# Ruby Weekly News 20th February - 5th March 2006 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 7, 2006, 11:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-20th-february-5th-march-2006/77750 "2006-03-07T11:15:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **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:** [March 7, 2006, 11:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-20th-february-5th-march-2006/77750/1 "2006-03-07T11:15:41Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060305.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060305.html) # Ruby Weekly News 20th February - 5th 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 ``` * RubyConf 2006, October 20-22, Denver! --------------------------------------- David A. Black: "The directors of Ruby Central, Inc. are pleased ``` to announce that the sixth International Ruby Conference (RubyConf 2006) will be held in the Denver, Colorado area, October 20-22, 2006." ``` * Registration now open for Silicon Valley Ruby Conference ---------------------------------------------------------- David A. Black also announced that registration is open for the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, to be held April 22-23rd 2006. ``` (It’s unrelated to RubyConf.) ``` "This event is a co-production of SDForum and Ruby Central, Inc." * Writers needed for The Ruby Bookshelf project ----------------------------------------------- Julian I. Kamil asked for help for converting open-licensed Ruby documents (tutorials etc.) into his Pandora format ("a simple web document and application platform written in Ruby"). > ... - a good understanding of usability principles to be able ``` to \> convert existing (sometimes hard to read) contents into Pandora \> books that are more structured, more readable, and more usable; and \> … ``` * Rails on the Mac - Apple Article ---------------------------------- Jim F. linked to an article at developer.apple.com that ``` introduces Ruby on Rails on MacOS X. ``` * Ruby metablog for Korean rubyists ----------------------------------- Minkoo S. proudly announced rubyist.or.kr, "a meta blog for ``` Korean rubyists, whose primary goal is to provide useful documents and information to Korean Ruby programmers." ``` * Canada on Rails announces location, and a site redesign --------------------------------------------------------- Nathaniel S. H. Brown announced that Canada on Rails have decided ``` on a location for the upcoming conference YVR06 (mid-April 2006), and redesigned their website, eh. ``` > BCIT Downtown Campus has been chosen, with a maximum capacity ``` of 300 \> people. With already over 50% of the seats filled, be sure to \> register soon or you might miss out on one of the most exciting \> technical events to come to Vancouver. \> \> YVR06 will be twice the size of the last conference by Open Source \> Events held last June, and with 4 times the amount of speakers, \> during the two days. All for only $250 with the early bird discount. # User Group News ``` * Toronto Ruby U. Group, 5 Mar 2006 Meeting --------------------------------------------- Mike S. said that the Toronto Ruby U. Group were having their March 2006 meeting on Sunday 5th at the Linux Caffe. * Calgary Ruby U. Society (CRUSERS) -------------------------------------- Alexey V. announced that the CRUSERS (Calgary Ruby U. Society) had their first meeting on Feburary 23rd, featuring a ``` Watir presentation by Paul R. and donuts thanks to ThoughtWorks Canada. ``` "So, if you like Ruby and live in Calgary, you are most welcome ``` to join us." ``` * First Pune Ruby Group Meet ---------------------------- Dibya P. announced the first Ruby / RoR meeting for the Pune ``` Ruby Group: February 25th 2006. (Pune is a city in India.) ``` As well as introductions to Ruby and Rails, agile development and reverse engineering will be discussed. * March Ruby events in the SF Bay Area -------------------------------------- Rich M. sent out the list of Ruby events in the San Francisco ``` Bay Area in March 2006. ``` "Sadly, no South Bay Ruby events have been announced. C'mon, ``` guys, make something happen…" ``` There are events on the 14th and 22nd. * Next meeting of codefesters in Columbia Maryland -------------------------------------------------- The codefesters of Columbia, Maryland are meeting every Monday. Initially they met to learn Rails together, but have now expanded ``` into non-Rails R… ``` "At this time we've got some people working on the rails project ``` and other folks learning how to do Test Driven Development with Ruby." # Quote of the Week ``` * Re: [QUIZ] Current Temperature (#68) -------------------------------------- Dave B.'s entry in the "Current Temperature" Ruby Q.. You'll ``` just have to read it. # Threads ## is there a seperate mailing list for novices? John M.: “After having writen many lines of bloat… Is there a seperate list for noobs for embarassingly simple questions and such?” Patrick H.: > To second what has already been said, don’t run away, join the fun. > This > is a nice place, because matz is nice. Start asking questions and > soon > you will be answering them as well. ## _No_ Ruby Weekly News 20th - 26th February 2006 Tim S. announced a week without Ruby Weekly News. (Hey, that was last week.) Did you know that anyone can contribute to the next newsletter, simply by going to [www.rubyweeklynews.org](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org), clicking the “contribute” button, and then summarising a few threads? It’s especially helpful now that there are SO MANY threads every week 😉 ## capistrano A question was asked about “Capistrano”, which provides this newsletter with an excuse to note that this is the new name of SwitchTower. The renaming is due to an unpleasant company sending a Cease & Desist letter to Jamis B., saying they have a trademark on “SwitchTower” (apparently they have a product relating to web conferencing that involves what they call a “SwitchTower Network”). ## AJAX Patterns Blog Pat Eyler: > Christian Gross, the author of AJAX and Best Practices, runs a blog > at > [http://www.devspace.com/](http://www.devspace.com/) and has started a poll asking which > language he > should port his AJAX patterns to next. (They are currently > available for > Java and .Net). > > If anyone’s interested in seeing Ruby up next, you might head over > to > the blog and cast your vote. Three days later there was a new post on Christian’s blog, wondering what was going on. The poll went from 10 votes total, with PHP leading, to more than 150 votes, 91% of which were for Ruby. > I thought, this can’t be, what we have here is a situation where > one > person voted over a hundred times. Thinking that this was the case > I > inspected the log files. At that point I was awe-struck because the > IP > addresses that voted were scattered throughout the Internet. > > What happened? I think one of two things; One person who hacked > using an > army of “bots”. Or somebody told somebody else in a Ruby forum and > said, > “Hey folks VOTE!”. Until I know better I am thinking the latter. > Even > now it seems that Ruby people seem to be adding their votes. What > does > this mean? Ruby! Not that I am complaining, but interesting that > the > Ruby community is very active! ## dirty ranges You dirty, _dirty_ ranges. Dirk van Deun came across some interesting behaviour when he modified ranges. > > range = “a”…“z” > > “a”…“z” > > range.min[0] = “b” > > “b” > > range.max[0] = “y” > > “y” > > range > > “b”…“z” # Editor note: All irb session outputs in this summary have been reformatted # and tweaked. # # If you’re confused by the [0], then observe that # s = “hello”; s[0] = “j”; puts(s) # results in “jello”. # # The examples could be rewritten to use foo.replace(“xxx”) instead of # foo[0] = “xxx”. George O. said that the correct way to modify endpoints (if you must) is with Range#begin and Range#end. > #begin and #end are direct accessors to the endpoint objects, > whereas > #max is calculated, taking into account end-closedness. It should > not be > surprising, then, that #max and #end return different objects. Regarding the common feeling of Don’t Do That (George: “Ranges themselves are immutable, so changing their value indirectly like that is kinda going against the grain”), Dirk van Deun said that it’s more subtle than that. > > range = “a”…“z” > > “a”…“z” > > ary = range.to\_a > > [“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, “f”, “g”, “h”, “i”, “j”, “k”, “l”, “m”, > > “n”, “o”, “p”, “q”, “r”, “s”, “t”, “u”, “v”, “w”, “x”, “y”, “z”] > > ary[0][0] = “z” > > “z” > > range > > “z”…“z” There were a couple more posts pondering having range clone the endpoints. ## Current Temperature (#68) Caleb T. came up with the week’s Ruby Q… > Write a Ruby program such that given a certain argument to the > program it > will return the current temperature of that location. People living > in > the United States may be interested in temperature by ZIP code: > > ``` > $ ruby current_temp.rb 47201 > The temperature in Columbus, Indiana is 32 degrees F. > > ``` > > Other locales may want to use their own mailing codes, or city > names: > > ``` > $ ruby current_temp.rb madrid > The temperature in Madrid, Spain is 12 degrees C. > > ``` # New Releases ## Second drop of RubyCLR bridge John L. released the second version of his RubyCLR bridge, which provides for Ruby integration with .NET 2.0 (other bridges out there only use .NET 1.1 features). “To show off its features, I’ve built a non-trivial all-Ruby Windows Forms 2.0 RSS Reader application that’s in the distribution.”