I attended the event called OoO, which is an offline meeting for offline renderists. The word renderist means people who are making renderer or interested in it.

The contents of the event is as follows.

• Keynote by Toshiya Hachisuka
• Report of SIGGRAPH 2008
• An introduction of DEMO scenes.

These were all attractive and interesting. And talks about the Larrabee also were ubiquitous.

I have a long standing issue. The issue is if providing server-side offline renderer itself is able to be a business going concern. Once I had tried at 2003, but it failed. I thought it was too early and it would need a time of 5 years. So I gave up the business and switched to make a web application.

And the 5 years went by...

The gang's all near.

Formula is the service for embedding and sharing images of mathematical expression on your blog easily.

Recently, the service corresponded to embedding by BBCode. For example, following BBCode is generated to be embedded.

   1  [url=http://formula.s21g.com/?f(x)%3D%5Cint_0%5E%7Bx%7Dg(t)%5C,dt][img]http://formula.s21g.com/?f(x)%3D%5Cint_0%5E%7Bx%7Dg(t)%5C,dt.png[/img][/url]

So that you can use it for bulletin boards which are capable to interpret BBCode such as phpBB.

I made an Ubiquity command in order to enable us to get images of mathematical equations from anywhere at anytime. It uses the Formula , which is the service for making images of mathematical formulae.

You can also get a preview of your input in real time, like this.

INSTALL

The command is able to be installed from here.

• http://ubiquity.s21g.com/8616?name=formula

NOTE1: You need the Ubiquity , an extension of the Firefox, to use ubiquity commands.

NOTE2: This command requires BASIC authentication via SSL at the first time in order to prevent SPAM posts. When you get the dialog box of the authentication, please enter your name and password which were used when you left a comment at the Formula. It means that you must leave at least one comment to the Formula for being authorized.

I made a tiny presentation tool for terminal addicts (of course including myself ;-)

• present-0.1.1 - Rubyforge
• present GitHub

USAGE is in README and sample directory.

You can make a presentation by using your favorite terminal like this.

   1  
   2  
   3  
   4        _                  _
   5       |_)   |_     _ ._  |_) _.o| _
   6       | \|_||_)\/ (_)| | | \(_|||_>
   7                /
   8  
   9       The Web Application Framework
  10  
  11          s21g LLC Genki Takiuchi
  12  
  13  
  14   1/15|**                          |00:02

I'd used this tool at the LL future.

MozillaLab's Ubiquity is a promising new window to the world after the age of the search box. I was strongly impressed with it, I've done a quickie job.

Gist Ubiquitifier

This is a service for enabling us to publish your Ubiquity commands without any servers which host the HTML file for installing the commands.

USAGE

At first, you make a JavaScript snippet including Ubiquity commands on the Gist.

If the URL of the page is as follows,

http://gist.github.com/7630

the URL of installation page is as follows.

http://ubiquity.s21g.com/7630

You can also specify the name of the command by adding name parameter to the query string, like this.

http://ubiquity.s21g.com/7630?name=s21g-blog-search

Currently the design of the service is very crufty. I will improve it if there are needs.

The PaginationScope library is a pagination library of the NamedScope era.

The difference to the last version is only a small bug fix. So you can keep using it if you don't mind.

That's all. But I shall use this opportunity to write some document for the helper method of the library.

SYNOPSIS:

   1  paginate <scope>[, <options>]

The scope is a pagination scope object. The options is a hash including several parameters as follows.

• :newer The label string for the link to a newer page.
• :older The label string for the link to an older page.
• :left The number of pages which appears on the left side.
• :right The number of pages which appears on the right side.
• :window The width of pages which surrounds the current page.

I made a new pagination library for the NamedScope era. You can use will_paginate for ordinary case. It must be better than the young PaginationScope library. But if you want to paginate with complicated chained named_scopes, this is suitable.

Usage

At first, include the module into your model class.

   1  class Post
   2    include PaginationScope

By this, the scope named "paginate" is made.

And then, in the controller of which you want to use pagination, you can get the scope for pagination like this.

   1  class PostsController < ApplicationController
   2    def index
   3      @posts = Post.not_deleted.paginate(params[:page], 10)

Finally, the pagination links are generated by calling the view helper, like this.

   1  <%= paginate @posts %>

Have fun!

We announce the release of new service named Formula, which provides a way of embedding mathematical equations into your blogs and sharing it.

http://formula.s21g.com/

Using the service, everybody can easily bring a beautiful mathematical expression to a blog post, like this.

You can jump to the page of discussion about the expression by clicking the image of the expression.

Usage is quite simple.

1. Write a mathematical expression in LaTeX format into the form in the top page of Formula.
2. And then, you will get the image of the expression at the bottom of the form as a preview.
3. Finally, you can generate the HTML snippet of the image for embedding by clicking the Submit button.

There is no need to sign up to use this service.

For details, email us to . We appreciate any kind of feedbacks.

Thank you.

Genki Takiuchi

I made a small utility library named Wormhole. The library enables us to communicate between caller and callee.

Here is a simple example of use.

   1  require 'rubygems'
   2  require 'wormhole'
   3  
   4  def foo(array)
   5    array << :foo # (1)
   6    Wormhole.throw array
   7    array << :baz # (3)
   8  end
   9  
  10  result = Wormhole.catch do
  11    foo []
  12  end.return do |array|
  13    array << :bar # (2)
  14  end
  15  puts result.inspect # => [:foo, :bar, :baz]

First, the block passed to Wormhole.catch, the caller, is evaluated. The foo method, the callee, throw an array object passing through the wormhole. Then the array is caught by the last block passed to a return method. A block parameter of the block is the array. Finally, the process goes back to the point 3 after the last block ends. A return value of the foo method is returned via the return method.

By using this utility, you can participate to a depth of a complicated system from a safer position.

At the end, you can install this utility from the GitHub by using gem command like this.

   1  % sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
   2  % sudo gem install genki-wormhole

Have fun!

I had moved main repository of ShootingStar from Rubyforge to GitHub, because I am difficult to develop it actively for a while, so that you can customize it independently if you want.

The page of ShootingStar is here:

• http://github.com/genki/shooting-star/tree/master

I appreciate any feedbacks via twitter to @takiuchi.