Ridgelift writes "Learning to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails has gained a huge amount of interest lately, but for people wanting to learn Rails there are no books on the subject. That's changed now with the pre-release of Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails , the latest book from Dave Thomas and the author of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson. It's really 3 books in one: a full Rails tutorial, an in depth guide to the components that make up Rails, and an introduction to developing applications using the Agile development model. There's even a quick introduction to Ruby, the language Rails is built with." Read on for an early review of the beta book. Full disclosure: Reviewer Miles K. Forrest points out that he has read earlier versions of the book's manuscript and provided critiques to the authors.

Cory R writes "Neil Gershenfeld is an MIT professor and the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms where he teaches a course called "How to Make (almost) Anything." In his book FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, Gershenfeld describes the current state of personal fabrication tools and the surprising impact that these tools have when made available to everybody from MIT students to villagers in India in the form of Fab Labs. Lots of fabrication techniques and some technologies are discussed including those that are still only in development today. The pace of development seems to be accelerating and as the capabilities of the tools advance, Gershenfeld predicts one day he will be able to drop the word "almost" from the title of his course." Read on for the rest of Cory R's review.

acreman writes "Monty Python's SPAMalot, a musical lovingly ripped off from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, won 3 of the 14 Tony Awards it was nominated for. The 3 awards given out were for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (Sara Ramirez), Best Direction of a Musical (Mike Nichols), and Best Musical. "

Ninwa writes "Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What's most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done '...so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).' They even offer an open source client in Python."

MrAndrews writes "I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"

thesamet writes "The Python Challenge is a set of riddles that require a little bit of Python programming to be solved. The purpose of the riddles is to provide an entertaining way to explore the Python programming language. The challenge was started late in April this year and it is starting to gain popularity in the Python community. What people love most about the challenge is that it makes them poke in Python's module library and discover new things. It truly demonstrates the great power of Python's included 'batteries.' The riddles are designed to be solvable by Python beginners, but yet are challenging even to experienced Python programmers. The first few riddles are very easy, but it gradually becomes more and more challenging. Many people reported that playing the challenge is highly addictive and it is great fun. The site also features discussion forums where users can ask for hints. Additionally, after solving a riddle, its solution is available in a wiki form."

An anonymous reader writes "Horst Knorr released a new test version of Knoda. With this release Knoda is the first KDE database frontend reading MS Access databases natively and is getting closer to its goal to be a full replacement for MS Access. Knoda is a database-frontend for KDE. Besides tables and queries Knoda comprises forms and reports, which are scriptable via Python."

skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.

m1cajah asks: "I've been trying to find an 'all-in-one' package for creating (and migrating to) online manuals and am having some difficulty finding what I'm looking for. I'm hoping Slashdot can help. We have a large number of manuals (designed for paper-based presentation) that suddenly need to be provided online to our customer base. Yes, the PHBs have changed the landscape on us once again. This will, once configured, be managed totally by the documentation staff and analysts (none very tech-savvy). It needs to be really easy to use because I would like to say there's a huge budget for this (as well as for training), but there isn't. Lower cost is good. Free is better.Can any of you point me to some other options?"

Qa1 writes "Seems that Python is moving into the enterprise. At the recent PyCon it has become apparent that it's not just Google, GIS, Nokia or even Microsoft anymore. The article points out that Python is increasingly becoming a perfectly viable and even preferred choice for the enterprise. More and more companies are looking at Python as a good alternative to past favorites like Java. Will we finally be able to code for living in a language that's not painful? Exciting times!"

Enjoi writes "GeNToo is a version of the Gentoo meta distribution based on the NT kernel, (virtually) completely free of any Win32 code. It provides a complete text-mode Gentoo environment, with all GNU tools, Perl, Python and the other usual suspects. In addition, it comes with with full NT hardware driver support." Aptly named GeNToo, is it a step towards bringing Windows closer to open source? "

immytay writes " Jim Hugunin (Jython, Numeric, and other projects) has issued the first release of IronPython since joining Microsoft in August of last year. IronPython runs on .NET and Mono and is supposedly faster than the C version of Python. This new version is 0.7, while 0.6 was released last summer and covered here. According to the IronPython mailing list, Jim has help from a Microsoft co-worker, and he plans to work toward IronPython 1.0."

r3lody writes "If you spend time working writing applications that have to do pattern matches and/or replacements, you know about some of the intricacies of regular expressions. For many people they can be an arcane hodgepodge of odd characters that somehow manage to do wonderful things, but they don't have enough time (or interest) to really understand how to code them. Nathan A. Good has written Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach for those people. In its relatively slim 289 pages, he offers 100 regular expressions in a cookbook format, tailored to solve problems in one of six broad categories (Words and Text, URLs and Paths, CSV and Tab-Delimited Files, Formatting and Validating, HTML and XML, and Coding and Using Commands)." Read on for the rest of Lodato's review.

malcomvetter asks: "I need a command line FTP client that supports 'Implicit SSL', sports some kind of scripting interface, and runs on Win32. Any suggestions? So far, I have only found GUI versions such as FileZilla." I remember once needing a scripting FTP client long ago. It took me a long time, but I finally found one that had a workable but unintuitive interface. Have scripting FTP clients become more prevalent or is your best bet using something flexible with network bindings (like Python or Perl) to get the job done?

leighklotz writes "Jeff Breidenbach and 200 lines of Python code have brought us the Glyphsaw Puzzle solver. Hold a puzzle piece up to a webcam, and the display sgiws exactly where in the puzzle the piece belongs. The solver uses the Python Imaging Library (PIL), Numerical Python, and the PARC DataGlyph Toolkit. By the way, you can make your own DataGlyphs."

prostoalex writes "Chris McAvoy is a UNIX administrator and an owner of two cats. So as a natural application of his work to his hobby he built this Linux-based cat feeder. A little hardware hacking and Python scripting can get you a device that would automatically disperse a yummy fish at specified intervals."

Dutch Dopey writes "In an interview with Lars Gustavsson of DICE, it was mentioned that Battlefield 2's modding tools are going to be delivered with the game, and that the tools are the same ones used to develop the game. The modding language in use is Python, and will support all aspects of the language.

Eric Giguere writes "Python is now available for use on Nokia's Series 60 platform (versions 1 and 2), the operating system used on a number of popular cellphones like the 6600 and less popular ones like the N-Gage. It's Python 2.2.2 with additional modules for platform-specific stuff like SMS messaging. It's an alternative to C++ or Java, though no devices are shipping with Python preinstalled as of yet."

An anonymous reader writes "Take Two Interactive announced today that they have acquired the rights to the Civilization franchise. They also announced Civ 4, saying that "Civilization IV will also set a new standard for user-modification, allowing gamers to create their own add-ons using the standard Python and XML scripting languages." Okay, so XML's not a scripting language. But it's nice to see open source tech in a major PC game!" Civ IV will be released under the new 2K Publishing Label we reported on yesterday.

Dr Twox writes "The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces has received a $2 million dollar boost from a multi-national corporation to further develop Jef Raskin's RCHI project, a radical new and simple to way interact with computers. Co-creator of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface, Raskin hopes to have RCHI finished within 18 months. "When you actually try it," says Jef. "It actually does what we say. We've got the goods." It's built with Python and SDL, so how long before someone ports this to *nix?"