Yariv’s Blog

On January 17th, I’ll be giving a talk about my adventures in open source Erlang at the Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group (MSLUG) meeting. For more information, visit http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug.

I hear the members of this group have a strong interest in Erlang. Guillaume Germain, who wrote Termite, an implementation of Erlang style concurrency for Gambit-C Scheme, is a member, and so is Marc Feeley, the author of Gamit-C. I’m looking forward for my second opportunity to be surrounded by people who are interested in Erlang :)

This meeting is open to everyone, so if you’re interested in attending, you’re more than welcome.

Aside: I lived in Montreal for a year when I was 15. My last visit was about 5 years ago, so It’ll be nice to visit again. It’s been a while since I’ve had some good poutine! :)

Here’s a good brain teaser to give you some entertainment for the new year.

You have 12 balls, identical in every way except that one of them has a different weight from all the others. You also have a balance scale. In 3 rounds, in each of which you can compare the weights of any 2 groups of balls, you have to ascertain which is the ball with the different weight and whether this ball is heavier or lighter than the other balls.

This is not a trick question in any way. I solved part of this puzzle after I got a significant hint. I wish I had tried a bit harder to solve it by myself, but it’s too late now. If you want a hint, you can email me, but you’ll feel greater satisfaction if you solve it by yourself.

Happy new year!

Following the suggestion of one of my readers, I created a Google group for ErlyWeb hackers. You can join it to ask questions, share points of view, help each other out, make suggestions, and announce the launch of the killer ErlyWeb app you’re building :)

Here’s the link: http://groups.google.com/group/erlyweb

From now on, I will make all announcements about new releases in this group rather than on my blog.

I created a zip file containing ErlyWeb 0.1 and its libraries for easy installation. Check out erlyweb.org for more info.

I’m not exactly enjoying what one would call a “positive” cash flow these days, but I decided to dig into my hard earned budget anyway and spend a chunk of it on a trip to Sweden for the 12th annual Erlang conference.

Here’s my dilemma: I want to take this opportunity to make a 2 week backpacking trip in Europe. I want to see Sweden, but I’m afraid it will be too cold to enjoy in the winter. I can either stay in Sweden after the conference, or hop on a plane to France or Spain (I *really* want to visit Barcelona).

I’d appreciate it if anyone could give me some tips on what I should do.

To save money, and also to stay true to the spirit of backpacking, I’ll be staying in hostels, which means I probably won’t bring my MacBook. I hope that spending 2 weeks without a computer won’t result in serious withdrawal symptoms.

the City of Boston — for its solar-powered trash compactors!

I must praise this compactor for its fault tolerant design: even if the power grid fails, it keeps compacting away. Very Erlangy :)

(Alas, if the sun fails, it is in trouble — but then we’d have bigger problems to worry about :) )

After weeks of bombarding me with tedious Erlang hype, reddit has finally given me a useful link: Paul Graham (whom I’ve been accused of over-quoting :) ), will be speaking tomorrow at MIT. (For literal minded people — I didn’t mean the first part of that sentence seriously :) ) It’s a free talk that’s open to the public.

Is anybody who reads this blog going?

Here’s a geo map overlay view taken from Google Analytics for my blog’s last 500 visits.

As you can see, Erlang isn’t just popular in Sweden :)

Ranked by number of visitors, the top 10 countries are USA (1312 visits), UK (188 visits), Germany (151 visits), Canada (135 visits), China (120 visits), Sweden (106 visits), france (94 visits), Australia (81 visits), Brazil (75 visits) and Netherlands (63 visits).

Where are you from?

Update: I made the high-res map downloadable.

Dear readers,

I’d like to take a short break from my Erlang postings and share a few pictures I took on my trip earlier today to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Note: I did some retouching with GIMP (actually, GimpShop for OS X) to enhance the dynamic range of these images, as the originals suffered from faded colors due to the poor lighting conditions.

A Velociraptor

A green lizard

This dino must have been coding in Java. Its neck looks like this stack trace :)

A chameleon

You can view the rest of the set here

Hi,

I’m curious as to who’s planning on going to the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop in Portlang on the 16th (the link is on the front page of http://erlang.org).

I haven’t made up my mind yet if I should go. It would be fun to meet some Erlangers face to face but I have no idea how popular this workshop is.

I’d appreciate it if somebody could clue me in.

Thanks in advance!