Aux

At last! New FreeBSD release is at your doors! Khm... Maybe not at your doors, but a few clicks away from your HDD (: Announcement page contains links to BitTorrent and lots of FTPs, full release notes are here and most important changes are:

* The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
* Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
* A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
* Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
* The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.
* KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
* DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures

Enjoy!

Safely Remove Hardware (SRH) is a context menu for unmounting different removable disks (UMS, flash memory, card readers) in Windows. It was introduced in XP (AFAIK) and was a bit unusable. Nothing changed in Vista, but it looks like it is finally properly working in Windows 7. Russian IT portal Habrahabr has an article about new SRH, its features and functionality. If you do not understand Russian - don't worry, screenshots from latest beta are enough to understand what's new!

Ruby is

A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.

Ruby is really cool and writting in it is a pleasure! But where to start from if you are totally new to Ruby? What to download and which IDE to use? I would recommend NetBeans. First of all it is written in Java so it is a crossplatform solution: Windows, UNIX, MacOS X are all handled. And this IDE has a lot of useful features like Ruby on Rails support, Ruby debugger and Ruby Gems installation manager. But the best feature for newcomers is bundled JRuby - a Ruby implementation in Java. So one package contains everything to get you started in no time!

You can read more about features and functionality on NetBeans Ruby page and then download it (about 60 megs).

So, everything is downloaded, what's next? I suggest reading Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. First edition of this book is freely available online, but remember - first edition comes from year 2000 and some things are changed, so some examples will not work or will show you some kind of warning. Anyway this is the best guide to Ruby I have read, so I suggest you to buy this one (newer edition of course). Also there are tonns of documentation online available.

I hope you will enjoy programming Ruby as much as I do!

Just found on engadget an article about new patent from Apple explaining possibilities to make a brand new 3D desktop. Looks cool! It features object interactions, for example, Sun icon showing current weather will light up near by icons, attaching objects to surfaces and so on. Follow links and read more - it's to much to copy/paste (:

Specially for those who live outside of T-Mobile network coverage Google started to sell developer phones without any strings attached. This dev phone (currently only one priced at 399$) not only free of SIM lock, but also free to change its firmware and every piece of software inside at developer's wish. A trully open mobile phone! More information is available on Android Market. You should pay initial 25$ fee to become a developer and access Android Market as a developer.