nnorwitz writes "PyCon 2004 is coming to Washington, DC at the end of March. It's a great place to meet lots of smart people and learn new things. Many interesting discussions go far beyond Python into other programming languages and topics. We should find out more about the Pie-thon, the OSAF since Mitch Kapor is the keynote speaker. There may even be a few surprises. The price is only $175, but early bird registration ends soon. It's not too late to submit a presentation either. I hope to see lots of new faces this year! I want to talk to some Perl and Ruby zealots^Wconverts^Wprogrammers. :-)"

Thanks to The Magic Box for their chart showing the top-selling videogames in Japan during 2003. Square Enix's Final Fantasy X-2 for PS2 tops the chart, selling a little less than 2 million copies, despite Japanese consumer discontent with the title, and Nintendo's Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire for GBA places second, with almost 1.5 million copies sold in 2003, and nearly 5 million in total. A surprise hit in third place is the PlayStation 2 action title Dynasty Warriors 4 from Koei, and further down the chart, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for GameCube can only manage a disappointing 26th place, with 310,000 copies sold, and an Xbox title of any kind is, sadly, nowhere to be seen in the Top 30.

Java Coward writes "Eric Herman and MySQL's Brian "Krow" Aker have released code to allow the DBMS MySQL to run Java natively inside of the database. The code allows users to write functions inside of the database that can be then used in SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE statements. So when will someone do Ruby?"

Thanks to 1UP for their article revealing the popular GameBoy Advance titles Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire have a time-unlocked glitch that's just been activated in Japan, since the game has features based on how long it's been played, and Nintendo have discovered there's "...an issue with its internal clock that can disable certain gameplay systems after a year's worth of playtime." Specifically, you can plant trees in-game which "eventually bear fruit, which you then feed to your pet monsters to cause them to evolve in useful and interesting ways." Unfortunately, after a year from the game's start date, "those trees are unable to grow." Nintendo has "...invited Japanese players to bring or send their game cartridges to one of many service centers around the country. The service centers will apply a patch that corrects the issue and return the fixed copy of the game free of charge." Finally, Nintendo of America have commented "The earliest the issue could appear [in the U.S.] is March 2004, which is the one year anniversary of the first sale in North America."

Simon P. Chappell writes "Now, I enjoy a good technical book more than the next geek, but it's been quite a while since one left me quite so excited with the possibilities that it presented. Code Generation in Action is beyond interesting, it is a masterful tome on its subject matter, written by one who is obviously an experienced practicioner in his craft." If "code generation" isn't a familiar term to you, this enthusiastic overview on devx.com is a concise introduction to what code generation is about, though it makes no pretense of ambivalence about its importance as a programming tool. Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

muirhead asks: "As a proud new dad, I made a web site to share some baby photos. Having seen this article about Google Bombing, I gave it a go and posted comments to Slashdot, Newsforge, Kuro5hin and LinuxWorld. Some of the pages have a high enough PageRank to show up as links into my site. Now, there are quite a few phrases that I can tell folk to google, and know my site will show top of the list. My favourites are Ruby Orange and Mutley Sleeps, but of course, I want more. What other free sites and means do you know of that I can use to further increase the visibility of my website?"

Thanks to IGN Pocket for their article pointing out that Nintendo's Pokemon franchise is celebrating its 5th anniversary in the States. According to the article, "Pokemon first launched on the original Game Boy in Japan in 1996. Since bringing the franchise to North America in September 1998, Nintendo has sold more than 110 million Pokemon games worldwide. Pokemon merchandise has generated over $15 billion in worldwide retail sales since 1998." With the HAL-developed Pokemon Pinball:Ruby And Sapphire out now for GBA, and Pokemon Coliseum for GameCube forthcoming early next year as a Pokemon Stadium-style companion for Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire on GBA, it seems Pikachu and friends are here to stay.

waieitch writes "A long-waited new version of the scripting language, Ruby 1.8.0 has just been released. You can download from here, and the changelog is available. With many new libraries, say dRuby, ERB, REXML, this version is doubled by 1.6.8 in size."

tcopeland writes "RubyForge is a new hosting area for open source Ruby projects. It's powered by the popular GForge fork of SourceForge development. There's even a couple of code snippets up there already."

JayBonci writes "It may come as a surprise that within the pages of 'Perl 6 Essentials' lies what could be two books, despite its length. If not for lack of cover space, it could easily bear the names "Perl6 for Perl5 programmers" and "Parrot in a Nutshell". Both topics are concise and clearly covered, despite their relatively different audience." Read on for the rest of Jay's review.

Simon P. Chappell writes "The Eclipse IDE has thundered into the collective consciousness of Java developers since its release by IBM as Open Source Software. Up until this time, the majority of available documentation at the Eclipse website has been for plug-in developers, with scant attention given to the rest of us that actually want to use the tool for anything else. This book restores the balance and brings much needed help to those interested in this IDE." Read on for the rest of Simon's review, about which he says "Full Disclosure: I received a free, review copy of this book, so feel free to assume that I've been bought off and have traded my technical integrity to put about an inch of dead tree on my shelf."

Thanks to Polygon for posting the Japanese games industry's half-year console hardware and software stats on their site. They summarize: "Sales of Sony's PlayStation 2 console significantly outpaced all competitors... surprisingly, Square-Enix topped all software publishers by a large margin." As far as Japanese hardware sales go, the GameCube (8.3 percent) and especially Xbox (1.6 percent) are falling ever-further behind the Playstation 2 (58.5 percent.) Regarding software, Square Enix may not have expected Final Fantasy X-2 to sell almost 2 million copies, but it only boosted their already top-selling Japanese output. Nintendo's second place in software may be more due to their handheld output, not including (?) the separately-listed and top-selling Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire for GBA, rather than their GameCube titles (though some GC titles like Animal Crossing have been surprise hits.)

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamesindustry.biz article describing Nintendo's attempts to stop European retailers importing Gamecube/GBA games. According to the piece, "..cease and desist orders have been issued to a number of independent retailers by Nintendo this week, demanding that they stop selling imported Nintendo titles and supply details of their suppliers." With handheld titles such as Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire lacking regional lock-outs, and even US/Japanese Gamecube games being playable with the help of Freeloader, Nintendo are clearly worried about imported titles taking away from native European sales, but as Gamesindustry.biz points out, "..the move will prevent [consumers] from playing titles which Nintendo of Europe has failed to release in this territory, such as the highly acclaimed Animal Crossing."

DJSpray writes "I've written a review of three books about the Ruby programming language, available on my weblog here. The three books are Yukihiro Matsumoto's Ruby in a Nutshell from O'Reilly, Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way (Sams), and Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt (Addison-Wesley). Note that the third book is available online here for those who prefer that sort of thing. Executive summary: while I have found several of the other O'Reilly Nutshell series books to be excellent, this one is riddled with errors, confusing writing, and omissions, and does not live up to O'Reilly's usual standards. Fulton's book is filled with good cookbook examples and well-written explanatory material, as well as solid tutorial examples, but it is not structured as a reference. The Pragmatic Programmer's book works well as a reference and covers language features in increasing depth, but with fewer examples. Ruby beginners may find that the latter two books actually complement each other nicely, while I can't recommend this edition of the Nutshell book at all."

Makarand writes "Although slowing down a light beam is as simple as passing it through a window pane, slowing down light dramatically has always involved extremely low temperatures and rooms full of complex equipment. A new small device developed at the University of Rochester can now slow light down to 127 mph without using the room-filling mechanisms previously required. The new technique uses a laser beam to create a hole in the absorption spectrum of a common ruby at room temperatures that can allow a second laser beam, with a frequency slightly different than the first laser, to shine through that hole at a greatly reduced speed. This light slowing device might find applications in the telecommunications industry."

A reader writes:" Persistence for object-oriented systems is an incredibly cumbersome task to deal with when building many kinds of applications: mapping objects to tables, XML, flat files or use some other non-OO way to represent data destroys encapsulation completely, and is generally slow, both at development and at runtime. The Object Prevalence concept, developed by the Prevayler team, and implemented in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Delphi, can be a great a solution to this mess. The concept is pretty simple: keep all the objects in RAM and serialize the commands that change those objects, optionally saving the whole system to disk every now and then (late at night, for example). This architecture results in query speeds that many people won't believe until they see for themselves: some benchmarks point out that it's 9000 times faster than a fully-cached-in-RAM Oracle database, for example. Good thing is: they can see it for themselves. Here's an article about it, in case you want to learn more."

Mitchell writes "People from several language communities came together to create a joint year-in-review for Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl."

Ursus Maximus writes "Scripting Language City is for folks who want to learn more about the future of this increasingly important subset of the programming universe. Scripting languages are not just for odd jobs anymore ;-))). Special attention is paid to four languages in Python City, Ruby City, Perl City, and JavaScript Expert Systems which includes a Scripting Language Chooser Program as well as a Basketball Expert Ssystem and a Football Expert System that are certainly something different from the usual same old mouse-over scripts usually found on JavaScript sites. There is also a web spider program that scrapes the web daily and provides updated lists of new web articles on scripting languages, with seperates outputs for each of the featured languages. as added bonuses, there is a page of essays and resources on open source and the free software movement called Farnham's Freehold and a page called The Linux Chronicles that follows the experiences of a Linux newbie with wit and humor. Not a slick professional web site, Scripting Language City is a work of love by a paramour of everything connected with scripting languages, open source, and the programming of free software."

phyxeld writes "RubyCocoa 0.4.0 is out. From the sf.net page: 'RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script. In Cocoa application, mixture of program written by both Ruby and Objective-C is possible.' It's always nice to see more GPL software in the Mac OS X world."

Roger Curry writes "Letters to Michael Faraday in 1856 from previously unknown victorian experimentalist Ernest Glitch have recently been discovered. The history of science may need to be revised. His letters, and accounts of his work, would appear to indicate the observation of laser action in air, a Victorian Nitrogen Laser, more than a century before Maiman first demonstrated his ruby laser. Also, in a letter dated 8th July 1856 he notes the crystallisation of the fullerene C60 some 150 years before Kroto. Amazingly, there are also accounts of a Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engine detailing the use of hypergolic propellants and deLaval nozzles, a Victorian Tesla Coil, with reference to a possible medieval Coil, and Manned Flight achieved long before the Wright Bros., using Multiple Valve-less Pulse Jets."