# Ruby Weekly News 16th - 22nd January 2006 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [January 24, 2006, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-16th-22nd-january-2006/96704 "2006-01-24T18:17:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**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:** [January 24, 2006, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-16th-22nd-january-2006/96704/1 "2006-01-24T18:17:31Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060122.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060122.html) # Ruby Weekly News 16th - 22nd January 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. and Jonathon Mah. [Contribute to the next newsletter] # Articles and Announcements ``` * "Learn to Program" is now available ------------------------------------- Dave T.: "Just a quick note to say Chris P.'s new book, ``` Learn to Program, is now available and shipping." ``` Surgeon asked how it relates to the online version that's been ``` around a while, and Dave B. said that the online version’s good, but the book is better. ``` * JRuby at JavaOne 2006 ----------------------- Charles O Nutter and Tom Enebo will be giving a JRuby ``` presentation at the JavaOne 2006 conference. ``` "We should have most of the milestones I talked about at RubyConf completed, and oughta have plenty more cool demos to run. If all ``` goes well, we may have Rails running under JRuby too." ``` (JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java. It also provides interoperability between Ruby and Java code - the two (?) ``` Ruby-Java bridges being an alternative approach.) ``` * Calling all Freebsders. ------------------------- Dick D. posted a heads up for FreeBSD users; the ports tree ``` is going to include 1.8.4 “Any Day Now”. It has been at 1.8.2 for a while. ``` Luc H. noted that DarwinPorts has recently done the same. ``` # User Group News ``` * Stockholm User Group ---------------------- Dr Nic asked if Stockholm had a Ruby U. Group, and everyone ``` said no, but that’d be cool, and they met on January 19th at a restaurant called “Grill Ruby”. # Threads ## Script’s Parent Directory Chris N. was “looking for a Ruby equivalent to Perl’s FindBin module,” which returns the directory containing the running script (as opposed to the current working directory). Austin Z. replied that File.dirname( **FILE** ) gives you this. ## thousandth separator bmgz is in need of a library for formatting numbers with thousandth separators, e.g. 1000000.00 becomes “1,000,000.00”. Gene T. posted a couple of options: a one-liner “snippet”, and the flexible Numeric#format\_s from Gavin S.'s Extensions library. ## Delaying Quote Expansion Kevin O. asked how to delay double-quoted expansion of “string #{variables}”. Eero S. mentioned this simple method: str = ‘“Value #{foo}”’ foo = 123 eval str #=\> “Value 123” James Edward G. II pointed to ERB, the standard templating library included with Ruby. require ‘erb’ str = ‘My number is \<%= bar %\>.’ bar = 1986 ERB.new(str).result(binding) #=\> “My number is 1986.” ## get the name of the day from Time.now misiek wanted to get the current day of the week as a name like Mon instead of the number returned by t.wday (where t = Time.now). Antonio C. suggested t.strftime(“%a”) for “Mon” and t.strftime(“%A”) for “Monday”. (strftime = String-format-time.) “ri strftime, will give you the complete list of options.” Another option is to require ‘time’ then Time::RFC2822\_DAY\_NAME[t.wday]. # New Releases ## Rake 0.7.0 Released Jim W. added some interesting features to the Rake build tool, including parallel execution of pre-requisites and namespace support for task names. ## TeensyWeb 0.2.0 From Jon A. Lambert, TeensyWeb 2.0, “a combination Wiki, Forum and Subversion Repository browser”. Now with installation documentation and RSS feeds. ## Radius 0.0.1 – Powerful Tag-Based Templates John W. Long was pleased to come out with Radius, “a small, but powerful tag-based template language for Ruby inspired by the template languages used in MovableType”. Nathaniel S. H. Brown: “Nice work. Would love to see a .rad extension for Rails at some point :)” ## RMagick gets face-lift, book and movie deal Timothy H. released RMagick 1.1.0, the Ruby interface to the ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick image processing libraries. It also includes a 2D drawing API. One of the new methods is Image#vignette, which was originally an RMagick example program, but has now made its way into ImageMagick itself 🙂 All known bugs were fixed, crop\_resized added for creating thumbnails, and more. In other RMagick news, | Apress’s new book, The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, by Michael | Still, devotes a chapter to using ImageMagick from Ruby programs via | RMagick. ## test-unit-benchmark-0.1 rubikitch created a tool called Test::Unit::Benchmark, used for showing how long each unit test took to run. “Because this program is very short, it is an easy example of AspectR, aspect oriented programming for Ruby.” ## TeensyMUD 2.7 released - Baby Got Back! “Baby Got Back” said Jon A. Lambert, announcing TeensyMud 2.7, “the original only ruby mud with smoking hot T&A action”. ## ppp-1.0.0 rubikitch, announcing yet more software, introduced `ppp’, an alternative to Kernel#p, with ppp, pppp, ppm and ppmp commands. All for debugging. ## Nitro + Og 0.27.0 Client code, WebFile, Elements improved, New … George M. released new Nitro and Og versions. Nitro is a web application framework and Og an object-relational database mapping library. As usual with these releases there are a huge number of interesting features, including “groundbreaking client side action/scripting support”, where you write Ruby code that results in Javascript. “A domain specific language is provided for the client action to implement stuff like ajax async updates, scriptaculous visual fx and more.” This support also includes “morphers”, which enable you to set properties like draggable=“true” and "auto\_complete=“true” on HTML input tags to cause mystical wonders to occur. A WebFile system was also added, to make it easy to upload files. Lots lots more. George: “The latest Nitro/Og releases are a real community effort ;-)” ## Librend 0.4 Ilmari H. released version 0.4 of Librend, a realtime graphics rendering library for Ruby. It uses SDL, and also supports sound. ## FreeRIDE 0.9.5 - The Free Ruby IDE The release of FreeRIDE 0.9.5 was heralded by Laurent J… Thanks to Jonathan M. for the new `projects’ support, and to Martin Leech for quick keystrokes to comment/uncomment blocks of code. Many usability enhancements were also made. “FreeRIDE aims to be a full-featured, first-class IDE on a par with those available for other languages, with all the best-of-breed features that you would expect in a high-end IDE.” ## irbsh-1.0.0 rubikitch set forth irbsh, an extension of irb/inf-ruby.el for Emacs. “You can easily execute shell commands and Ruby codes by using irbsh.” ## Mongrel 0.1.0 – A Fast As Hell Mostly Ruby Web Server Zed S. released “a mostly Ruby webserver” called Mongrel. It’s fast, but allegedly cannot yet yet bake cheddar. * * * Now for the fun (and surely flamewar generating) statistics on how it compares to WEBrick: WEBrick/Linux: 175 req/sec Mongrel/Linux: 1350 req/sec WEBrick/OSX: 5.3 req/sec Mongrel/OSX: 304.4 req/sec * * * There weren’t yet any flames, so we’ve put the quote in an emotionally coloured box to try and stir things up. (That’ll be asterixes for you plain-text fellas. Pretend they’re masking swear words from Zed for the same effect.) 0.1.1 was later released, adding the “It Works Now, Maybe” feature. RedHanded chipped in with comm’try. ## testunitxml-0.1.3 Henrik M. introduced Test::Unit::XML, which adds assertions for checking XML documents. ## RubyCLR first drop John L. announced a new Ruby / .NET bridge called RubyCLR. Generics aren’t yet supported, but it’s a “super high priority item”. ## Ruby-GetText-Package-1.1.1 Ruby-GetText-Package now has a Greek locale (by damphyr), bugfixes and support for Rails tests. Masao M.: “Thanks to: Kazuhiro NISHIYAMA, Nick S., damphyr, Karel Miarka.” ## ICU4R 0.1.0 - initial release Lugovoi N. let the initial release of ICU4R out of the bag. “ICU4R is an attempt to provide better Unicode support for Ruby, based on ICU library.” ## FarPy GUIE v0.4 FarPy GUIE, used for graphically designing wxWidget GUIs, now supports wxRuby. Thanks for reading! ---
**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:** [January 24, 2006, 6:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-16th-22nd-january-2006/96704/2 "2006-01-24T18:48:06Z")
Thanks for doing this! ## -r Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development: [http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume](http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume) Contact information: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid, +1 650-873-7841