# Ruby Weekly News 5th - 11th March 2007 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 13, 2007, 10:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-5th-11th-march-2007/88643 "2007-03-13T10:15:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **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:** [March 13, 2007, 10:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-5th-11th-march-2007/88643/1 "2007-03-13T10:15:36Z")
Links are at [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070311.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070311.html) # Ruby Weekly News 5th - 11th March 2007 Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk mailing list and its cohorts, the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and Ruby forum. It is brought to you this week by ``` * Tim S. (firstname.lastname at gmail.com) * Robert Postill (robert-at-grinning-cat.com) * Christian Carter (cdcarter at gmail dot com) ``` # Articles and Announcements ``` * Google Summer of Code ----------------------- Pat Eyler notes that Google's Summer of Code is coming up ``` shortly. “Ruby Central is once again planning to act as the mentoring organization for Ruby.” ``` > Google will post the list of mentoring organizations on March ``` 14th. \> Google will be accepting student proposals March 15-24, so, if \> you’re a student, this is the time to start putting together a \> proposal. ``` * Free webcasts on Ruby and Rails from CodeGear ----------------------------------------------- Joe reports that CodeGear are hosting a free "live virtual ``` developer conference" on March 12th - 16th. At least four session are to do with Ruby. ``` * Speaker Selection for Gotham Ruby Conference ---------------------------------------------- Gregory B. posted the official speaker list for GuRuCo, the ``` Gotham Ruby Conference. (New York City, April 21st.) ``` > It will be a technical conference aimed at highly motivated > Rubyists, Rails developers, and language enthusiasts. GoRuCo is ``` a \> joint effort by volunteers from NYC.rb and the New Haven Ruby \> Brigade. It’s supported by the sponsors of this conference including \> Google, StreetEasy, and Jonathan Summers. ``` According to the website, the conference has now sold out, but ``` you can sign up to a waiting list in the hope someone cancels. # Threads ## SimFrost (#117) James Edward G. II posted this week’s Ruby Q… “This was one of the Perl Quiz of the Week problems a couple of years ago. It’s also my favorite computer simulation.” Create a simulation of frost, following the (given) rules that describe how to iterate the animation. “Again, use whatever output you are comfortable with, from ASCII art in the terminal to pretty graphics.” What is Ruby Q.? From the website: > Ruby Q. is a weekly programming challenge for Ruby programmers in > the > spirit of the Perl Quiz of the Week. A new Ruby Q. is sent to the > Ruby > Talk mailing list each Friday. (Watch for the [QUIZ] subject > identifier.) After a 48 hour no-spoiler period has passed, everyone > is > invited to contribute solutions and/or discussion back to the list. > The > following Thursday a Summary will be sent to the list, discussing > the > quiz, solutions and discussion. The next day, the cycle begins > again. It’s a great way for new and experienced Ruby programmers alike to try their hand at problems, and get feedback from others. ## Duck Typing Hash-Like Objects Gary W. asks for ideas on the best way of identifying a “hash-like” object, so that the check relies only on the interface, as in duck typing. Various suggestions were put forward including the detection of the to\_hash method, using #fetch and the discussion also careered through the meaning of duck typing. If you want to know more about hash behaviour and/or duck typing you could do a lot worse than reading this thread. ## [Ruby.on-page.net](http://Ruby.on-page.net) - Evolution began A flurry of feedback greeted [ruby.on-page.net](http://ruby.on-page.net), an online Ruby documentation site featuring a novel interface. The idea appears to be help offered on a single page with wiki-like attributes. Give it a shot and see what you think. ## Yahoo!'s Ruby Developer Center Brian A. ran into Yahoo!'s Ruby Developer Center and thought it looked interesting. “Nice heads up”, concluded Richard C… ## the name of Matz In this thread you’ll find Matz’ name in Kanji, how to pronounce “Yukihiro Matsumoto”, and a discussion of naming conventions to distinguish given and family names. Following a comparison with Matz’ non-capitalisation of his family name, Akinori MUSHA said “Although passports and other formal documents may have restrictions, one should be allowed to spell one’s name as one wants, so long as it is used consistently and serves as social identification.” why the lucky stiff’s name was also dissected, with Wilson B. reckoning that the underscore in \_why “represents the intake of breath before speaking his name”. Matz said (without joking) “I’ve heard that it’s his REAL first name”, and Hal F. backed up the rumour - he’d heard it was based on a younger sibling’s alternative to \_why’s real first name; “Wyatt or something”. # New Releases ## Rassmalog 3.1.0 - the mutant Rassmalog is a blog engine based on RSS 2.0, YAML and Textile. By the end of the thread v3.0.0 had mutated into v3.1.0, so it’s definitely under active development. ## JRuby 0.9.8 The JRuby folks are obviously busy as there is yet another release for your delight. Highlights here are the Rails support (say goodbye to irksome WAR deployments 🙂 which the developers reckon is good enough for testing. ## ActiveWarehouse ETL 0.6.0 Check out the latest release of ActiveWarehouse’s Extract, Transform and Load project. Gem goodness is included and there are a “slew” of new and improved features. Definately one for Ruby in the Enterprise folk. ## rcairo 1.4.0 The ruby wrapper for the Cairo library was released this week. This release has emphasis on performance and PDF output. Also some standardisation with Ruby-GNOME2 has occurred. ## memcache-client 1.3.0 The pure Ruby client for memcached has been released. Patches and new functionality appear to be the order of the day. So if your DB development lacks a certain dash of speed, why not give this a shot? ## Instant Rails 1.6, with MySQL 5 Instant Rails now includes MySQL 5. The Instant Rails installer is an easy way for Windows users to get up and running with a Rails development environment. Curt H.: “Many thanks to Jirka Pech who made the MySQL upgrade possible.” ## Ruby ORBit2 (CORBA) Max L. implemented preliminary support for the ORBit2 library (for CORBA). “No IDL is required at all: all information about method calling can be accessed via CORBA reflection mechanism.” ## New “Ruby for Windows” Installer Lothar S. posted a new Ruby installer for Windows, as an alternative to the widely-used One Click Ruby Installer, with a different philosophy as to which packages should be included in the base install. > Everything is compiled with MSVC 6.0, so it is compatible with the > one > click installer and all the “msvcrt” binary gems. ## Rack 0.1, a modular Ruby webserver interface Christian N. released Rack, a webserver and framework interface for Ruby. It is based on Python’s WSGI and PEP333, and he believes it will bring a lot to the Ruby web community. > Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for > developing > web applications in Ruby. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses > in the > simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web > servers, > web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) > into > a single method call. With the Rack standard, any Rack compatible framework (Rails, Camping, custom, more to come) will work with any Rack supported web server (Mongrel, WEBrick, FCGI, CGI). This means that we would need to develop just one Rack adapter per framework, and one Rack handler per webserver. Currently, each framework has to implement its own support for each web server. # end We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Ruby Weekly News! Anyone can contribute to the next newsletter - simply visit [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next) to summarise one or more threads from the list. ---
**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:** [March 13, 2007, 1:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-5th-11th-march-2007/88643/2 "2007-03-13T13:43:07Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next) Go There! Do That! Awesome interface Tim, keep up the good work! T.