Just go straight to the search page and ignore the fact that it’s a community driven dictionary, Wikipedia-style. There search for something, I don’t know, woman. The first thing you may notice is that, even though it supports lot’s of languages, you didn’t have to specify which ones to search for. You just typed the word and hit search, from whom they might have got that strange idea?

You can argue that it’s only searching on English and Lojban. If it was up to me, “Any” would have been the default option, pick it up and search for red to see how that’s interesting. Now, you click on xunre and you find out a lot of information for that word, like the type, the rafsi (like an abbreviation in Lojban) and the explanation of its meaning.

If you don’t know how Lojban works, it’ll be hard to understand the explanation of the meaning and that’s beyond this post. Keep reading and you reach the amazing part, the “Notes: See also…”. Here you have synonims or other words you might be interested in. From there you start to browse the dictionary learning many new words related to the original one. That’s an amazing tool. For example, the first one is skari, which means color. When you go skari’s page you see: “Gloss Word: color“. Notice that color is also a link, which let’s you go back and forth between English and Lojban as you please.

That last point is essential. I not only use English, I also use Spanish and some day, maybe Esperanto. When I’m searching for a term I go back and forth between various related words, in various languages until I reach the conclusion: “this is the right word, there are other similar words, but this is the closest one“. I also test that it translate to the meaning I want in both, English and Spanish. It’s very rare to find an ambiguous term in both English and Spanish, but it is common in each of the separately.

Riism (Riismo in Esperanto) basically adds a masculine suffix and a new gender-neutral pronoun. The pronoun is ri, so li and ŝi both become ri. You could say “mi amas ri”, meaning “I love him/her”, thus expressing your love without having to reveal your sexuality inclinations.

And the suffix is -iĉ-, so patro is parent, not father, patrino is still mother, but father is patriĉo. In the Esperanto group at work we started to play with it, I hope more people will embrace it.

This kind of gender-neutrality is not something new, other languages such as Finnish, Swahili, Chinese and of course, Lojban, already work this way.

A little bit expensive I’d say, but definitely interesting.

• Django
• Ruby on Rails
• Zope/Plone

This is a remake of Installing Rails 2 on Ubuntu but targeting Ruby in general and with some improvements. Essentially the same, actually, but more usable, at least for myself.

Ubuntu, like many other free operating systems, have a beautiful package management system that will track what depends on what, what is installed, what is not, what is not longer needed, which versions of each. If you tamper with it, you are asking for trouble. If you do a manual upgrade, from sources, eventually a package upgrade will downgrade your version or some other application being incompatible will not work. And once you start throwing files in /usr, you start to ask for trouble. I’ve been using this type of operating systems for years and I’ve learned this by experience.

Nevertheless you, as I, want to try and code with Rails 2, right? Or Merb? or any other Ruby softawer that hasen’t been packaged yet. Well, this is how I installed it in my Kubuntu box (should work the same for any Ubuntu and Debian derivate as well as others). I’ve decided to install everything on /opt/ruby. I like to keep more-or-less self-contained directories in /opt. So I started with:

and that’s the last time I’ll ever use root access in this document, and that’s the way I like it. Another important detail is that I’ll keep all the environment and software entirely optional. All you’ll do here will be in a separate directory and will not interfere with the rest of your computer. Actually, to use it, you’ll have to load a file, which means, you control when you are entering the Ruby environment. In ~/bin/ruby.sh I put:

Django tries to be everything. It comes with its own ORM, its own template engine, its own everything. That gives you a nice developing experience because everything fits together and because very nice applications can be built on top of all those components, like the admin tool, which is amazing.

On the other hand, if you don’t like one component, you can’t just remove it and put another one in its place. Maybe you can, but it is most likely that it won’t go very smooth. All these issues apply equally to Rails.

Pylons doesn’t try to do anything else than the basics, and leaves the rest to external libraries. External libraries that you pick, and switch if you feel like it. This is closer to real-, I mean, non-web-application development where you generally don’t use frameworks. It sounds good, but as soon as you start using Pylons, you see that it seems like a bunch of different stuff badly glued together. The whole experience ends up not being as pleasant although it is, I’d say, more professional (you are picking the tools you think are right, not whatever that was already there).

But there’s more. If you develop an application in the Pylons way, you can reuse parts of it without depending on the web framework. You use the database models in a desktop application and you only depend on SQLAlchemy (or whatever ORM you picked). You don’t end up with a desktop application that depends on a web framework, which doesn’t makes sense. This may be important or most likely, not.

It would be nice if something like Django was built on top of Pylons. That would be something like, if you use Elixir and you have this or that template engine, you get a nice administration tool, if you don’t, you don’t get it. But you still can pick your philosophy without changing basic parts, like the way you write the configuration file. Given infinite time this facts should reach the conclusion that Pylons is the right choice, but the Django’s admin tool is so sexy!