Queen Victoria, Ruby and Debauchery Among The Upper Classes

Let me deal with these in order...

The Jewel In The Crown

As regular readers will know, over the past couple of years much of my life has been taken up with the development of a Ruby programming environment (Ruby In Steel) for Visual Studio. One of the things that characterises a first rate IDE is first rate code-completion or, to use the Microsoft jargon, IntelliSense. Ruby makes code completion hard - it is a dynamic language so a variable, x may change from an integer to a string to a MyThingummy object in a matter of a few lines of code. Good code completion has to be able to handle that and provide relevant member lists at any arbitrary point. Ruby doesn’t go out of its way to help you to work this out - it doesn’t even have type declarations. Rails makes things worse - its code libraries are immense and complicated and the relationships between the component parts are not explicit.

I won’t go into all the nasty inner details of Ruby code completion but suffice to say that while many IDEs do it, rather few do it at all well. Some use simple lookup lists (fast but inaccurate), others, I suspect may interrogate the code using the Ruby interpreter (accurate but slow). We decided to write our own code inference engine from scratch. This compiles the standard libraries and interprets new code as it is written, thus providing both speed and accuracy. Getting the Rails IntelliSense right has been one of the major tasks for us in recent months.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep us busy, as a sideline, we also wrote a Ruby/.NET connector widget which I mentioned in a previous blog entry. This is free, by the way, and you can use whether or not you have Ruby In Steel. Drag a Ruby Connector into a C#, VB.NET or Chrome project and you can design visual front ends in a .NET language and run your Ruby programs from them.

 Download Page For the Ruby Connector.

But, where you may be asking yourself, does Queen Victoria enter into the picture? This takes me back to MySpace.

Are Friends Eclectic?

Until a few weeks ago, ‘online networking’ sites such as MySpace and Facebook were unknown to me. Sure, I’d heard the names but I had no real idea of what went on inside their semi-closed environments or why I should wish to be a part of it.

However, having heard so many people talk about their MySpace sites, curiosity got the better of me and so I enrolled and set one up myself. Initially, I was presented with a pretty empty page into which I entered a few personal details such as musical and literary tastes and so forth. Still, the page was distinctly lacking in the ‘community’ thing in which MySpace is supposed to specialise. Fortunately, a few MySpace veterans who knew me from elsewhere, took pity on my isolation and invited me to be their ’friends’. This means that their names and pictures now appear in a ‘friends space’ section of my site and mine appears in theirs. It also means they can send messages to me and other people in their friends groups.

In this way, pretty quickly my circle of MySpace friends expanded. MySpace appears to be particularly popular among showbiz types. My ‘friends space’ is largely filled with pop stars whom I got to know back in the ‘80s when I used to be a music journalist; and magicians (whom I’ve got to know more recently thanks to an amateur interest in the arts of prestidigitation).

Meanwhile, I also joined two other online communities - Facebook, which is broadly speaking, very similar to MySpace, but has a notable lack of ‘80s pop stars and a great deal more people whom I know from my professional activities in software development and publishing; and Blog Catalog, which is an online community of Bloggers.

 My Facebook Site
 My MySpace Site

Queens I Have Known...

Into the story at this point enters the dashing, suave and more than slightly dissolute figure of Lord Likely, a Victorian gentleman adventurer whose explorations are just as likely to involve the darkest regions of the human body as those of the upper Nile. If you are easily shocked, be sure to keep a bottle of smelling salts close to hand before venturing onto his lordship’s blog: http://lordlikely.blogspot.com/.

It was on Blog Catalog that I made Lord Likely’s acquaintance - and this acquaintance was renewed first on MySpace and later on Facebook; Lord Likely (whose ego knows few if any bounds) looms large on both.

It was Lord Likely’s network of MySpace friends which revealed to me the somewhat surprising fact that many of the great, good, elevated and not to put too fine a point on it, dead... have remarkably active MySpace pages...

These include:
 Charles Dickens
 William Shakespeare
 H. P. Lovecraft
 Rasputin

and, last but far from least...

 Queen Victoria

With so many well known people on MySpace it is sometimes difficult to work out who are really who they appear to be and who, on the contrary, are mere impersonators. OK, OK, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s probably reasonably easy to make an informed guess that most of the people in the list above are not who they claim to be. I mean, good Heavens, Queen Victoria is no doubt far too busy administering the Empire to fritter away her time on MySpace. No doubt one of her butlers does it in his spare time. But what about...

 Prince Charles
 HRH The Duke Of Edinburgh
 Her Majesty The Queen

Many of these blogs are written in the first person, so who am I to doubt them?

If the Royals are not your cuppa tea, you could try the following...

 Groucho Marx
 Benny Hill
 Duran Duran

The Duran Duran site is the real thing, by the way. Or anyhow, I think it is. On MySpace, you can never be entirely sure...