JJinuxLand

Does gravity move at the speed of light? For instance, if I were able to change some energy into matter, how long would it take for other matter to begin to feel the attraction of the matter I created? I assume someone out there knows the answer.

If you could convert energy to matter and back again in an amazingly concise manner, and do it at a specific frequency, and if you could detect such changes in gravity at a specific frequency, you could conceivably use gravity as a communications mechanism. That's not likely to happen during my lifetime, but it does make for some interesting science fiction.

I finished reading ActionScript 3.0: Visual QuickStart Guide. All-in-all, it wasn't bad. I needed to learn ActionScript quickly, but not extremely deeply, and it helped me do that.

This is the first time I've read a visual quickstart guide. The book was only about 300 pages, and each page was cut in two columns. The inner columns have code, and the outer columns have prose. Hence, there's only about 150 pages of prose. The code tended to be very basic and very redundant. Unsurprisingly, the author was a non-software engineer who learned how to code in ActionScript. I sort of expected that. The book wasn't perfect, but I definitely recommend it if you're a software engineer who needs to learn ActionScript in a hurry.

That's enough for the book review. Now, let me say a few words about ActionScript. First of all, ActionScript 3.0 is a compiled language. ActionScript started life as ECMAScript, but by the time they hit 3.0, it had morphed into a pleasant…

Is there something like Ruby Toolbox for Python? Unlike PyPI, Ruby Toolbox feels highly curated, which I really, really like. Notice it even has graphs to show you the relative popularities of the various packages.

Half the reason I go to PyCon is so that I can know which libraries are good, and which ones aren't so good. Ruby Toolbox helps me cut to the chase, so it'd be great to find something like that in the Python world too.