About a year ago, I'd talked extensively about how great Ruby is. I've now had a year in which to play around with the language, and it has continued to grow on me. I even started playing around with the latest, hottest thing on the development scene - Ruby on Rails. Okay, it's not the newest thing out there, but it solves a lot of problems very quickly. I've been using Ruby quite heavily over the past few months, trying to write up a complete library for some scientific endeavours, and the use of TextMate has been invaluable. It's a great editor. Unfortunately, it's got a 30 day trial, so I'm stuck without it at the moment. The academic version is only €29 though, so I should have no qualms about buying it. If you were to mug me for some qualms, you'll find that indeed, I have no qualms with spending the money. It's just PayPal has a lot of problems with taking my money. I've just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get it to accept my payment, and failing miserably. Why is it that I could pay for my Flickr account with PayPal, but it just refuses to accept my payment for TextMate? I'm coming to the realisation that the name PayPal is a complete misnomer - since you can neither Pay, and they are not very Pal like.

In the end, to actually get a license for it - I've had to ask Bhautik to buy the license for me. I suspect the problem lay in the credit card numbers not matching up with the physical location of the IP. I mean, I'm all for security, but you're making it very hard to make impulse purchase on the Interwebs. It's not like anyone would be overseas, or have multiple credit cards, or speak another language while living in a third party country, right?

Update: 6:30 Wednesday night - Just in case anyone asks, don't use the default install of Ruby on Tiger. Observe!

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
.F
Finished in 0.049977 seconds.

  1) Failure:
test_simple_monosaccharide(TC_SugarGc) [tests/tc_SugarGc.rb:31]:
<[0, 1, 0]> expected but was
<[0, 1, 1]>.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 1 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [universal-darwin8.0]

This first run of the test fails. It's counting memory references of instances of a particular class (Monosaccharide in this case), starting at 0, going up to 1, and then going back down to 0 when the object goes out of scope again. I also call the garbage collector, since I'm not willing to wait around for my laptop to run out of memory. It looks like the garbage collector isn't working though, as it keeps that memory reference around.

[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -Ilib tests/tc_SugarGc.rb 
Loaded suite tests/tc_SugarGc
Started
..
Finished in 0.04419 seconds.

2 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
[hirenj@nerfherder SugarCoreRuby-gc]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i686-darwin8.6.1]

The garbage collector works on 1.8.4. Lesson learnt? Avoid the default install of Ruby on Tiger like the plague.