http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060108.html
Ruby Weekly News 2nd - 8th January 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…
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Articles and Announcements
* Red Letter: The Ruby Journal site takes shape, accepting
proposals
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"After a brief hiatus over the winter holidays, Red Letter: The
Ruby
Journal is again making progress towards issue #1."
"The writer's kit is coming shortly. Many, many people asked for
it.
We were very pleased with the number of responses to our initial
post."
"We are currently accepting proposals for feature stories. While
the
writer’s kit is assembled, please feel free to send a three-five
paragraph proposal to […]"
"We also want to choose six-seven columnists that would write
regularly for Red Letter."
See also Do you run a Ruby user group, SIG, or conference? in
which it
was announced that the journal “will feature a Community page
dedicated to announcing Ruby events, user groups, SIGs, book and
product releases, conferences, and more.”
* You want a Ruby extension? Talk to me, baby
---------------------------------------------
Joe Van D. decided to improve his extension skills, and so asked
for
“any C or C++ libraries out there that someone would appreciate
an
open-sourced Ruby extension for?”
Lots of suggestions followed.
* Snakes and Rubies Video and Audio Online!
-------------------------------------------
John W. Long announced the onlineness of video and audio from the
[Snakes and Rubies] Django and Rails event.
"Kudos to Jacob Kaplan-Moss and the rest of the team who handled
the
recording and editing."
User Group News
* User groups in central England?
---------------------------------
Ross B. wondered if there were any Ruby users groups in
central
England, “specifically the East Midlands, Nottingham area”.
There were not yet any replies.
* Toronto Ruby U. Group meeting Sun 8 Jan 2005 [ed: 2006]
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Toronoto Ruby U. Group's (TRUG) next meeting is on Sunday
8th
January 2006 at the Linux Caffe.
Chad P.: "Holy cow. You have a cafe just for Linux users?"
Austin Z.: "Yeah. You know how tolerant Toronto is ;)"
Sy Ali: "BSD users are welcome too. ;)"
* New Haven Rubyists Meeting 2005.01.11 [ed: 2006]
--------------------------------------------------
Gregory B. announced the next monthly meeting of the New Haven
Rubyists: Wednesday 11th January 2006.
"This month's feature is a ORM panel discussion which will
compare and
contrast Og, ActiveRecord, and Lafcadio."
"We also review a Ruby Q. each month, and this month's featured
quiz
will be the Sokoban one."
* An Orlando Ruby/Ruby_on_rails user group is forming
-----------------------------------------------------
Steve L. announced that Gregg P. is forming Ruby and Rails
users groups in Orlando (Florida), and those interested should
get in
contact.
* Phoenix Ruby U. Group January meeting reminder
---------------------------------------------------
James B. reminded the Phoenix Ruby U. Group that their
meeting
was on Monday 9th January 2006.
* Any interest in a Milwaukee Area Ruby U. Group
--------------------------------------------------
Tom J. is looking for others to form a milwauke.rb or
waukesha.rb
group.
* Ruby users in the SE Wyoming / W Nebraska region?
---------------------------------------------------
"Just curious to see if there's anyoue else out there yet from
the
southeastern corner of Wyoming or the Nebraska panhandle?" asked
Kirk
“A bit east of Chugwater, WY” Haines.
* January Ruby events in the SF Bay Area
----------------------------------------
Rich M. announced some January Ruby events in the SF Bay Area:
10th
January has the San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group, and on the 25th
is
the Beer & Pizza SIG.
"P.S. If you are planning a Ruby-related event in the SF Bay
Area, be
sure to let me know about it (early) so that I can list it!"
Quote of the Week
David A. Black:
“I’m happy to say I don’t know any true Ruby elitists.”
Francis H.:
“Whatever, dude. That’s because we’re too cool to hang out with
you.”
Threads
Dice Roller (#61)
Matthew D Moss came up with this week’s Ruby Q…
“Time to release your inner nerd.”
Write a dice roller for D&D-like games that takes an expression like
“5d5-4)d(16/d4)+3” and the number of times to roll the dice, and
returns
stats for your character.
“The meat of this quiz is going to be parsing the dice expression”.
Matt L.: “REAL gamers roll 100 sided dice (aka Zoccihedron)”.
XML pretty printing?
Chris McMahon asked if Ruby has any libraries to make “pretty” XML?
James B. said that REXML has options for outputting XML with
indentation, see e.g. REXML::Document#write.
ruby-dev summary 28027-28205
Takaaki T. summarised the Japanese mailing list ruby-dev.
Process.exec has been added to Ruby 1.9, and patches were also merged
allowing Intel’s compiler to compile Ruby on IA64. (But some tests
still
fail.)
Talking to Java Code from Ruby
Kevin B. was using YAJB (Yet Another Java Bridge) to utilise the
Java
library JasperReports from Ruby, but was getting a “No such method”
error
when trying to call a particular overloaded method.
“So is there a way to specify types for overloaded methods, or do I
need
to use RJB?”
| I would like to use yajb because it’s pure ruby and pure java,
meaning
| no compiling, and installs are easy. The communication being slow
makes
| almost zero difference to me because I won’t be doing very much
| communication, just spawning off processor hogs with the thing.
Masashi Sakurai said that the error was correct - Kevin was passing
the
wrong parameters to the method, and he supplied a fixed version of
his
code.
“The yajb tries to search the overloaded method as java does. So,
giving
appropriate arguments, you can choose the method.”
In the meantime, Kevin had got it working with RJB, and had
presumably
made the same fix somewhere along the line.
Another milestone for Ruby!
Jeremy H. reported from the Jifty home page:
| Jifty is written in Perl. If you’re familiar with Ruby, Perl might
feel
| like Ruby’s quirky big brother.
“You know you’ve arrived when people try to describe Perl by
comparing it
to you!”
Almost …
05jan2006 #perl6
15:05 My plan worked perfectly. the perl as ruby’s quirky
brother
comment was intended to get ruby people to laugh
15:05 #
http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/hehMmmnnPerlPeople.html
15:05 obra++ # evil genius
Jifty is a web application framework for Perl, featuring
continuations,
form-based dispatch (“you never need to write form handling logic”),
and a
pony.
Ruby PDA implementation?
We accidently reported on an old Ruby-on-mobiles thread last week,
but
this one’s definitely fresh, and has more information than the old
one.
gregarican re-asked about Ruby on PDAs, and Jason Tell linked to his
blog
post showing success at running Ruby on an iPAQ with the Windows
Mobile
operating system.
gregarican gets Wince::Strerror exceptions with various operations.
Does
anyone have an idea?
New Releases
KirbyBase 2.5.2
Jamey C. made a new release of KirbyBase, a pure-Ruby database
management system that uses plain text for all its files.
KBTable#insert behaviour has changed. If the user specifies nil for a
field then nil will be used, rather than the default value of the
field.
Subversion 1.3.0 released.
Kouhei S. noted the release of Subversion 1.3.0, which now comes
with
complete Ruby bindings.
RForum 0.2
Andreas S. announced the second version of RForum (web forum sofware
that
also integrates with mailing lists).
Many improvements were made, including new stylesheets and support
for the
Ferret search engine.
Rote 0.3.2 released
“Rote is a lightweight, powerful documentation and templating system
that
provides an easy-to-use Rake-based build for your software
documentation
and other static text for the web.”
Several new features were added, and bugs fixed.
Family Connection 1.0
Duane J. released 1.0 of Family Connection, “an easy-to-setup
online
hub for your family that includes a Family News section, and an
Address
Book.”
SwitchTower 0.10.0
Jamis B. announced a new version of SwitchTower, fixing “several
longstanding issues”, as well as adding some new functionality.
“I anticipate one (or at most two) more releases before 1.0.”
| SwitchTower is a utility that can execute commands in parallel on
| multiple servers. It allows you to define tasks, which can include
| commands that are executed on the servers. You can also define
roles for
| your servers, and then specify that certain tasks apply only to
certain
| roles. It was developed primarily to ease the pain of deploying
Rails
| applications to multiple machines, but can be used for a great deal
more
| than that.
Rio 0.3.7
Rio now supports pipe syntax and behaviour, and has improved
treatment of
Windows paths.
Rio is a “Ruby I/O convenience class wrapping much of the
functionality of
IO, File and Dir.”
An example:
Create a tab separated file of accounts in a UNIX passwd file,
listing only the username, uid, and realname fields
rio(‘/etc/passwd’).csv(‘:’).columns(0,2,4) > rio(‘rpt’).csv(“\t”)
Harpo:
| Bravo !
|
| … Because :
| . It is very useful.
| . It is well documented.
Instant Rails 1.0 Final has been released!
Curt H. announced Instant Rails 1.0 Final.
| Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby,
| Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No
| installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and
run
| it. It does not modify your system environment. This release of
Instant
| Rails is for Windows, but there are plans for ports to Linux, BSD,
and
| OSX.
The Final release is the same as the Release Candidate 1.