Ruby Weekly News

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.

A short newsletter this week, which is unfortunate because there were so many great threads :-(

• 19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know

A fascinating article by Peter Cooper, posted to his most excellent blog rubyinside.com. It hit the front-page of Digg (although there were only a few comments). Even if you’re not a Rails user, there is plenty in the article that applies to Ruby in general, or you can just check out one of the other thirteen articles he wrote last week.

• ICFP Programming Contest: Interest in Ruby team? (ruby-talk)

The ICFP Programming Contest is on July 21-24, and registration is open, reports Maurice Codik. This is the International Conference on Functional Programming’s annual programming contest, and had 161 teams last year.

The contest will be held the weekend of July 21-24: Teams will be given a task to complete in whatever language they choose. The winners will get bragging rights, and a subsidized trip to the ICFP conference in Portland this September. This year’s theme will be “computational archaeolinguistics.”

Maurice would like to know of people that are interested in working in a Ruby team.

• RailsConf Europe, Sept. 14-15: don't put it off! (ruby-talk)

David A. Black reminded all about RailsConf Europe on September 14-15, 2006, in London. It has a very respectable list of speakers already. Registrations and presentations proposals are open.

I repeat: this is a BIG Rails event, and you should be there! Judging from registration numbers, there’s a healthy interest in the event… BUT WE WANT AN UNHEALTHY INTEREST!! Go ahead—put our seating capacity to the test!

“RailsConf Europe is brought to you by Ruby Central, Inc. (the RailsConf people), and Skills Matter, Ltd., our London-based conference partners.”

• Gateway Restored (ruby-talk)

Thanks to James Edward Gray II’s efforts, we once again have a gateway between the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, after more than a month of downtime.

He thanked Dave Thomas (wrote the original gateway code and used to maintain the gateway), Dennis Oelkers (“who was keeper of the gateway for so long”), Fred Senault (donated the newsgroup account for the new gateway), HighGroove Studios (hosting the new gateway script) and their employee Charles Brian Quinn.

“Without all of the above, there would be no gateway. My thanks to you all!”

Retired Ruby Mascott? (ruby-talk)

Pawel Szymczykowski vaguely recalled Ruby having an “anime-girl type” mascot a few years ago, and indeed found a page of pictures of Ruby-chan, drawn by Yoshida Masato.

Wilson Bilkovich said it was always unofficial, and a couple of posters pointed out an old thread discussing Ruby mascots where many people thought this was an unsuitable choice.

There was no such “mascot.” The ruby-chan image came up at a time when the notion of having a Ruby mascot was being bandied about. Mercifully, and correctly, the idea of having a kind of “pet” woman/girl as a mascot was not taken particularly seriously by very many people (except, perhaps, by those of us who felt somewhat affronted by it).

Pawel: “So the only official Ruby mascott is the gem? Isn’t that flying in the face of the tradition of having a cute, user friendly mascott that can be found at your local zoo?” For example, the Perl camel or Python snake.

Brad Tilley, not immediately realising the image links were a camel trying to swallow some poor person’s head, and a scary razor-toothed snake, said:

You’re kidding right? I love Python as much as I love Ruby, but their snake mascot is not a good mascot (IMO). It’s cold-blooded. It eats small furry cute mammals. It’s slimly, it smells, etc. Look at the problems Pyhton has with naming projects. Eggs… what kind of name is that? A lot of people think eggs are gross. And snake eggs are even more gross!

Ruby’s gem is much better (IMO). A Ruby is something of value. If I found a ruby, I would pick it up, dust it of and put it in my pocket. Rubys are something to be held, admired and passed onto or sold to others. If I came across a snake, I’d either run from it or kill it somehow… isn’t it human nature to fear snakes? Why have a mascot so naturally repulsive to 90% of humankind?

(Poor snakes, they get such a bad rap. They’re actually soft and dry, not slimy. I’d also expect Ruby users to be fans of eggs, since they go so well with chunky bacon.)

Brian Mitchell said that the real unofficial community mascots must be the chunky-bacon foxes from Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Don’t forget Chip, the Talking Code Block, added Pawel.

text to speech? (ruby-talk)

Arun, who teaches blind people in New Delhi to program, asked how to do text-to-speech in Ruby.

“Now, of course, for a blind person, audio is as important as the screen is for the sighted, and even to do your first “Hello World” program, you need text to speech to be working.”

Dale Martenson said that on Windows you can use the SAPI interface, which is wrapped through the Win32 Util library, and gave a simple example of its use.

John Gabriele thought that Ruby-GNOME supports GNOME’s accessibility interface, so that might be an option for *nix users. Axel suggested the MBROLA multi-lingual text-synthesis library.

Jamal Mazrui announced that he has written a text editor called TextPal (in Ruby using wxWidgets) that is “fully keyboard accessible and offers almost every feature I’ve found in a text editor (I compared many), and does so in a manner intended to maximize usability by blind persons.” It is free and open-source.

instance_exec (ruby-talk)

Implementations of instance_exec for Ruby 1.8 were discussed. (This, a feature of Ruby 1.9, is a version of instance_eval that takes arguments. It can be useful when evaluating a block that was passed from somewhere else, preventing us from using lexical scoping to pass in an argument.)

This topic was previously covered in February.

Ruby In Steel 0.7 available - Now On Rails (ruby-talk)

Huw Collingbourn announced that the Steel IDE (a Ruby IDE that is built on Visual Studio 2005) now has Rails integration.

Others

There were many new releases not covered in this newsletter, including Mongrel 0.3.13.3, JRuby 0.9.0, RubySlim, MarkaBoo 0.7.3, RFuzz 0.4, Equipment (for Camping) v0.1.0, ruby-debug 0.1, Hpricot 0.1 and 0.2, Ruby Reports 0.4.13, and Facets 1.4.

One-Click Ruby Installer 184-19 Final is available! (ruby-talk)

Curt Hibbs said that the final version of the 1.8.4 release of the One-Click Ruby Installed for Windows is out. Great news for Windows users!