Week 320 - Interesting links

Taking the Raspberry Pi 2 for a Test Drive with GNU Radio

I’ve been playing around with GNU Radio applications on the Raspberry Pi recently and I found this tutorial really helpful. — JM

Rails on Docker

This is a nice simple walkthrough of how to use Docker to setup a Rails development environment. Also I hadn’t come across boot2docker, the lightweight Linux distribution, or the headless gem, a Ruby wrapper around Xvfb, before. — JM

JRuby+Truffle - a High-Performance Truffle Backend for JRuby

My involvement in the London Computation Club has made me more interested in the design trade-offs in compilers, interpreters, etc. This experimental implementation of an interpreter for JRuby based on the work of an Oracle Labs intern sounds fascinating. Via Tom H. — JM

React.js Conf 2015 - Hype!

In this conference talk, Ryan Florence demonstrates some of the power of React.js. I found it all pretty impressive. — JM

Mirage 2014 review: IPv6, TLS, Irmin, Jitsu and community growth

A conversation with Tom S prompted me to read some more about Mirage OS and building Unikernels. There certainly seems to be a lot of work going on in this space. — JM

RFC 7464, JSON Text Sequences

Reading this reminded me of the “ASCII Delimited Text” blog post I linked to in week 272 links. The use of these ASCII control characters really appeals to me. I guess that they’ve not really been adopted because using printable characters is so much easier. — CR

xsv: Command line tool for dealing with CSV files

I spent a short while playing with this earlier today and was pretty impressed. It’s not something I have a need to use everyday but I can certainly remember occasions where it would’ve saved me some time. Even the basic ability to display CSV data in a table will come in handy.

It also includes an option (xsv fmt --ascii) to convert from CSV to ASCII delimiters, as discussed in the link above. — CR

Little Big Details - GOV.UK info pages

I enjoy reading Little Big Details and was pleased to see them include GOV.UK’s info pages. — CR