# Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th August 2006

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-7th-13th-august-2006/65303>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [August 17, 2006, 1:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-7th-13th-august-2006/65303 "2006-08-17T13:02:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**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:** [August 17, 2006, 1:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-7th-13th-august-2006/65303/1 "2006-08-17T13:02:01Z")

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# Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th August 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

```
 * blade will be stopped
 -----------------------

   The ruby-talk.org mailing-list archive is down at the moment. Use
   nagaokaut.ac.jp instead.

 * Ruby Cookbook now in PDF format
 ---------------------------------

   Last week, many people said they would like a PDF version of the 

```

Ruby  
Cookbook.

```
   Good news, reports Leonard Richardson, "O'Reilly is now selling 

```

the  
Ruby Cookbook as a downloadable PDF for 50% off the cover price.  
AFAIK  
this is the first full-length O’Reilly book to be sold as PDF,  
and if  
it goes well, other O’Reilly books should follow."

```
 * Ruport Day has begun!
 -----------------------

   Ruport Day came and went (a day to make improvements to the 

```

Ruport  
project, complete with prizes). Gregory B. writes “The overall  
winner, who deserves massive props is James H., who introduced  
SVG  
Graph support, as well as a sizeable chunk of documentation to  
the  
project”.

```
   Ibroadfo was second, Eric P. third, followed by James Edward 

```

Gray  
II.

```
   Gregory would like to get in contact with the maintainer of
   SVG::Graph, to talk about how it could be packaged for Ruport 

```

(e.g. a  
gem).

```
 * Ruby Inside offers $100 prize for blogging about Ruby between
 ---------------------------------------------------------------
   August 12-19
   ------------

   Ruby Inside is offering a $100 prize to a random blogger who 

```

creates  
and posts an interesting post about Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails in  
the  
forthcoming week, along with a $15 second prize to a random  
person who  
links to the contest. As a aggregator of Ruby content, Ruby  
Inside is  
suffering during the summer lull, so perhaps this could get some  
new,  
interesting content out into the wild.

```
 * OS X Leopard shipping with Rails!
 -----------------------------------

   Daniel S. reported that MacOS X Leopard will include 

```

Ruby,  
RubyGems and Rails. Apple have been shipping Ruby with their  
operating  
system since around 2002, but in the past there have been old  
versions  
or little issues that caused problems for Rails. For this  
release,  
Apple have been communicating with the Rails core team to ensure  
everything’s done right.

```
   DHH blogs:

   > It's been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by 

```

the  
\> Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running  
on  
\> Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see  
\> Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.

```
   People are particularly pleased that Apple's using RubyGems, so
   updating Rails and installing other Ruby libraries will work as
   Rubyists expect.

 * Microsoft Phasing in Support for Dynamic Languages on .Net
 ------------------------------------------------------------

   An interesting article at eWEEK.com about dynamic languages on
   Microsoft's .NET platform, with lots of quotes from IronPython 

```

creator  
Jim Hugunin and John L. (of RubyCLR fame).

```
   "People say they love a language like Ruby because it has this
   simplicity and this dynamism."

 * Tim B. (Sun Microsystems) on Ruby
 -------------------------------------

   Tim B., the Directory of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems 

```

(and  
recent contributor to the Ruby community) wrote a mostly-positive  
article “On Ruby” describing his initial experiences.

# User Group News

```
 * mkerb.org - Milwaukee RUG Meeting [August 9]
 ----------------------------------------------

   The Milwaukee RUG (Wisconsin, U.S.) had their latest meeting on 

```

August  
9. Thanks to SpiderLogic for providing space for the meeting.

```
 * Phoenix Ruby U. Group August Meeting
 ----------------------------------------

   James B.: "The Phoenix Ruby U. Group will hold its August
   meeting on Monday, August 14, 2006, at 6:15pm. The meeting will 

```

be  
held at facilities graciously provided by Cyclone Commerce."

# Threads

## Ruby stable branch is…1.9?

Is Ruby 1.9 the stable branch? No, 1.8 is still the latest stable  
branch,  
but 1.9 will become a stable branch in the future.

## RubyConf in Second Life?

John L. had an idea of holding a virtual equivalent to RubyConf in  
`Second Life’ (SL), a “a privately-owned, partly subscription-based  
3-D  
virtual world” [wikipedia], run by Linden Labs.

Charles O Nutter said there is already a SL rubylist community that  
meets  
every first and third Thursday of each month. “Feel free to stop by,  
we’re  
interested in having more folks attend, and there’s a nice big  
presentation screen and plenty of seating. There’s even an in-world  
IRB  
extension to play with Ruby while you’re there.”

## Einrichtung einer deutschsprachigen Ruby-Newsgroup (bitte lesen!)

Christian J. proposed creating the newsgroup “de.comp.lang.ruby”  
for  
German-language Ruby discussions, but Josef `Jupp’ Schugt suggested  
“de.alt.ruby” instead, as it’s much easier to create a newsgroup  
under  
“de.alt” than the general “de” hierachy.

Stefan S. said that the lack of traffic in “de.comp.lang.misc”  
was a  
bad sign for the proposed group, and James B. linked to  
gmane.comp.lang.ruby.german.

## LDAP

barjunk asked which LDAP libraries people prefer, and the answer was  
Net::LDAP.

Austin Z. pointed out that it’s the only pure-Ruby LDAP library.  
The  
alternative is ruby-ldap, a binding to a C LDAP library.

Francis C. added: “Get Net::LDAP and read the Rdoc for  
Net::LDAP#open. As Austin said, this library is very disciplined (and  
documented) about how it uses the network (unlike the native-C  
libraries),  
and it’s pure Ruby- no compiler needed on any platform.”

## why doesn’t Array include Comparable

Ara T. Howard asked why Array, which does has a meaningful \<=\>  
(spaceship)  
operator, doesn’t include the Comparable mixin. Comparable adds \<, \>,  
\<=,  
between? etc. methods.

A couple of people agreed that it would be useful.

## Proper Case (#89)

Elliot T. was behind last week’s Ruby Q., to write a method  
that  
correctly capitalises the words in English sentences.

## Pen and Paper (#90)

This week’s Ruby Q. asks you to write a program to play a simple  
pen-and-paper game, involving a grid of numbers. The quiz was written  
by  
Eric D…

## FSF Award. Guido / Larry won it, why not matz?

Gregory B. nominated Matz for the 2006 FSF Award for the  
Advancement of  
Free Software, noting that Guido and Larry (Python, Perl creators  
respectively) have previously received it.

# New Releases

## Mongrel 0.3.13.4 Pre-Release – PID Files Working

Zed S. asks people to try out the latest Mongrel pre-release. “This  
release is pretty close to becoming official.”

“Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended  
for  
hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather  
than  
FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby  
On  
Rails, Og+Nitro, and Camping frameworks.”

## Pandora 0.4.3 Release

Wiki-engine Pandora has a new search function, common-book sidebar,  
site-wide menu, bug fixes and more, said Julian I. Kamil.

He also explained what makes it different from other Wiki engines:

> it uses a `book’ metaphor for managing its contents. As a Pandora  
> user,  
> you would publish books, with chapters, and pages. As the  
> publisher, you  
> decide who can author the books contents, who can edit them, and  
> who can  
> view them. All of these and the associated user management  
> functions are  
> built into the system.

See ‘The Ruby Bookshelf’ for an example.

## Dr Nic’s Magic Models

Dr Nic’s Magic Models dazzled the crowd. This is a library that lets  
you  
access your ActiveRecord objects with even less work than before.

Actually, there’s no work now. You don’t even need to declare your  
model  
classes.

Say you have an empty Rails project, with a database having  
`people', `groups’ and `membership’ tables. Just open up a console  
and  
start manipulating your objects:

> > person = Person.find(1)  
> > =\> \<Person:0x3958930 @attributes={“lastname”=\>“Williams”,  
> > “firstname”=\>“Nic”,  
> > “id”=\>“1”, “email”=\>“removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid”}\>  
> > person.memberships  
> > =\> [\<Membership:0x393a000 @attributes={“group\_id”=\>“1”, “id”=\>“1”,  
> > “person\_id”=\>“1”}\>]  
> > person.groups  
> > =\> [\<Group:0x390df60 @attributes={“name”=\>“Magic Models Forum”,  
> > “id”=\>“1”, “description”=\>nil}\>]

The above example, taken from the Magic Models homepage, demonstrates  
that  
even has\_many :through relationships are automatically discovered.

## Zerenity 1.0

“Zerenity is an almost clone of Zenity for Ruby. It allows for the  
easy  
creation of simple graphical dialogs from a Ruby script.” (Using  
Ruby/GTK2.)

It’s written by Farrel L… The 1.0 version adds a significant  
number  
of unit tests.

## RFuzz 0.7 – Win32, Bug Fix, Browser Begins

Zed S. put out another RFuzz release.

“RFuzz is an HTTP client library that you can use in combination with  
a  
random junk generator to conduct fuzzing tests against any HTTP  
server (or  
web app). It’s not limited to fuzzing, as the HTTP client can work as  
a  
Net/HTTP replacement, and you can easily just make regular requests.”

## RubyPhone project updated

Gregarican: “This project ports the TSAPI (Telephony Services API)  
library  
to Ruby so you can create CTI applications using the power, fun, and  
flexibility of Ruby.”

There is now a CSTA Simulator, to simulate a PBX.

## rcov 0.7.0 (code coverage for Ruby)

The rcov code-coverage tool now has an-aggregate option, to merge  
results  
from multiple runs, and some bugs were fixed, Mauricio F.  
announced.

## open4-0.5.0

Ara T. Howard added timeouts to open4, a version of the open method  
to "  
open child process with handles on pid, stdin, stdout, and stderr:  
manage  
child processes and their io handles easily."

## Ruby Reports 0.4.21, 0.4.23

Gregory B. optimistically released the “Probably Broken” Edition  
of  
Ruby Reports. “This is the 8th release since the start of Google’s  
Summer  
of Code”.

This development release removes the old data-structures that were  
exposed  
to Ruport designers.

It was indeed broken, and version 0.4.23 followed, fixing  
Ruport::Query.  
There is now a proof-of-concept Invoice Engine, and a tool to create  
skeleton config files etc.

## Rails 1.1.6: Stronger fix, backports, and full disclosure

David Heinemeier H. announced Rails 1.1.6, with a better fix for  
the  
recent security issue around routing. Only 1.1.x releases were  
vunerable  
(1.0.x are ok), and the fix has been backported to each affected  
release.

The fix breaks third-party engines, but there is an interim  
workaround  
that you can use until these are updated (just block certain URLs).

There is now a rails-security mailing list (announcements only), and  
a  
#rails-security IRC channel on Freenet.

## Cerberus 0.2.0

Anatol P.: “Cerberus is a Continuous Builder software for Ruby.  
Cerberus could be periodically run from scheduler and check if  
application  
tests are broken. If it happens then Cerberus will send notification  
to  
project developers.”

## Ruby In Steel 0.75

Huw C.: “This release includes significantly enhanced  
colour  
coding and collapsing for both Ruby and Rails (RHTML) files and  
provides  
support for debugging support for Ruby In Rails. Previous versions  
only  
provided debugging for standard Ruby projects. The Ruby In Steel IDE  
is  
hosted within Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 (Standard edition or  
better).”