# Ruby Weekly News 27th March - 2nd April 2006 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [April 4, 2006, 12:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526 "2006-04-04T12:36:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **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:** [April 4, 2006, 12:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/1 "2006-04-04T12:36:15Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html) # Ruby Weekly News 27th March - 2nd April 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 ``` * Italy on Rails - First Europe Ruby on Rails Conference -------------------------------------------------------- Nathaniel B. announced the first Ruby on Rails Conference in Europe. It will be held in Rome in late 2006, and run by Open ``` Source Path. ``` * Article: An Exercise in Metaprogramming with Ruby --------------------------------------------------- Hal F. wrote an article in February called An Exercise in Metaprogramming with Ruby, but neglected to post a link to it on ruby-talk. | My editor said it "didn't do that well" in terms of page views. ``` And | I said, well, I should have posted it to ruby-talk. And she said: Do | that now, and we’ll see what effect it has. | | So there you have it. No bots or artificial inflation, please. 😉 ``` The article was well received by the group. http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,1928561,00.asp * Brazilian Portuguese Ruby Book -------------------------------- Eustaquio Rangel de Oliveira J announced his Brazilian Portuguese ``` Ruby book, to be released on April 5. ``` The book was added to the RubyGarden RubyBookList page. | Com um texto orientado para quem já programa em alguma outra | linguagem, este livro apresenta exemplos claros que podem ser | facilmente assimilados, servindo de guia para o conhecimento e | aprendizado da linguagem Ruby. * Ruby and RoR Book Roundup --------------------------- Rob S., "a big bookworm", put together a list of Ruby books coming up in 2006. ``` # User Group News ``` * The San Diego Ruby U. Group lives! --------------------------------------- Daniel A. claimed that the San Diego Ruby U. Group lives! "After some false starts, we've decided to do this thing for real ``` now. Calling all San Diego Rubyists!" ``` * Ruby Social Club - 1st April Milan Meeting -------------------------------------------- Chiaro Scuro: "The Ruby Social Club is getting up to speed and spreading fast. After the first two meetings in Rome we are going ``` to meet up in Milan on the evening of saturday the first of April." ``` * April Meeting of the Phoenix Ruby U. Group ----------------------------------------------- James B. announced that the Phoenix Ruby U. Group will be meeting on April 10, and will likely discuss new features in ``` Rails 1.1, and old features in Ruby’s built-in unit testing library. “And I’m sure we’ll make stuff up as we go.” # Quote of the Week ``` * Blixy Tee Bus Stop -------------------- So I was wearing my chunky bacon Blixy Tee http://www.cafepress.com/blixytees.10116504 at the School bus stop the other day, and my son (5yrs) gets up on his tip toes and starts trying to read foxspeak: "Chunky?... bacon? Chunky Bacon... Come on, seriously... Chunky. Bacon. Chunky Bacon. [repeated ad nauseam]" Pretty soon all the kids were chanting. It was fun. Thanks Why, Bil K. ``` # Threads ## ruby-dev summary 28274-28600 Furuhashi Apuri summarised the Japanese mailing list ruby-dev, which had ideas around regexp named captures, **method** to hold the name of the currently executing method, and a proposal for multi-method support. The latter would allow you to write class Bar def foo(String x) “a string” end def foo(Integer x) “an integer” end end b = Bar.new b.foo(“hello”) # → “a string” b.foo(5) # → “an integer” The String or Integer or … is just anything that has an === method. “Matz said he agrees and this can be committed to 1.9 if it is fast implementation.” ## Ruby Goes to the Sun April Fools’ jokes. Hansson’s getting the band back together. Mmmbop. ## Testing DiGraph (#73) Robert F. posted this week’s Ruby Q… “In this week’s Ruby Q. you will not only have fun and (hopefully) learn something; you will also contribute to a research project evaluating automated testing techniques. So please read on and then take the quiz!” “The goal of this quiz is to write a good and extensive test suite for a Ruby DiGraph (directed graph) class.” ## WIN32OLE#[] and WIN32OLE#[]= method in Ruby 1.9 (or later) Win32OLE author Masaki S. said he was considering changing the behaviour of WIN32OLE#[] and WIN32OLE#[]= “in Ruby 1.9 or later.” “I have not commited the change yet. Before commiting it, I want suggestions or opinions from Win32OLE users.” Currently, [] and []= map to method calls, so that excel.visible = true and excel[‘visible’] = true are equivalent. The change is to make them act on properties, so you can write code like worksheet.cells[1,2] = 10. Dave B.: | Excellent! This makes a lot more sense than the existing function of [] | and []=. | | When I first used WIN32OLE, I was surprised that you couldn’t use [] to | access index operations. ## Rails 1.1 In a thread noting the release of Rails 1.1, Jim W. commented “The CVS head of rubygems will do incremental downloads of the index file. We are working out the details of testing this on a large site like RubyForge.” This will greatly improve the speed of the “Updating Gem source index” action when installing or upgrading gems. ## Ruby Black Belt Dmitry B. posted a draft Ruby exam, having decided to create a Ruby equivalent of [JavaBlackBelt.com](http://JavaBlackBelt.com). “What we need is a feedback of experienced Ruby enthusiasts (means You).” James Edward G. II posted a list of errors in the draft exam, while Justin C. asked what the purpose of the exam was, given that previously “most people expressed a strong dislike for anything resembling Ruby `certification’.” Dmitry: “What we are talking here about is a bit different, than traditional certification. The main purpose is learning. You pass the exam and see that You don’t know some answers.” Listrecv: “One of the problems I’d have with a certification of this sort is that it focuses only on the least important aspects of the language - syntax, nomenclature, conventions, etc.” Peter S. mentioned The Python Challenge - a set of programming riddles where you must apply some Python programming techniques to advance to the next level. | I came to know a LOT of non-programmers through python challange - i | have been mailing on a (nearly) dayly basis with an US (non programmer) | girl (i think se was a lawyer) up to the 18th or something level. When | she begun she did nothing about programming at all, after 1 week he has | been posting about regexps, after 2 weeks about bzip2 from python, after | 3 weeks cookies and HTTP, well you get the idea… She was really | enthusiastic to learn this stuff (which is IMHO not typical for a non | technical person) just to see the next screen… And she was not the | only one… This made Bill K. think of \_why’s Try Ruby! web-based interactive interpreter. It has an on-line tutorial where you type code into your web browser and see what happens. Pistos C.: “I tentatively agree with the others about official certification, but this idea of some sort of online interface that covers all (or many) of the features, tools, libs, etc. of Ruby in an interactive, educational fashion sounds appealing.” Ruby Q. was mentioned several times as a resource for improving your Ruby skills. ## Calling R from Ruby AlexG created a simple bridge between Ruby and R (a statistical package / language), allowing him to use R libraries from Ruby. The thread also discussed advantages and disadvantages of using either of the languages over the other, for example R has a fast matrix library (but so does Ruby, via NArray), R is “Procedural, with highly limited function support”, but | Au contraire! R is at heart a functional language with a Lisp ancestry! | What’s different about R (and S) is two different ways of doing objects | and classes, neither one of which is remotely like a Java or Ruby | programmer’s idea of objects and classes. [M. Edward Borasky] Going back to the original topic, Thomas said that if you’re on Windows then you can access R through Win32OLE. ## Round floats to N decimal places? Pat M.: | I’m doing some math that results in floats with ~10 decimal places, but | I’d like to round them to 2 places. Is there a built in way of doing | this? Right now I’m doing format(“%0.2f”, the\_float).to\_f, which seems | to work fine but it seems like an ugly way of doing it. Dave B. said that the Facets project defines Numeric#round\_at(d) and Numeric#round\_to(n) methods for this purpose, and suggested that Ruby’s built-in Numeric#round method be altered to accept an optional parameter for degrees of rounding. Karl B. suggested Pat take a look at the LongDecimal library, which is “specialized for doing calculations with a defined number of digits after the decimal point.” ## B & E (#72) Stephen W. created (last) week’s Ruby Q. - find the least number of security codes you need to try to break a system where the code passes whenever the last sequences of key-presses matches the codes, without any reset between. ## Get the size in pixels for a string Stéphane Thibaudeau asked how to get the pixel width and height of a string rendered with a particular font. Chris A.: require ‘tk’ f = TkFont.new(‘Courier 10’) width = f.measure(“Hi There!”) height = f.metrics.assoc(‘linespace’)[1] # New Releases ## JRuby 0.8.3 Thomas E Enebo said that JRuby 0.8.3 was released. “JRuby is a project to provide a Java implementation of the Ruby language and interpreter.” jirb now works, using Java classes from Ruby is “dramatically” faster, several important bugs were fixed and more. ## Mongrel Web Server 0.3.12 – Pre-Release Zed S.: “Mongrel is due for a 0.3.12 release which will feature some pretty insane goodies for everyone. There’s talk of IOWA support, lots of speed improvements (including sendfile support), a great Configurator which makes configuring Mongrel a snap (especially for framework implementers), and a ton of debugging stuff.” “DON’T CRY” (it’s a pre-release). “Mongrel now has sponsorship from Eastmedia ([http://www.eastmedia.com](http://www.eastmedia.com)) in partnership with Verisign ([http://www.verisign.com/](http://www.verisign.com/)) to make Mongrel fast and stable enough for enterprise class loads (meaning “gigantic”, not “Java style”).” ## Rake 0.7.1 Jim W. put out a new Rake release, fixing a bug on Windows and adding a few features. ## Instant Rails 1.1 Curt H. announced Instant Rails 1.1 an update of the “one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run”. Unsurprisingly, this release features Rails 1.1. ## ZenTest 3.1.0 Ryan D. exposed ZenTest 3.1.0, with updated versions of zentest, unit\_diff, autotest and multiruby. ## RJS, Active Record++, respond\_to, integration tests, and 500 other things! Hoho, it’s Rails 1.1. “The biggest upgrade in Rails history has finally arrived. Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.”-David Heinemeier Hansson. ## Ruby-FLTK 0.9.3 Jeremy H. announced a new version of the Ruby-FLTK bindings, “Yes, it’s been a while!”. ---
**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:** [April 4, 2006, 11:33pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/2 "2006-04-04T23:33:09Z")
On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 07:33:48PM +0900, Tim S. wrote: > [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html) > > ## Ruby Weekly News 27th March - 2nd April 2006 […] ruby-dev summary 28274-28600 > > Furuhashi Apuri summarised the Japanese mailing list ruby-dev, which had > ideas around regexp named captures, **method** to hold the name of the > currently executing method, and a proposal for multi-method support. > > The latter would allow you to write > […] > The String or Integer or … is just anything that has an === method. > “Matz said he agrees and this can be committed to 1.9 if it is fast > implementation.” As I said under that thread, I think this (proposal for multi-method support) is yet another April 1st joke. I’m subscribed to ruby-dev and the message referred to in in that summary ([ruby-dev:28533]) doesn’t exist: indeed, the last message is [ruby-dev:28505] as of Wed, 5 Apr 2006 03:30:04 +0900. Maybe it would be better to clarify that for the record. ---
**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:** [April 5, 2006, 12:16am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/3 "2006-04-05T00:16:02Z")
In article [20060404213120.GB3504@tux-chan](mailto:20060404213120.GB3504@tux-chan), Mauricio F. wrote: > On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 07:33:48PM +0900, Tim S. wrote: > > > [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060402.html) > > […] > > As I said under that thread, I think this (proposal for multi-method support) > > is yet another April 1st joke. I’m subscribed to ruby-dev and the message > > referred to in in that summary ([ruby-dev:28533]) doesn’t exist: indeed, the > > last message is [ruby-dev:28505] as of Wed, 5 Apr 2006 03:30:04 +0900. > > Maybe it would be better to clarify that for the record. I fell for it, doh! I’ve updated the site. ---
**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:** [April 5, 2006, 11:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/4 "2006-04-05T23:37:31Z")
Tim, thanks for writing the summaries! When I came to Ruby, I found some mailing list summaries, and found them very useful. I imagine it must take quite a while to put together, so thank you for taking the time to do so! Cheers, Benjohn ---
**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:** [April 5, 2006, 11:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/5 "2006-04-05T23:34:21Z")
On 4 Apr 2006, at 23:13, Tim S. wrote: > > last message is [ruby-dev:28505] as of Wed, 5 Apr 2006 03:30:04 > > +0900. > > > > Maybe it would be better to clarify that for the record. > > I fell for it, doh! I’ve updated the site. Heh - I thought it sounded like an excellent approach! I particularly liked the idea of using the === operator (that I’ve started to think of as a predicate acceptance test - it makes the receiver behave as a predicate, and the argument is matched for satisfying the predicate) for the matching. Really very similar to a case statement, but extensible, I suppose. ---
**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:** [April 6, 2006, 5:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/6 "2006-04-06T17:43:15Z")
Benjohn B. wrote: > Tim, thanks for writing the summaries! > > When I came to Ruby, I found some mailing list summaries, and found > them very useful. I imagine it must take quite a while to put > together, so thank you for taking the time to do so! +1 I have appreciated the Ruby Weekly News for some time now. We encourage you to keep up the good work. 🙂 Pistos ---
**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:** [April 6, 2006, 6:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/7 "2006-04-06T18:32:41Z")
Tim S. wrote: > ## Ruby Black Belt > > Peter S. mentioned The Python Challenge - a set of programming riddles > where you must apply some Python programming techniques to advance to the > next level. Btw, during the writing of this thread, we begun to work on [www.rubychallenge.com](http://www.rubychallenge.com) with Alex C. - It will be a Ruby on Rails site stuffed with great programming puzzles, trying to fill the gap between the pickaxe (n00b) and ruby quiz (advanced) levels. If we will manage to implement our ideas, it will be way more cooler than [pythonchallenge.com](http://pythonchallenge.com) in every aspect, at least imho ;-). After we reach a certain level, we would like to incorporate the Ruby community as well, so stay tuned! bw, Peter ---
**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:** [April 7, 2006, 5:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-27th-march-2nd-april-2006/93526/8 "2006-04-07T05:23:47Z")
On Apr 6, 2006, at 11:31 AM, Peter S. wrote: > ruby quiz (advanced) levels Ruby Q. is your (the community’s) quiz. I take submissions: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid Beginners, get those problems in! > After we reach a certain level, we would like to incorporate the > Ruby community as well A Ruby Q. to add levels? 😃 James Edward G. II