Ruby

I apologize for not posting here for almost half a year now. I have started to learn ruby and I'm impressed with I have seen so far. I read the book/tutorial in http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ it didn't take me much time since it's geared to someone learning how to program for the first time, but you get much of the syntax of the language just by reading the tutorial.

The most interesting part of the tutorial is chapter 10. Procs is nothing new, and is not unique to ruby, from a C perspective it gives the programmer much more flexibility.

I can think of many cases where passing Procs to Methods and return Procs from Methods would be useful, i.e. make a method that will return the n_th Laguerre polynomial using the Rodrigues formula. Notice we are not evaluating the n_th Laguerre polynomial at x. We are evaluating a function that will calculate the n_th polynomial at any x.

Cheers.

Skribit

I have added a new widget, it's called skribit and it will allow to make suggestions for my blog. I have not worked a lot on the blog lately but I'm planning to make some changes in the future.

Best Regards
Chuy

NExT step machine

Jacob, Sahil and Me won a NExT machine (no one else wanted it) from the experts. Nice! Now we need some power cables to get it to work. More to come stay tuned.

WWDC 08

WWDC 2008 is almost here.
And I'm thrilled to be attending this year. This is the first year to wwdc sold out and is also the first year after the announcement of the iPhone SDK, it's certainty going to be a big event. If any one here is attending give me a call.
Chuy :)

Good Video

I have been watching some of the TED talks, some of them are really good. But for some reason I have seen this one a dozen times already.

Science Posters. (Made on a Mac)

Don't forget to check out the
2007 WWDC science posters.

2008 A New Year

2008 is here. And it has been here for a while now. I'm just getting started on a new job so I haven't published anything new for a while. With the job change there is also a small change (not a big one in this case) on my research area. I will start doing some Density Functional Calculations (DFT) so I might be talking a little bit about it on here from time to time. In the mean while I'm using the MIT open courseware to start learning the techniques used to do this kind of calculations. If you are interested you can take a look at Atomistic Computer Modeling of Materials.

Best Regards
Chuy