http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060319.html
Ruby Weekly News 13th - 19th March 2006
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to
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by Tim S…
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Articles and Announcements
* Best of Ruby Q. now available
---------------------------------
"Quizmeister James Edward G. II selected the best 25 Ruby
Quizzes
from last year, then carefully collected answers and annotated
them.
The result is “The Best of Ruby Q.”, a wonderful book which
will
teach any Ruby programmer new techniques and approaches to
coding."
Dave T.: "(oh, and I happen to think it's one of our nicer
looking
covers, too…)"
* Ruby Hacking Guide Translation
--------------------------------
Vincent I. said he'd finished translating the second
chapter of
Minero AOKI’s “Ruby Hacking Guide” into English.
"This book explains the internals of the ruby interpreter. And
even if
you do not care about how the interpreter works, I think it can
help
have a better understanding of Ruby and how to make extension
libraries."
The news was well received.
* Next Beta of Rails Recipes available
--------------------------------------
"The fourth beta of Rails Recipes, Chad F.'s book or writing
real-
world Rails, is now available", announced Dave T…
"The book now features contributions from three members of the
Rails
Core Team, and includes countless suggestions for existing
readers.
This is definitely the book to have on using Rails in the real
world."
* RubyCorner a meeting place for the Ruby blogging community
------------------------------------------------------------
Anibal Rojas announced RubyCorner, a directory of Ruby blogs.
Lyle J. pointed out two sites that fill the same role;
Artima's Ruby Buzz and Planet Ruby.
Threads
What’s the best way to split this kind of string?
Sam K. asked how to split a string into sequences of repeated
characters
(in particular, where the characters are digits), e.g.
“111223133” => [“111”, “22”, “3”, “1”, “33”]
Ross B. gave two ways of doing it:
s.scan(/0+|1+|2+|3+|4+|5+|6+|7+|8+|9+/)
s.scan(/(\d)(\1*)/).map! { |e| e.join }
obscure ruby bug tracker
Chris describes his long journey trying to find the Ruby bug tracker
on
rubyforge.
“Maybe a little effort in making the bug tracker a bit easier to find
is
in order…”
Small optimization tips
Vincent F. shared a couple of changes that improved performance in
his
script, including using Set instead of Array when you are only using
<< and include?.
Set#include? usually takes constant time (having a Hash underneath),
while
Array#include? is linear in the number of elements in the array.
Constraint Processing (#70)
Jay A. created this week’s Ruby Q…
“For this quiz the goal is to make a constraint processing library
for
ruby. A Constraint Satisfaction Problem consists of variables,
domains for
each variable, and constraints among the variables.”
Python looking better …
Python got a new homepage, which led to questions about the
ruby-lang.org
redesign effort which has been quiet since last year.
Curt H.: “I can assure you that it is still progressing. It has
been
slow progress, but much faster in recent months (thanks to John
Long).
Hopefully a few more months and it’ll be all finished.”
Why’s Poignant Guide site down?
Mark V. was having trouble accessing Why’s Poignant Guide to
Ruby.
Mental said there’s been a general problem with Why’s server, which
has
unfortunately happened while he’s at the SXSW music festival.
Fortunately
it’s all back up now.
New Releases
A few of the releases this week …
Third Drop of RubyCLR
John L. set out the third release of his RubyCLR bridge.
“There is now a pretty cool Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation)
sample in this release. It renders math equations from a quick and
dirty
Ruby DSL that I hacked up yesterday. I think it really shows off some
of
the cool things you can do when you have a powerful client-side
rendering
engine.”
“I did a lot of perf tuning in this release, so dynamic compilation
time
of the interop shims should be much faster. Runtime performance is
pretty
good - I can parse a 7.5MB XML doc using XmlTextReader (a pull-mode
XML
parser) which results in over a million calls across the interop
boundary
in about 2s.”
Nabaztag 0.1
Paul B.:
I’m pleased to announce the public release of our Nabaztag
communication
library for Ruby.The Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com/) is a small electronic
rabbit
with lights, motorised ears, and speech.The library enables control of the text-to-speech, ear movement,
and
choreography features of a Nabaztag device. It implements a small
DSL
for choreography commands.Paul.
PS - Yes, we actually use this at work!
It performs a couple of announcement functions. First, it reports
the
success or failure of builds on the continuous integration machine.
Second, it announces every time our review aggregation service
receives
a ping. It’s nothing that couldn’t be handled by a computer playing
a
few samples (or using OS X’s text-to-speech), but it’s more
interesting
this way!
rcov 0.2.0 - code coverage tool for Ruby
Mauricio F. posted rcov 0.2.0, a Ruby code coverage tool thats
20-300 times faster than the `coverage’ tool.
“typically, the program being inspect runs only ~3 times slower than
without rcov (i.e. not 200 times slower as with some other tools)”.
It also features “more accurate coverage information through code
linkage
inference using simple heuristics”.
This release has prettier output, and a more convenient interface.