Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for October 2006

Domain Specific Languages (DSL) in Ruby

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Today I was talking to Professor Thomas Plagemann of the University of Oslo about programming languages like Simula (invented, of course, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard there) and Ruby.

When I got back home, I started looking at some innovative programming paradigms and I came across two great articles:

Martin Fowler’s article gives a glimpse of the future of programming: Domain Specific Languages (DSL). And Ross Russ Olsen’s article shows how to use Ruby to create an impressive quiz application which implements a DSL and which is 100% configurable at run time.

I’m sure that you’ll be impressed by Ruby’s elegance and power.

There is no 1Gb limit on MyT now

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I’ve just learnt that the 1Gb transfer limit for MyT has been waived. Instead, there is a new Garantie d’Usage which basically states:

Vous avez la priorité lorsque vous êtes dans votre “garantie d’usage”. Si vous dépassez votre “garantie d’usage”, vous pourrez continuer à  surfer, lire vos mails, mais avec un niveau de priorité moindre, pour preserver la qualité de service pour tous. Vous ne paierez rien de plus. Avec My.T, vous profitez du haut débit pleinement, sans soucis.

What I read from what is:

  • Up to 1Gb of transfer per month, Mauritius Telecom will do its best (i.e. best-effort) to give us the bandwidth we’re paying for (i.e. 256 kbit/s in my case)
  • If the transfer limit has been exceeded in the month, then Internet will become very slow (I wonder if they are using some kind of traffic shaping) but will still remain free.

Personally, that’s ok for me :-)

Announcing the CSE Programming Contest

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I’m happy to announce the CSE Programming Contest that I am organising together with my colleagues Sudha Cheerkoot-Jalim, Anwar Chutoo and Pascal Grosset.

Please get the official announcement then fill in the registration form and return it to us by this Friday.

The registration is open to any undergraduate student from the University of Mauritius (including non-CSE students) but we will have to choose (using some magic formula) 40 students to participate in the contest on the 11th of October 2006 at 14:00 as our biggest lab (the MCID Lab) can only accomodate that number of students.

Please note that each of the 40 selected will have a Kubuntu Linux PC with ISO C/C++ and Java 5.0 compilers. Eclipse (with CDT) will also be installed but, of course, one can also use vi or emacs or kate (etc.) and the command line.

The problems will be really tough… but fun to solve! And we have not yet decided about the prize (if any…)

Good luck!