# Ruby Weekly News 26th June - 2nd July 2006

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-26th-june-2nd-july-2006/97039>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 4, 2006, 12:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-26th-june-2nd-july-2006/97039 "2006-07-04T12:11:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**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:** [July 4, 2006, 12:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-26th-june-2nd-july-2006/97039/1 "2006-07-04T12:11:03Z")

</div>

[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060702.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060702.html)

Use the link above for a nicer version of this newsletter that’s  
formatted  
for the web, including links to threads and other sites. You can also  
subscribe to a newsletter-only mailing list, or to RSS/Atom feeds.

# Ruby Weekly News 26th June - 2nd July 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

```
 * European Rails Conf -- talk proposals now being accepted 

```

(ruby-talk)  
======================================================================

```
   David A. Black: "We're now accepting proposals for talks at the
   European Rails Conference, to be held September 14-15 in London.
   Accepted speakers will get free admission to the conference."

   Proposals must be submitted by July 21, 2006.

   "David, for Ruby Central, Inc. and Skills Matter, Ltd., 

```

co-producers  
of the 2006 European Rails Conference".

# User Group News

```
 * European Rubyists (ruby-talk)
 -------------------------------

   Austin Z. is taking a vacation in Europe soon, and would 

```

like to  
meet up with European Rubyists.

```
 * Munich.rb -- User Group Meeting in Munich, Germany (ruby-talk)
 ----------------------------------------------------------------

   Urban H.'s trying to organise a meeting in Munich on July 

```

15th or  
16th, in response to Austin’s message that he’d be in Munich some  
time  
in July. Is anyone else interested?

```
 * Ruby Ireland - Irish ruby and rails user group (comp.lang.ruby)
 -----------------------------------------------------------------

   Aidan F. has formed a mailing list for Irish Ruby users who are 

```

keen  
on forming Ruby and/or Rails groups.

```
 * Northern Virginia Ruby user's group meeting 6/28/06 (ruby-talk)
 -----------------------------------------------------------------

   The NovaRUG group (Northern Virginia, U.S.) met on the 28th June. 

```

The  
next meeting is on July 19.

# Threads

## RAA and web services? (ruby-talk)

Daniel B.: “Does the RAA have any sort of web service backend? I  
saw  
hints that it might be added at some point but nothing definite.”

There were not yet any replies.

## Iconv and incompatible encodings (ruby-talk)

Alex Y. wanted to “lossily convert between partially incompatible  
encodings”, such as from UTF-8 to 7-bit ASCII.

Paul B. said that the iconv library has “//IGNORE” and  
“//TRANSLIT”  
options for ignoring or transliterating unconvertable characters. He  
gave  
the example of converting “caffè” into “caff” or “caff`e”, and also  
showed  
how to turn it into “caffe” with the Unicode library.

## Why is there no Smalltalk-like IDE for Ruby? (comp.lang.ruby)

See also the same topic in ruby-talk.

Joseph M.: “I shout my question to the entire Ruby + Smalltalk  
community: Smalltalk has had amazing IDEs for decades, why not Ruby?  
Smalltalkers, Ruby needs your help!”

There were many replies.

The Smalltalk language itself has a high level of integration with  
its  
development environment, rather than the IDE being bolted-on as an  
after-thought.

In Ruby (as with most languages) the entire `world' of the program is re-created each time it is run, whereas a Smalltalk program is image-based (in most implementations), and evolves over time, preserving its state even when it is `restarted’.

So, for example, in order for a Ruby IDE to work out what methods a  
class  
has, it must perform complex analysis of the static source code text  
(and  
since methods may be conditionally defined at runtime, this is  
impossible  
to do perfectly in all cases). In Smalltalk, the system knows what  
methods  
the class has: it just needs to look at its current state.

Some advantages of Ruby’s `re-create world from plain-text sources  
files’,  
and in general having a separation between development environment  
and  
language runtime, were also put forward.

## m17n and unicode (ruby-talk)

The difference between m17n and unicode, as described by Logan  
Capaldo:

> Unicode says, lets make ONE universal character set and map all our  
> strings into it.
> 
> m17n says not every language is the same, not every concept of a  
> character is the same, let’s support all the languages and  
> character  
> sets we can.
> 
> Ruby’s m17n will have support for Unicode, but it will be an option  
> for  
> an encoding, not the only encoding.

## Summer of code: ruby-breakpoint GUI client (ruby-talk)

Florian G.’ Google Summer of Code project (ruby-breakpoint  
improvements) was discussed, particularly regarding a GUI vs web  
interface  
for visualising Ruby objects.

Florian: “I still think that a real GUI client will be able to do  
things  
that are hard to do with a web one, though, so I’ll focus on the GUI  
one  
first.”

## Rational about the Gem package format? (ruby-talk)

Why is the gem package format a tarball containing files  
“data.tar.gz” and  
“metadata.gz” (plus now two corresponding “.sig” files)?

“Why not just have the metadata stored in with the data and not worry  
about double layers?”, asked Trans.

Mauricio F. explained that to extract a single file from a  
.tar.gz  
(gzipped tarball), you must first decompress the entire file, so if  
this  
was necessary then extracting the meta-data would be slow and use a  
lot of  
memory. (Although he noted that RubyGems currently decompresses the  
entire  
file into memory anyway.)

The format is also easy to extend - simply add more files to the  
outer  
layer. As well, the “data.tar.gz” can be constructed before  
“metadata.gz”,  
enabling the latter to easily store a cryptographic digest of the  
data.

## Regex Comparison Causing Massive Memory Usage (ruby-talk)

A regular expression in Charset.is\_utf8(str) from the SOAP library  
was  
examined after Mike H. reported that passing in a 200 KB string  
resulted in memory usage exceeding 2 GB.

Xavier N. said that the regex could potentially cause a lot of  
unnecessary backtracking, and Florian G. proposed a change to  
prevent  
the problem.

## QInputDialog syntax (ruby-talk)

Graham S. was having trouble converting between the C++ syntax  
used in  
the Qt documentation, and what is needed for QtRuby.  
(Qt is a multi-platform GUI toolkit, used most prominently in KDE.)

Ed Borasky highly recommended the “Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby”  
PDF from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. It’s written by Caleb T. and  
costs  
US$8.50 (it’s a “Friday” book).

Pau Garcia i Quiles seconded the recommendation, and also said  
“C++ GUI Programming with Qt3” is a good book if you’re going to be  
doing serious Qt development (even though it is C++ oriented).

Your editor stopped halfway through writing this summary to buy the  
PDF,  
and it does indeed look like a nice introduction 🙂

## Time To Pick the Mongrel BUGS Mascot! (ruby-talk)

Zed S. (the author of the Mongrel Ruby web application server) was  
sent  
a page of “ugly ugly ugly dogs” by Bradley Taylor, and he just had to  
use  
one of them for the Mongrel BUGS mascot (replacing the current  
beetle).

The group sent in their favourite choices. “I like MISS ELLIE” was  
all  
James Edward G. II had to say.

## RedLetter Ruby Journal (ruby-talk)

The “RedLetter Ruby Journal” faltered without any publications, as  
its  
editor Sam Flywheel was apparently unable to attract enough writers.

Several people complained that they had not yet received refunds on  
their  
subscriptions despite requesting them, and Pat Eyler noticed Sam had  
now  
announced “Tabula: The Journal of MySQL Development”.

## PDF::Writer and i18n (comp.lang.ruby)

Pawel Chmielewski asked about representing non-English characters  
with  
PDF::Writer, as the library didn’t appear to support UTF-8.

Austin Z., the library’s author, said that PDF::Writer will  
never  
support UTF-8 directly, because its not in the PDF standard.

The default character set used by PDF::Writer is similar to Latin-1,  
and  
additional characters are supported via “encoding character maps”.  
This is  
briefly described in the PDF::Writer manual, and the documentation  
will be  
expanded in the next release.

## creating graphical application with video (ruby-talk)

Geert F.: “I have to teach my sister how to create an application  
that  
can show pictures and small video files on a windows-based system and  
get  
some user input in return. Being able to work fullscreen is optional,  
but  
would be nice.”

Ilmari H. suggested Ruby/SDL or Ruby-GNOME2 + gstreamer.

Geert managed to get streaming video working with Ruby/SDL, using the  
“smpeg” library, but felt its performance wasn’t very good. He plans  
to  
try SDL with “ffmpeg” instead (and hopes there is an existing Ruby  
library  
wrapping SDL/ffmpeg).

“The good thing is that I could compile both SDL and ffmpeg using  
MinGW”  
under Windows.

## C-Style Ints (#85) (ruby-talk)

Ruby Q. this week is by Aaron P…

> Write a class that can represent a signed or unsigned number with  
> an  
> arbitrary number of bits. This class should support all bitwise  
> operations ( & ^ ~ | ), basic math operations ( + - / \* ), and  
> comparison operators.

# New Releases

## RubyScript2Exe 0.4.3 (ruby-talk)

Erik V. made a new RubyScript2Exe release, with improved  
RubyGems  
support, and followed it up with version 0.4.4 to fix a bug that was  
introduced.

“RubyScript2Exe transforms your Ruby script into a standalone,  
compressed  
Windows, Linux or Mac OS X (Darwin) executable.”

## id3lib-ruby 0.4.0 (Unicode fixes) (ruby-talk)

id3lib-ruby by Robin S. now works properly with Unicode frames,  
and  
some methods in the API were renamed.

## KirbyBase 2.6 (ruby-talk)

Jamey C.: “I would like to announce version 2.6 of KirbyBase, a  
small,  
pure-Ruby database management system that stores its data in  
plain-text  
files.”

It no longer over-rides NilClass#method\_missing.

## na\_str-0.0.0 : combining narray with mmap for persistant numerical data

## (ruby-talk)

na\_str is a new library that will intrigue users of NArray (a library  
for  
“fast calculation and easy manipulation of large numerical arrays  
into the  
Ruby language”).

Written by Ara. T. Howard, it provides a way of sharing NArray data  
with  
other Ruby objects. An example library, na\_map, combines NArray and  
mmap  
so that data can be modified “with no explicit io on the users part  
and  
partial change[s] to numerical grids can occur very quickly and  
persistently.”

Interestingly, na\_str uses rb\_str\_new4() internally. This creates a  
string  
that shares an internal memory region with another.

## Mongrel 0.3.13.3 Needs Debuggers (ruby-talk)

Zed S. needs people to test the 0.3.13.3 pre-release.

See also Mongrel 0.3.13.2 Pre-Release-RailsConf, which included a  
change  
to try and “reap dead threads as soon as possible,” especially when  
there  
are too many open files.

## For SciTE Users: Snippets (ruby-talk)

Mitchell Foral created a Lua module for SciTE that mimicks the  
Textmate  
editor’s “snippet” system.

From the documentation:

> Basically, snippets are pieces of text inserted into a document,  
> but can  
> execute shell code at run-time, contain placeholders for additional  
> information to be added, and make simple transforms on that  
> information.  
> This is much more powerful than SciTE’s abbreviation expansion  
> system.

The website includes screencasts.

## RMagick 1.13.0 (comp.lang.ruby)

RMagick, the Ruby library for the ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick  
image-manipulation libraries, had some bugs fixed and features added,  
including Image#auto\_orient to automatically orient an image from its  
EXIF  
data.

> If you’re using a web hosting service and it has a very old version  
> of  
> RMagick installed, please consider asking your service provider to  
> upgrade. I’ve fixed several memory leaks in recent releases so if  
> you’re  
> running into memory usage problems with your web app upgrading  
> could  
> really pay off.

## fUnit-0.1.3 - A Fortran Unit Testing Framework (comp.lang.ruby)

Bil K. posted “funit”, a Fortran unit testing framework (where you  
write  
tests in Ruby).

## Radiant CMS 0.5 - Grindstone (ruby-talk)

John W. Long quietly set loose the first official release of Radiant,  
“a  
no-fluff content management system designed for small teams.”

## Ruby Reports 0.4.11 (ruby-talk)

Ruport 0.4.11, the “Mr. Sparkle” Edition, was released by Gregory  
Brown.  
This is a cleanup and bugfix release, and also has a couple of new  
features.

In other news, Dudley F. has joined the project as a developer,  
more  
documentation will soon be written (including a Ruport cookbook), and  
the  
developers now hang out on the #ruport IRC channel on freenode.

## RubyGems 0.9.0 Release (ruby-talk)

Jim W. announced the “much anticipated” release of RubyGems  
0.9.0.

> This release includes a number of new features and bug fixes. The  
> number  
> one change is that we can now download the gem index incrementally.  
> This  
> will greatly speed up the gem command when only a few gems are out  
> of  
> date.

Support for authenticating proxies and improved integration with  
documentation tools were also added.

## mkrf 0.1.0 released (ruby-talk)

Kevin C.'s mkrf had its first release. mkrf is similar in purpose  
to  
mkmf (and mkmf2), but creates Rakefiles instead of Makefiles (it is  
used  
for building Ruby C extensions).

Asked how it compares with mkmf2, he enumerated advantages of using  
Rakefiles over Makefiles (gem packaging, rdoc generation built in  
…),  
and also said he was keeping the code clean so it could be  
incorporated  
into RubyGems at some point.

## Ruby-GNOME2-0.15.0 (ruby-talk)

Masao M. released Ruby-GNOME2-0.15.0. It now includes Ruby  
interfaces  
to VTE (terminal emulator widget), Poppler (PDF rendering library),  
bug  
fixes and other improvements.