Ruby Weekly News 23rd - 29th January 2006

http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060129.html

Ruby Weekly News 23rd - 29th 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…

[ Contribute to the next newsletter ]

Articles and Announcements

 * Silicon Valley Ruby Conference
 --------------------------------

   David A. Black: "I'm pleased to announce that Ruby Central, Inc. 

and
SDForum are teaming up to present: The Silicon Valley Ruby
Conference
April 22-23, 2006".

 * Ruby at O'Reilly Rough Cuts
 -----------------------------

   Pawel S. noticed two upcoming Ruby books available as
   O'Reilly "Rough Cuts" (their version of the Pragmatic 

Programmer’s
Beta Book creation):

      * Ruby Cookbook (Leonard Richardson, Lucas Carlson).
      * Ruby on Rails: Up and Running (Bruce A. Tate, Curt H.).

User Group News

 * The Seattle Brigade Chats with Bruce Eckel
 --------------------------------------------

   Bruce Eckel came to some Seattle Brigade (Seattle.rb) meetings, 

and
wrote up his impressions of Ruby in a blog post Ruby, PHP and a
Conference.

   "The result: there are definitely some very cool things here. I 

don’t
know why Ruby fans don’t talk about them, but they’re here."

 * Twin Cities (Minnesota) Ruby U. Group Meeting - Jan 31st
 ------------------------------------------------------------

   The Minneapolis/St Paul area group were having their second 

meeting on
January 31st.

   "If you would like to present something, we would be very happy 

to
have you, and free beers may follow!"

   Planned presentations, and possible free-beer receivers, are 

Charles
Nutter and Thomas E. talking about JRuby; and Nick S.
giving a
Watir overview.

 * Call for Participants: München (Munich, Germany) Ruby U. Group
 ------------------------------------------------------------------

   Urban H. posted a message about organising a Ruby U. Group 

in
Munich, and invited German Ruby developers to join the -de
mailing
list.

 * Notes from the First NoVA Ruby U. Group
 --------------------------------------------

   Paul D. wrote up his notes from the first NOVARUG (Northern
   Virginia Ruby U. Group) meeting. More than 40 people attended 

the
meeting, which featured a presentation by Rich Kilmer on Alph (a
Ruby-ActionScript bridge, for doing Ruby stuff with Flash), and
other
topics.

 * Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts (OGRE) 2nd Meeting
 -----------------------------------------------------

   OGRE had their second meeting on January 25, featuring "talks 

from the
Jaded Pixel development team on issues related to the development
of
Shopify."

 * Boise Ruby Brigade
 --------------------

   Mike M. announced a Ruby group for Boise in Idaho, U.S., with 

the
first meeting scheduled for February 22.

 * Ruby user group in/near Wilmington, DE? Interest in starting one?
 -------------------------------------------------------------------

   Obie F. said he and some other Rubyists are going to be
   starting a major Rails project in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.

   Is there a Ruby U. Group there already, or any others 

interested in
setting one up?

Threads

Printing RFC3339 timezone?

csn asked how to turn a Time into some text suitable for use in an
Atom
XML feed, i.e. following RFC3339.

Bob S. posted a link that describes the ‘xmlschema’ method,
and
Austin Z. gave the same response a minute later.

require ‘time’

t = Time.now
t.xmlschema # => “2006-01-31T22:09:20+13:00”

Making Thumbnails with RMagick

Timothy H. noticed that a lot of people were using RMagick to
make
thumbnails of JPEG images, so he benchmarked four different resize
methods
(for speed, simplicity, and quality).

The overall winner was the `thumbnail’ method. That’s easy to
remember :slight_smile:

PostgreSQL in Ruby with SSL connections

Kevin B. asked how to connect to PostgreSQL through SSL, and Dick
Davies replied, saying that if he uses the ruby-postgres library
(which
wraps the C client library), then this is handled “transparently” as
far
as the Ruby library is concerned: you just need to put the
appropriate
certificate/key files in the ~/.postgresql directory.

Kevin later managed to get this working via psql, but the Ruby code
was
giving the error #<PGError: SSL error: sslv3 alert handshake
failure>.

Any ideas?

I like the new ruby-doc.org!

James Edward G. II said “I feel the new front page of ruby-doc.org
is
significantly more attractive. Nice work!”

ruby-doc.org creator and maintainer James B. gave credit for the
redesign to Dan Ritz of 30 Second Rule.

Maxwell Heidegger asked if it was using Rails, and the answer was no:
it’s
using Nitro.

Port a Library (#64)

James Edward G. II introduced an unusual theme for Ruby Q. this
week:
port a small, simple library of your choosing from another language
to
Ruby.

Strange posting about ebooks

Lots of people on the mailing list received an 18mb email containing
a
number of unauthorised Ruby e-books.

They were displeased.

how to run just one test method in a test case

nicknameoptional had some unit tests, and wanted to know if there is
a
command to only run a particular test method.

Marcel Molina Jr. said that the “-n” command-line option is used for
this.

It takes either the whole method name, or a pattern to match a set of
test
methods.

ruby tc_foo.rb -n test_foo_1
ruby tc_foo.rb -n /foo_2/

wxruby 2

baalbek wondered about the status of wxruby2, and Alex F. said
it’s
close to being ready for beta release, but there are some important
bugs
that need fixing.

| There is a good group of C++ developers involved who made a lot of
| progress over last summer, but they’ve all been short of time in
the
| last few months, so been a lull in development.
|
| It’s usable enough for playing around, and has some nice new
features
| beyond 0.6.0 - on top of all the native look’n’feel niceness of Wx
| generally - such as good support for OS X (inc aqua-look), Unicode,
new
| widgets, and better exposing of Wx class hierarchies. Unlike 0.6.0
| release from the old series, I wouldn’t say it’s stable enough for
| production code.

New Releases

xx-0.1.0 : xhtml and xml make it twice as dirty

Ara.T.Howard:

| xx is a library designed to extend ruby objects with html, xhtml,
and
| xml generation methods. the syntax provided by xx aims to make the
| generation of xml or xhtml as clean looking and natural as ruby it
self.

In a subsequent post Ara compared this library with the XML builders
used
in Nitro and Rails.

One-Click Ruby Installer 184-16 preview1 is available!

Curt H. posted preview1, then preview2 of the Windows One-Click
Ruby
Installer for Ruby 1.8.4.

There was much rejoicing.

Adam S.: “Thank you so much for your work on the one click
installer. It makes using ruby in my office feasible, which makes me
sane(ish).”

Mongrel HTTP Server 0.1.2 (With Camping Tepee Sample)

Zed S. announced a new release of his “fast as hell web server
library”,
Mongrel.

“Remember, this is totally ALPHA work. Don’t run a nuclear reactor
with
it, but do shoot me crashes, bug reports, anything.”

Sudoku - Dancing Links algorithm

jwesley wrote a Sudoku game in Ruby / GTK+, and also released a gem
for
his implementation of the “Dancing Links” puzzle-solving algorithm.

OpenGL-0.32g for Apple MacOS X

James A. created a version of the latest rb-opengl bindings,
tweaked for
MacOS X.

Tim S. [email protected] wrote:

Strange posting about ebooks

Lots of people on the mailing list received an 18mb email containing a
number of unauthorised Ruby e-books.

They were displeased.

Laughed out loud at that. In case I haven’t said it before, thanks for
the time and effort you put into this!

martin