# Ruby Weekly News 6th - 12th February 2006 **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [February 15, 2006, 10:49am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-6th-12th-february-2006/68538 "2006-02-15T10:49:54Z")\ **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:** [February 15, 2006, 10:49am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-6th-12th-february-2006/68538/1 "2006-02-15T10:49:54Z")
[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060212.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060212.html) # Ruby Weekly News 6th - 12th February 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] # User Group News ``` * OK.rb's First Meeting ----------------------- James Edward G. II announced the first meeting of the Oklahoma ``` Ruby Users Group: March 14th 2006 at the University of Central Oklahoma. ``` | This first meeting is being organized by myself and Grant ``` Schofield | and we will be providing some educational content to get us going. I | will give a “Uniquely Ruby” talk, focusing on those things that make | Ruby stand out from other languages. Grant is giving a first-look at | Rails presentation as well. Both talks will be aimed at Ruby | programmers of all skill levels. ``` * Boulder-Denver Ruby Group - February 15th ------------------------------------------- Marty H. said that the Boulder-Denver Ruby Group are holding ``` their February meeting on Wednesday 15th. ``` "David A. Black will be joining our group that night and will be presenting for our group." * February Ruby events in the SF Bay Area ----------------------------------------- Rich M. posted a list of Ruby events in the San Francisco Bay ``` Area during February. ``` The SF Ruby Meetup is on the 21st, and the Beer & Scripting SIG ``` is on the 22nd. # Quote of the Week ``` * Ruby's lisp features. ----------------------- ``` > Let’s call it MatzLisp from now on. 😉 > > ``` > matz. > > ``` # Threads ## FasterGenerator (#66) James Edward G. II came up with this week’s Ruby Q… > ``` > end > > ``` Ruby’s standard Generator class was recently re-written to improve performance. Your mission is to make it even faster. Matz: “I’d be happy to replace current implementation of generator.rb with the winning one.” Some very promising benchmarks were posted. ## Getting last character from a string draco draco asked for a nice way of getting the last character in a String. Several people said that you can use negative indices to count backwards from the end of String and Array objects, for example -1 for the end, -2 for the second-to-last etc. Based off a post by Gennady B., s = “abc” s[-1] # 99 s[-1].chr # “c” ## Adding properties to a method? jonT wanted to know how to add `properties’ to Method objects. ##### class Method attr\_accessor :foo end def bar “some\_res” end method(:bar).foo = 1 puts(method(:bar).foo) # =\> nil instead of 1 ##### The problem is that method(:bar) returns a new Method instance each time it is called. As is often the case, the Facets project has a solution. It includes method!, which returns the same Method instance each time it’s given the same method name. (Not so good if some code redefines the method in between two calls to method! though.) ## Ruby port for Nokia 770 Wireless Internet Tablet Ken Hilton successfully ported Ruby 1.8.4 to the “Nokia 770 Wireless Internet Tablet” (which runs Linux). “Before porting Ruby to it, it was love at first sight. Now I’m ecstatic.” He will be posting a tarball once he’s setup a rubyforge account. ## how to do instance\_eval with arguments Jim W.: “I’m prototyping a DSL and came across a situtation where I have a lambda that I would like to give to instance\_eval, but the lambda takes arguments. Instance\_eval will not supply any arguments when evaluating the lambda and I don’t see a straightforward way around this.” Matz said that Ruby in CVS HEAD has instance\_exec for this. See also [Frost-safe DSL’ing with instance\_exec] by Mauricio Fernandez, which gives a safe implementation of instance\_exec for Ruby 1.8. The above article was found via Christian N.'s [Anarchaia]. Chris also questioned why a new method was added, rather than just making instance\_eval pass any arguments it receives. For those readers who are confused about why you would ever need this feature (as was I initially), note that it is never needed in the usual case when the block passed in is defined on the spot. # Not useful value = 42 obj.instance\_exec(value) { |v| some\_method(v) } # Lexical scoping means we could just write value = 42 obj.instance\_eval { some\_method(value) } Consider the case, though, where a block taking arguments has been defined somewhere else, and we now want to instance\_eval it. # This doesn’t achieve anything. blk isn’t evaluated against obj. value = 42 obj.instance\_eval { blk.call(value) } # This works value = 42 obj.instance\_exec(value, &blk) # New Releases A few of the highlights this week … ## Watir WebRecorder for Ruby Marcus Tettmar announced Watir WebRecorder, "a version of WebRecorder that creates Ruby/Watir code. Watir WebRecorder is a multi-tabbed web browser that records web activity in Internet Explorer and creates Ruby code which uses the Watir library for IE automation. WebRecorder is designed to speed up the creation of web testing and web automation scripts." ## Nitro + Og 0.28.0: Cacheable, Ruby Query Language, Mongrel, Og cloning George M. released new versions of Nitro and Og, a web application framework and object-relational mapper respectively. Caching and querying were improved, bugs fixed, plus a bunch of other new features. ## Spreadsheet::ParseExcel Hannes W. announced a pure-Ruby library for reading Excel files. It is based off the Perl module of the same name.