# Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th March 2007

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-12th-18th-march-2007/89558>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 21, 2007, 9:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-12th-18th-march-2007/89558 "2007-03-21T09:01:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/weliwarmer)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2007, 9:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-12th-18th-march-2007/89558/1 "2007-03-21T09:01:38Z")

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Links are at [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070318.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070318.html)

# Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th March 2007

Ruby Weekly News takes a look at the week’s discussions on the  
ruby-talk  
mailing list (and its equivalents, the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and  
Ruby  
forum).

This edition is brought to you by Tim S. and Robert Postill.

# Articles and Announcements

```
 * New O'Reilly book features Matz
 ---------------------------------

   ChrisH stumbled on an announcement for a new O'Reilly book 

```

“Beautiful  
Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think”, which includes  
an  
essay by Matz.

```
   Royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.

 * South Florida Software Symposium - May 18 - 20, 2007
 ------------------------------------------------------

   If you're in Florida between the 18th and 20th of May you may 

```

well  
want to get yourself down to this event. Its a No Fluff Just  
Stuff  
event so expect plenty of cool talks.

```
 * Google Summer of Code (please forward)
 ----------------------------------------

   Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been selected as 

```

a  
mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code.

```
   The deadline for student proposals is March 24.
   "If you're interested, the time to act is now!"
   A list of ideas has been put up on rubycentral.org.

   "If you're still interested in mentoring, but haven't contacted 

```

me  
yet, please do."

```
   In another thread, 'KDE Ruby SOC projects', Richard Dale says the 

```

KDE  
project was also selected as a mentoring organisation, and there  
is  
already one Ruby-related KDE proposal.

```
   Richard listed some possible projects that he hopes students will
   consider, including "Interactive visual irb. Like a Smalltalk
   environment I think ruby projects should be developed against an
   always running program."

```

# User Group News

```
 * North Bay Ruby U. Group March Meeting (Sebastopol, CA)
 -----------------------------------------------------------

   Rob Orsini presented "Exploring Ruport" at this month's North Bay
   (California) Ruby U. Group meeting.

 * London Ruby U. Group - 12th March, 2007
 -------------------------------------------

   The London Ruby U. Group had a "code review" meeting, where 

```

members  
submitted their code for discussion.

```
 * Phoenix Ruby U. Group March Meeting
 ----------------------------------------

   JRuby and RSpec were the topics of discussion in March's Phoenix 

```

RUG  
meeting.

```
 * Milwaukee RUG Meeting - This Wednesday 3/14/07 @ 5:30-7:30
 ------------------------------------------------------------

   The agenda for this week's Milwaukee RUG meeting was "Leveraging
   CruiseControl for Continuous Integration", "Continuous 

```

Integration for  
Rails", by Tom J…

# Threads

## Who’s maintaining log4r?

This thread kicked off with the Jeff having made some patches for  
Log4r  
but finding himself unable to submit them to the project maintainer.

Tom C. (admin of Rubyforge) weighed in and conferred with the  
chaps  
at Ruby Central about what to do with unmaintained projects.

Various suggestions were offered including forcibly adding  
maintainers to  
a project and forking new projects from the existing codebase. The  
rubyforge guys decided they prefered forking to fiddling with  
existing  
projects.

Eventaully the original maintainer came forward so hopefully this  
important project will soon be getting some cool new features.

## shutting irb up

A top tip started this short thread. For those moments when you want  
irb  
to be that little bit extra terse simply follow the instructions  
herein.

## Ruby and Mobile

SunRaySon asks if it is possible to develop Ruby applications for  
mobile  
phones.

Justin C. and Zouplaz point out the WinCE and Symbian ports of  
Ruby.  
WAP and SMS technologies can also be used.

## QTRuby + QT4 + Win32

“I would like to use the fantastic QT4 for Win32 using the Qtruby  
bindings”, writes Uma G… Has anyone managed to compile this on  
Windows?

Hans F. links to a recent thread in the QtRuby forums where a  
poster  
explains how he’s successfully done this.

Also in that thread, Richard Dale says that a qt4-ruby-mswin32 binary  
gem  
is a “top priority” for the next QtRuby release, which will make life  
much  
easier.

## What graphical frontend for a simple 2D game?

ChrisKaelin “just started for fun a little project creating an  
rpg-like  
game (you know, dwarves, elves’n’stuff)”, and decided it was time to  
put a  
graphical interface on it. What game or graphics libraries should he  
use?

The best option is Rubygame, followed by Ruby/SDL, replies Steven  
Davidovitz. RUDL is also available, however it is “fairly old and  
outdated  
with the last release in 2004”.

Editor: You can also use a non-game-oriented graphical toolkit that  
has  
Ruby bindings, like Tk, Fox, wxWidgets, GTK+/GNOME, or Qt/KDE. RAA  
lists  
some Ruby games as well.

# New Releases

## JRuby rails-integration release announcement

This project aims to make deployment of Ruby projects into WARs  
possible.  
It looks like a cool project so give it a shot.

## RSS Parser 0.1.7

Kouhei S. announced the latest release of RSS parser. Note the  
Atom and  
Dublin core godness included in this release.

## One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.6-25

Curt H. released a new version of the One-Click Ruby Installer for  
Windows. The only change is the upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6.

## ruby-semacode-0.7.3

A new release of Ruby Semacode is out. If you’re wondering what a  
semacode  
is check out [http://www.semacode.org](http://www.semacode.org).

## Ruby-HL7 0.1.23

The latest release of HL7 parsing and generation library has been  
announced by Mark G… Despite the version number this is  
apparently  
the first public release so props to Mark 🙂

## Ruby 1.8.6 has been released

Akinori MUSHA: “I am pleased to announce that Ruby 1.8.6, the latest  
release from the 1.8 stable branch, has finally been released.”

> This version of Ruby is a steady and reasonable enhancement of the  
> 1.8  
> series including many bug and security fixes, standard library  
> updates,  
> feature enhancements and performance improvements keeping high  
> backward  
> compatibility with the previous release (1.8.5).

# end

We hoped you enjoyed this edition of the Ruby Weekly News.

Anyone can contribute to the next newsletter - simply visit  
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next) to summarise  
one or more threads from the list. Thanks!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/weliwarmer)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2007, 6:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-12th-18th-march-2007/89558/2 "2007-03-26T18:02:42Z")

</div>

On Mar 21, 2007, at 3:00 AM, Tim S. wrote:

> ```
> Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been  
> 
> ```
> 
> selected…

I love this typo. He’s not really our pet though, we are his pets. 😉

James Edward G. II

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/weliwarmer)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2007, 6:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-12th-18th-march-2007/89558/3 "2007-03-26T18:07:44Z")

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On 3/26/07, James Edward G. II [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> On Mar 21, 2007, at 3:00 AM, Tim S. wrote:
> 
> > ```
> > Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been
> > 
> > ```
> > 
> > selected…
> 
> I love this typo. He’s not really our pet though, we are his pets. 😉

You may have uncovered my plan JEG-man, but you’re too late. No  
one can stop me now. Bwahahahaha
