# Ruby Weekly News 23rd - 29th January 2006 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [February 2, 2006, 12:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-23rd-29th-january-2006/100115 "2006-02-02T00:20:23Z")\ **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:** [February 2, 2006, 12:20am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-23rd-29th-january-2006/100115/1 "2006-02-02T00:20:23Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060129.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060129.html) # Ruby Weekly News 23rd - 29th 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… [Contribute to the next newsletter] # Articles and Announcements ``` * Silicon Valley Ruby Conference -------------------------------- David A. Black: "I'm pleased to announce that Ruby Central, Inc. ``` and SDForum are teaming up to present: The Silicon Valley Ruby Conference April 22-23, 2006". ``` * Ruby at O'Reilly Rough Cuts ----------------------------- Pawel S. noticed two upcoming Ruby books available as O'Reilly "Rough Cuts" (their version of the Pragmatic ``` Programmer’s Beta Book creation): ``` * Ruby Cookbook (Leonard Richardson, Lucas Carlson). * Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (Bruce A. Tate, Curt H.). ``` # User Group News ``` * The Seattle Brigade Chats with Bruce Eckel -------------------------------------------- Bruce Eckel came to some Seattle Brigade (Seattle.rb) meetings, ``` and wrote up his impressions of Ruby in a blog post Ruby, PHP and a Conference. ``` "The result: there are definitely some very cool things here. I ``` don’t know why Ruby fans don’t talk about them, but they’re here." ``` * Twin Cities (Minnesota) Ruby U. Group Meeting - Jan 31st ------------------------------------------------------------ The Minneapolis/St Paul area group were having their second ``` meeting on January 31st. ``` "If you would like to present something, we would be very happy ``` to have you, and free beers may follow!" ``` Planned presentations, and possible free-beer receivers, are ``` Charles Nutter and Thomas E. talking about JRuby; and Nick S. giving a Watir overview. ``` * Call for Participants: München (Munich, Germany) Ruby U. Group ------------------------------------------------------------------ Urban H. posted a message about organising a Ruby U. Group ``` in Munich, and invited German Ruby developers to join the -de mailing list. ``` * Notes from the First NoVA Ruby U. Group -------------------------------------------- Paul D. wrote up his notes from the first NOVARUG (Northern Virginia Ruby U. Group) meeting. More than 40 people attended ``` the meeting, which featured a presentation by Rich Kilmer on Alph (a Ruby-ActionScript bridge, for doing Ruby stuff with Flash), and other topics. ``` * Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts (OGRE) 2nd Meeting ----------------------------------------------------- OGRE had their second meeting on January 25, featuring "talks ``` from the Jaded Pixel development team on issues related to the development of Shopify." ``` * Boise Ruby Brigade -------------------- Mike M. announced a Ruby group for Boise in Idaho, U.S., with ``` the first meeting scheduled for February 22. ``` * Ruby user group in/near Wilmington, DE? Interest in starting one? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Obie F. said he and some other Rubyists are going to be starting a major Rails project in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S. Is there a Ruby U. Group there already, or any others ``` interested in setting one up? # Threads ## Printing RFC3339 timezone? csn asked how to turn a Time into some text suitable for use in an Atom XML feed, i.e. following RFC3339. Bob S. posted a link that describes the ‘xmlschema’ method, and Austin Z. gave the same response a minute later. require ‘time’ t = Time.now t.xmlschema # =\> “2006-01-31T22:09:20+13:00” ## Making Thumbnails with RMagick Timothy H. noticed that a lot of people were using RMagick to make thumbnails of JPEG images, so he benchmarked four different resize methods (for speed, simplicity, and quality). The overall winner was the `thumbnail’ method. That’s easy to remember 🙂 ## PostgreSQL in Ruby with SSL connections Kevin B. asked how to connect to PostgreSQL through SSL, and Dick Davies replied, saying that if he uses the ruby-postgres library (which wraps the C client library), then this is handled “transparently” as far as the Ruby library is concerned: you just need to put the appropriate certificate/key files in the ~/.postgresql directory. Kevin later managed to get this working via psql, but the Ruby code was giving the error #\. Any ideas? ## I like the new [ruby-doc.org](http://ruby-doc.org)! James Edward G. II said “I feel the new front page of [ruby-doc.org](http://ruby-doc.org) is significantly more attractive. Nice work!” [ruby-doc.org](http://ruby-doc.org) creator and maintainer James B. gave credit for the redesign to Dan Ritz of 30 Second Rule. Maxwell Heidegger asked if it was using Rails, and the answer was no: it’s using Nitro. ## Port a Library (#64) James Edward G. II introduced an unusual theme for Ruby Q. this week: port a small, simple library of your choosing from another language to Ruby. ## Strange posting about ebooks Lots of people on the mailing list received an 18mb email containing a number of unauthorised Ruby e-books. They were displeased. ## how to run just one test method in a test case nicknameoptional had some unit tests, and wanted to know if there is a command to only run a particular test method. Marcel Molina Jr. said that the “-n” command-line option is used for this. It takes either the whole method name, or a pattern to match a set of test methods. ruby tc\_foo.rb -n test\_foo\_1 ruby tc\_foo.rb -n /foo\_2/ ## wxruby 2 baalbek wondered about the status of wxruby2, and Alex F. said it’s close to being ready for beta release, but there are some important bugs that need fixing. | There is a good group of C++ developers involved who made a lot of | progress over last summer, but they’ve all been short of time in the | last few months, so been a lull in development. | | It’s usable enough for playing around, and has some nice new features | beyond 0.6.0 - on top of all the native look’n’feel niceness of Wx | generally - such as good support for OS X (inc aqua-look), Unicode, new | widgets, and better exposing of Wx class hierarchies. Unlike 0.6.0 | release from the old series, I wouldn’t say it’s stable enough for | production code. # New Releases ## xx-0.1.0 : xhtml and xml make it twice as dirty Ara.T.Howard: | xx is a library designed to extend ruby objects with html, xhtml, and | xml generation methods. the syntax provided by xx aims to make the | generation of xml or xhtml as clean looking and natural as ruby it self. In a subsequent post Ara compared this library with the XML builders used in Nitro and Rails. ## One-Click Ruby Installer 184-16 preview1 is available! Curt H. posted preview1, then preview2 of the Windows One-Click Ruby Installer for Ruby 1.8.4. There was much rejoicing. Adam S.: “Thank you so much for your work on the one click installer. It makes using ruby in my office feasible, which makes me sane(ish).” ## Mongrel HTTP Server 0.1.2 (With Camping Tepee Sample) Zed S. announced a new release of his “fast as hell web server library”, Mongrel. “Remember, this is totally ALPHA work. Don’t run a nuclear reactor with it, but do shoot me crashes, bug reports, anything.” ## Sudoku - Dancing Links algorithm jwesley wrote a Sudoku game in Ruby / GTK+, and also released a gem for his implementation of the “Dancing Links” puzzle-solving algorithm. ## OpenGL-0.32g for Apple MacOS X James A. created a version of the latest rb-opengl bindings, tweaked for MacOS X. ---
**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:** [February 2, 2006, 12:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-23rd-29th-january-2006/100115/2 "2006-02-02T00:32:37Z")
Tim S. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > ## Strange posting about ebooks > > Lots of people on the mailing list received an 18mb email containing a > number of unauthorised Ruby e-books. > > They were displeased. Laughed out loud at that. In case I haven’t said it before, thanks for the time and effort you put into this! martin