# Ruby Weekly News 19th - 25th February 2007 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [February 26, 2007, 10:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-19th-25th-february-2007/86836 "2007-02-26T10:39:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**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:** [February 26, 2007, 10:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-19th-25th-february-2007/86836/1 "2007-02-26T10:39:17Z")
Links are at [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070225.html](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 removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid). [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 😉 so, I get shy asking specific > 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](http://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.