aren’t interesting.

SD Cards on the XO

Here is the page on the OLPC website that documents secure digital cards on the XO.
The XO supports SDHC (high capacity). I use a 16GB AData card on my XO without problem.
Here is a little reminder: when you insert the SD card into the XO, do so with the screen, and the shiny part of the card, both facing you.
BTW: I use a “Sandisk MicroMate for SDHC” USB adapter to work with the card under Windows XP, it cost 8USD from an Amazon affiliate.

erlang-scheme interop

Eric Sessoms announced his Erlang-Scheme interoperability library recently on the PLT discussion list.

What it is: Basically, it’s a port of Distel from emacs lisp over to
scheme. It talks to erlang using its own protocol and impersonates an
erlang node on the network. It aims to provide an abstraction such
that erlang processes look like scheme threads, and vice-versa.
Communication from scheme to erlang is done with (a wrapper around)
thread-send. Messages from erlang to scheme get routed to thread
mailboxes so that they can be picked up with thread-receive.