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 Sutherland.

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 Szymczykowski 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 Hibbs).

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 User 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 Enebo talking about JRuby; and Nick Sieger giving a Watir overview.

  • Call for Participants: München (Munich, Germany) Ruby User Group

    • Urban Hafner posted a message about organising a Ruby User Group in Munich, and invited German Ruby developers to join the -de mailing list.

  • Notes from the First NoVA Ruby Users Group

    • Paul Duncan wrote up his notes from the first NOVARUG (Northern Virginia Ruby Users 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 Moore 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 Fernandez said he and some other Rubyists are going to be starting a major Rails project in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.

    Is there a Ruby User 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 Showalter posted a link that describes the xmlschema method, and Austin Ziegler 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 Hunter 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 :-)

PostgreSQL in Ruby with SSL connections

Kevin Brown 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 Gray 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 Britt 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 Gray II introduced an unusual theme for Ruby Quiz 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 Fenton 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 Hibbs posted preview1, then preview2 of the Windows One-Click Ruby Installer for Ruby 1.8.4.

There was much rejoicing.

Adam Sanderson: “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 Shaw 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 Adam created a version of the latest rb-opengl bindings, tweaked for MacOS X.