Links are at http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070225.html.
Ruby Weekly News 19th - 25th February 2007
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. (email [email protected]).
[Whew, September 2006 - February 2007 sure was a long week 
]
Articles and Announcements
* Registration Now Open For Gotham Ruby Conference
--------------------------------------------------
Gregory B. announced that registration has opened for GoRuCo,
“a
one-day, single-track event in New York City dedicated to
everything
Ruby” on April 21st, 2007. Tickets cost US$100.
He also reminded us that that there isn't much time left to
submit
presentation proposals.
* last call for the MountainWest Ruby Conf
------------------------------------------
The 2007 MountainWest RubyConf is coming up on March 16th and
17th. It
will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has “a great line up of
speakers, including the JRuby team, Ara T Howard, and a keynote
by
Chad F.”, writes Pat Eyler.
Microsoft are supplying an Xbox 360 bundle as a door prize, and a
"huge pile of books" will also be given away.
* Ruby blogging contest
-----------------------
Pat Eyler warns that time is running out to submit blog entries
on
“How has Ruby stretched or blown your mind” for the January On
Ruby/Apress blogging contest.
"The winner gets three Apress books of his or her choice."
User Group News
* nyc.rb does video
-------------------
"Last Tuesday was the third anniversary of nyc.rb and the first
with
video", reports Trotter Cashion.
Congratulations on the milestone!
Threads
OpenSSL, SOAP4R
Ze Maria wondered how to use digital certificates with
SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.
Mike Wernsing posted the details, showing the useful options to set,
e.g.
“protocol.http.ssl_config.client_cert”.
Emil Marceta noted an extra step that must be done to validate the
peer
certificate, rather than just checking that it’s signed by the
Certificate
Authority (CA).
Ruby and R?
This thread discussed integrating Ruby with R, a programming language
designed for statistical computing.
Ara. T. Howard posted a link to the RubyWithRLang page on the SciRuby
wiki. This page documents usage of the RSRuby library, which embeds R
within Ruby, “allowing R methods to be called and data passed between
the
Ruby script and the R interpreter”.
Adopt-a-newbie? Based on actual experience.
SonOfLilit described his experiences with a Ruby nuby who felt more
comfortable sending him questions directly, rather than posting to
the
whole list.
All of this has brought me to think of an Adopt-a-newbie model.
Somehow,
every newbie that wants would get an email address of a volunteer
from
ruby-talk, with whom he can correspond personally and who will
answer
his basic questions and serve to also encourage him to keep
learning.
What do others think?
Samantha (the programmer who prompted SonOfLilit’s idea) was the
first to
reply:
As a newbie, I think that would be awesome. I’ve emailed off-list
with
two people so far, and the help has been tremendous. I think that
it’s
an awesome idea. Personally, I don’t like putting stuff out there
and
possibly sounding like a moron
questions when I know that so many people are out there on the
list.
It’s a bit intimidating.
Logan C. said it sounded interesting, but success would depend
on the
adoptee, as well as the adopter. “I would not want to end up being
the
fount of knowledge and turn into a crutch for the adopted person.”
Han D. surmised “I guess mentors have the responsibility of being
patient
and newbies have the responsibility of being eager to learn.”
“I understand that some newbies are afraid on posting even on the
friendliest ML of the world ruby-talk IMHO,” said Robert D., so he
volunteered to post other people’s “stupid questions” to the list as
a
proxy, so no-one knows who the question was from.
Several people suggested shy newbies could post on the mailing list
of
their local Ruby user group, if they’re uncomfortable posting to a
larger
audience.
ruby equivalent for property or config.xml ?
Gilbert R. asked what the normal way is of storing configuration
data
in Ruby programs.
Farrel L. said YAML files are a good way to go, and Alex Y.
noted
that Ruby source files can be a nice way of representing
configuration
values.
module Config
DATABASE = {:adapter => ‘foo’ …}
FROBNICATOR = :fozzbangle
LOCATION = :coozbain
end
Screen-scraping
David V. wants to automate interaction with a bunch of
“laborious and
unhelpful” web applications at his work.
What’s the best way to do this?
“My criteria are being able to handle the fact most of these apps are
clickfests of ASP / ASP.NET provenience, and the HTML source code
could
probably scare small children, so I’d like to have the toolkit handle
most
of the textmunging.”
Xavier N. recommended Watir (usually used for testing web
applications)
because “it is the easy and more robust way to do screen-scrapping,
because it delegates all the parsing, JavaScript, etc. to a real
browser”.
Peter S. put forward a new library he’s written called “scRUBYt”,
which combines Mechanize and Hpricot.
Lightweight way to create jpeg files?
Mike N. wondered if there’s an easy, “lightweight” way to create
JPEG
files from Ruby, without using RMagick (which “seems like it’s loaded
with
dependences”).
A.S. Bradbury said that PNG sounded like a better image format for
his
situation, and suggested using the pure-Ruby png library (“gem
install
png”), written by the seattle.rb user group.
New Releases
One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.5-24 released
Curt H. released the latested One-Click Ruby Installer for
Windows,
upgrading the SciTE editor to version 1.72.
Bash completion for the gem command
Michael S. created a file that enables command-completion for
“gem”
in the bash shell.
Facets 1.8
A new major version of Facets - “a large collection of core extension
methods and module additions for the Ruby programming language” - was
released.
Trans: “As always thanks to everyone who has contributed, both
directly
and indirectly.”
More releases
See the rubyforge news page for more release announcements.