http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20051218.html
Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th December 2005
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by
Tim S…
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User Group News
* Ruby group in Orlando Florida
-------------------------------
Steve L. wants to know if there are "any Ruby U. Groups in
Orlando
Florida, or anywhere in Orange or Seminole County Florida?"
* Seattle.rb RubyGems Hackfest this weekend!
--------------------------------------------
Eric H. announced the second Seattle.rb RubyGems Hackfest, on
Saturday 17th December.
* Utah Ruby U. Group, December Meeting
-----------------------------------------
Jamis B. said the Utah Ruby U. Group's next meeting is on
the
21st December 2005 at Neumont University.
"We will be doing some pair/team programming exercises, so bring
a
laptop if you have one."
Threads
stable sort_by?
Patrick G. wanted a “stable” sort_by method.
(Jim W.: “A stable sort will leave items in the original order
if
their keys are equal.”)
Robert K. gave a technique for doing a stable sort with Ruby’s
built
in Enumerable#sort_by method.
Simply change
enum.sort_by {|x| calculate_key(x) }
to
i=0
enum.sort_by { |x| [ calculate_key(x), i+=1 ] }
Math::PI?
Daniel Schüle asked where to find Math::PI, saying “am I missing some
module with math constants or are the users … me in this case 
supposed
to define them on our own?”
Ara T. Howard replied: Math::PI.
Is there any chemistry-related ruby application?
Hanjo K., working in the “cheminformatics” field, asked if Ruby has
any
applications related to Chemistry.
Bil K. thought that the SciRuby site might have something, and
Tanaka
Masahiro said there is a “ChemRuby” library that is being funded and
developed.
RRobots (#59)
Simon Kroeger came up with this week’s Ruby Q. (which turned into a
two-week special):
| RRobots, Inc. is always looking for new talented pilots. Recently
they
| lost so many skilled employees in a show battle against one of
their
| competitors that they decided to try something new.
Write an AI for a robot that competes against others on a
battlefield. A
competition between submitted AIs then takes place on 27th December
2005.
(Make sure you submit your entry before then.)
ruby-dev summary 27761-28026
Koichi Sasada posted the latest summary of the Japanese list
ruby-dev,
used to co-ordinate development of Ruby itself. (The equivalent
English
list is ruby-core.)
It includes a note of denial-of-service (DoS) vunerabilities in
WEBRick
and Ruby’s bundled XML-RPC library (found by Akira T.). “Problems
were
fixed on ruby 1.8.3, so it is recommended for all to use ruby 1.8.3
or
later. There are also patches for ruby 1.8.2.”
Ruby 1.8.4 preview2 was released.
The summary also covered:
* Complex<=> issues.
* rb_funcall2 calling protected methods (for C extensions).
* The addition of a Ruby/Tk example.
* Improved super behaviour in a particular case.
* A request for a GC method to cause the garbage collector to be
run
“always”. (For debugging.)
* A suggestion for adding time literals like 19850412T101530.
String.to_sym?
robertj asked if Ruby had a String#to_sym method for getting symbols
from
strings.
Nobu: String#to_sym (added in Ruby 1.8 as an alias for #intern.)
Purpose of Ruby T.
Gary A. asked what is the “purpose” of the ruby-talk mailing list
(and
its bi-directional usenet mirror comp.lang.ruby) - i.e. which topics
is it
acceptable to discuss?
James B. said that questions specific to particular applications
or
libraries are best sent to their specific mailing lists, where
available.
(In particular, Rails questions should go to the Rails list.)
Otherwise, it’s the right place for Ruby questions. (Daniel C.
noted there is the ruby-core mailing list for development of the Ruby
interpreter and standard libraries.)
Chad P.: “As far as I can tell, there’s no specific topic focus
to
ruby-talk-just some “anti topics” that get summarily directed
elsewhere.”
Several people said that ruby-talk is a very friendly place, and
requested
that we all help keep it that way
New Releases
Ruby SNMP 0.6.0
Dave Halliday following “tons” of feedback on the previous version,
released Ruby SNMP 0.6.0, with several enhancements and fixes.
eric 3.8.1
Bugs were fixed in Detlev Offenbach’s Eric3, a Ruby and Python IDE.
ruby queue : rq-2.3.1
Ara.T.Howard released ruby queue 2.3.1, “a tool used to create
instant
linux clusters by managing sqlite databases as nfs mounted priority
work
queues.”
Rote 0.3.0 (doc/web)
Ross B. released Rote 0.3.0, a Ruby templating / documentation
builder.
Instant Rails 1.0 preview6
Curt H. released Instant Rails 1.0 preview6.
| Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby,
| Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No
| installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and
run
| it. It does not modify your system environment. This release of
Instant
| Rails for Windows, but there are plans for ports to Linux, BSD, and
OSX.
Rant 0.5.4
Stefan L. updated the Rant build tool. A bug was fixed,
compatibility
for Ruby 1.8.3 added, plus a new method sys.write_to_binfile.