# Ruby Weekly News 13th - 19th March 2006

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-13th-19th-march-2006/84113>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 20, 2006, 11:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-13th-19th-march-2006/84113 "2006-03-20T11:09:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [March 20, 2006, 11:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-13th-19th-march-2006/84113/1 "2006-03-20T11:09:06Z")

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[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060319.html](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  
you  
by Tim S…

[Contribute to the next newsletter]

# 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](http://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/](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.