Ruby Weekly News 18-24th October 2004

Tim_Sutherland1 · 26 October 2004 13:04

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

···

-------------------------------------

Ruby Weekly News 18-24th October 2004

   A summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the
   comp.lang.ruby newsgroup. There were 634 articles in 149 threads. This
   summary is brought to you by Tim Sutherland ([7]TimSuth).

Introduction

   From 2001/12/8 to 2003/06/16, the Ruby Weekly News provided a weekly
   summary of announcements and other interesting ruby-talk threads.
   [8]http://www.rubygarden.org/rurl/html/index.html has the archives,
   and ideas for improving the service are at [9]RubyNews.

It's back...

Ruby in the News

* [10][Introduction to Rubyx Linux - OSNews.com]

          Rubyx is a source-based Linux distribution in which
          installation, configuration and so on are handled with Ruby
          scripts. There is a [11][Rubyx on OS News thread] on ruby-talk
          discussing the article.

* [12][Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide -
Slashdot.org]

The second edition of [13]ProgrammingRuby was reviewed on
Slashdot. The ruby-talk thread starts [14][here].

Announcements

* [15][Ruby/Tk translation]

          Benjamin Peterson translated Koji Arai's [16]RubyTk
          documentation from Japanese into English. "(why yes, all 200
          pages and 102 footnotes)". The translation was [17][posted to
          the web].

* [18][diff2html - Pretty-printing big patches]

Dave Burt wrote a script to turn a unified diff into
side-by-side HTML output.

* [19][Catapult: WEBrick application for dynamic execution of code
via HTTP]

          James Britt wrote an application called [20][Catapault] that
          maps URLs onto Ruby file and class names, caching the resulting
          objects after the first instantiation.

* [21][Rubyist Magazine vol.2 (in Japanese)]

          SASADA Koichi announced the [22][second volume] of a Ruby
          Magazine. It includes interviews, reports on conferences,
          tutorials and tricks.

* [23][svg graph generator, early release]

Simon Strandgaard released an experimental tool for generating
SVG graphs.

* [24][rpa bash programable completion]

          Brian Schröder "hacked together" [25][support for bash
          completion] for the rpa packaging tool. Mauricio Fernández
          [26][decided] to include it in the next release of
          [27][rpa-base].

* [28][ruvi 0.4.12 PRERELEASE [rpa and gem]]

Alexander Kellett presented some first attempts at creating a
GEM for [29][ruvi], a VIM clone written entirely in Ruby.

* [30][Nitro 0.1.2]

          George Moschovitis announced version 0.1.2 of Nitro.
          [31][Nitro] is a web application framework utilising XSLT for
          web templates and having features such as distributed state and
          caching.

* [32][DocDiff 0.3.1]

          Hisashi MORITA introduced [33][DocDiff], a program for showing
          the difference between two files, either word by word,
          character by character or line by line. It has several output
          formats and supports various encodings including ASCII, UTF-8
          and EUC-J.

* [34][Needle 0.6.0]

          Jamis Buck announced [35][Needle], a "dependency injection
          (a.k.a. "inversion of control") container for Ruby." This is
          used when a number of modules of code all need to know about
          each other. Needle is used to register "services" and handle
          the dependencies between them. Dependency injection means that
          Needle takes responsibility for instantiating the different
          services. This means that the services can be written without
          any knowledge of the framework. Jim Weirich has written a good
          [36][description] of dependency injection.

* [37][Rabbit 0.0.4]

          Kouhei Sutou came out with Rabbit 0.0.4, then quickly released
          0.0.5 to fix a critical bug on the Windows platform.
          [38][Rabbit] is an application that uses RD markup to generate
          slides for presentations. It's now easier to install on
          Windows, has a couple of new themes and is customised for
          Japanese, English and French.

* [39][Ruby/ActiveLDAP 0.5.1]

          Will Drewry announced a new version of [40][Ruby/ActiveLDAP], a
          library which provides an object oriented mapping of LDAP
          objects to Ruby objects. It can now be installed with
          [41]RubyGems and many bugs were also fixed.

* [42][RubyGarden FAQ Revival]

          Chad Fowler was happy to declare an updated [43][RubyGarden
          FAQ], which David Alan Black has rewritten in [44][Rails]. He
          went on to say "This release is part of a greater
          [45]RubyGarden revitalization that is underway. If you have
          ideas for content and/or [46]RubyGarden improvements, now's a
          great time to let me know."

* [47][Ruby-GetText-Package-0.7.0]

          Masao Mutoh announced the latest version of the
          [48][Ruby-GetText] package, a Native Language support library
          and set of tools modelled after GNU gettext.

* [49][XHTMLDiff 1.0.0]

          Aredridel released [50][XHTMLDiff], a tool to show the
          difference between two XHTML documents using <ins> and <del>
          tags.

* [51][Rails 0.8]: Just shy of 100 additions, changes, tweaks, and
fixes!

          David Heinemeier Hansson announced a new release of
          [52][Rails], a web-application framework for Ruby. This release
          includes many bugfixes and new features, including a new
          framework called "Action Mailer" for email services like
          password reminders.

Threads

Interesting threads this week include ...
_________________________________________________________________

[53][Can one simulate go to in Ruby? Is it possible?]

   Roman K9 got more than he bargained for when he asked "Is it possible
   to have a go to in Ruby without having a go to?" Solutions using
   callcc were presented, and Matt Maycock gave a program that someone
   described as an "Unholy morphing of Ruby into Basic". Continuations
   were also discussed in [54][another thread].
     _________________________________________________________________

[55][[QUIZ] Regexp.build() (#4)]

The fourth Ruby Quiz was to build a regular expression to match
integers matching lists and ranges. For example

year = Regexp.build( 98, 99, 2000..2005 )
"04" =~ year # => false
"2004" =~ year # => true
"99" =~ year # => true

A [56][summary] of responses was later posted.

Another thread [57][began].

   The [58][summary] of last week's Quiz (Geodesic Faces) was also
   posted.
     _________________________________________________________________

[59][Re: ruby-dev summary 24298-24353]

This thread began several weeks ago, but this week there was some
discussion of "functors" as polymorphic proc. It all started with
Nowake proposed that a Proc object should be invoked with
any method name like that:

m = Proc.new( :to_s ) { 'test1' }
p m.to_s # => 'test1'
_________________________________________________________________

[60][trace_func parameters (Re: ruby-dev summary 24298-24353)]

   This isn't much of a thread, comprising a single post from Matz,
   however it is a very useful description of the parameters to
   "trace_func". It is listed here in the hope that someone will put the
   information somewhere permanent, such as on the [61]RubyGarden Wiki.
     _________________________________________________________________

[62][A concise description of Ruby?]

Curt Hibbs wrote
Yesterday, a co-worker came into my office and saw the shiny, new pickaxe II
book on my desk and said "What is Ruby?"

Unfortunately, I really blew the opportunity as I attempted to come up with
a brilliant one or two sentence description. The best I could muster was
something like, "Uhh... err... it's kind of like perl or python but much
better." How lame is that!

He went on to ask for suggestions for better answers to the question,
a sort of elevator pitch for Ruby.

   [63][Mike Clark]: "Ruby? Oh, you won't like this language. (Slides
   Pixaxe II out of view.) It's entirely too fun and productive for most
   people."

   [64][Jan Krüger]: Ruby is the programming language that makes you have
   more time for your girlfriend .. or less, if you fall in love with
   ruby instead.

   [65][Paul Sanchez]: Ruby is an elegant language in which it's easy and
   natural to express solutions. It's simple enough that a beginner can
   start using it immediately, yet powerful enough to deal with
   sophisticated needs. It's so fun that the Puritans would have banned
   it had they known about it.

   [66][Simon Strandgaard]: Ruby has hidden positive suprises. Even
   though I have used it for long time, it keeps amaze and suprise me. It
   gives me energy.

   [67][Aredridel]: I say "A language that's like the best parts of
   Smalltalk, Perl and Lisp, all in one, and no line noise, parentheses
   or weird VM"

[68][gabriele renzi]: it's an OO dynamic language with simple syntax.
It is fun oriented. I love ruby.

   In a subthread focusing on the Javascript language, Florian Gross
   [69][took the opportunity] to post an implementation of many of Ruby's
   standard libraries in Javascript!
     _________________________________________________________________

[70][Re: Garden Spam ]

   Unfortunately there are some people who are running scripts to spam
   the [71]RubyGarden Wiki (and other wikis) with links. This is a big
   problem - you can spend half an hour removing spam from pages and by
   the time you're done there will be more to clean. The thread discusses
   the problem and approaches to dealing with it. Hopefully this can be
   dealt with soon. If you're reading this Ruby Weekly News on
   [72]RubyGarden there is probably spam on the page. Click "View other
   revisions", select the last revision before the spam, click "Edit
   revision", then "Save" with "This change is a minor edit" set. This
   will revert the page to a pre-spam state.
     _________________________________________________________________

References

Jamis_Buck4 · 26 October 2004 13:46

Tim Sutherland wrote:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

Wonderful, Tim! I've been wishing this would come back. It's a great resource. I have several friends who want to join ruby-talk, but are daunted by its high volume. This is an excellent alternative, I think. Thanks!

- Jamis

···

--
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

gabriele_renzi · 26 October 2004 15:29

Tim Sutherland ha scritto:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

thanks for reviving it!
I was thinking of doing it myself
Maybe you could accept some help (a simple "lot of work this week, who wants the ball?" on the list) ?

Bill_Guindon1 · 26 October 2004 17:25

I really needed that. Been suffering from withdrawal symptoms as my
day job has pretty much ripped me away from Ruby for a bit -- this was
the perfect way to catch up quickly.

···

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:04:13 +0900, Tim Sutherland <timsuth@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

--
Bill Guindon (aka aGorilla)

Chad_Fowler4 · 26 October 2004 23:44

Absoutely fantastic, Tim! I've been looking for a volunteer to take
this on for a while. What do you say we make it "official" and get
you access to do it in a more permanent place on RubyGarden? Shoot me
an email if you're interested, and we'll work out the logistics.

Thanks,
Chad

···

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:04:13 +0900, Tim Sutherland <timsuth@ihug.co.nz> wrote:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

Simon_Strandgaard1 · 27 October 2004 16:34

Thanks for this great summary.
I have alwaysly appreciated the summaries on ruby-dev/core.
This news is good.

···

On Tuesday 26 October 2004 15:04, Tim Sutherland wrote:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if
you're reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

--
Simon Strandgaard

Tim_Sutherland1 · 26 October 2004 23:39

Yes, definitely. I've put a pre-release version of next week's on the wiki:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-25

I encourage people to add to this as the week goes on.

Also, it is possibly for someone to post
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18
to http://www.ruby-lang.org/ or another appropriate place?

I'm guessing that many of the people who used to read Ruby Weekly News don't
read ruby-talk.

Thanks.

···

In article <E2ufd.2137$Es2.43918@twister2.libero.it>, gabriele renzi wrote:

Tim Sutherland ha scritto:

I have written the Ruby Weekly News for 18-24th October 2004:

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-18

The web version is nicer than plain text (lots of hyperlinks), but if you're
reading this offline then the output from "lynx -dump" is below.

I hope to continue writing this each week, but no promises
Feedback is welcome.

thanks for reviving it!
I was thinking of doing it myself
Maybe you could accept some help (a simple "lot of work this week, who
wants the ball?" on the list) ?

Gavin_Sinclair · 26 October 2004 23:48

Au contraire, I use it to make sense of ruby-talk

Gavin

···

On Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 9:39:04 AM, Tim wrote:

I'm guessing that many of the people who used to read Ruby Weekly News don't
read ruby-talk.

Topic		Replies	Views
Ruby Weekly News 25-31st October 2004 ruby-talk	2	96	3 November 2004
Ruby Weekly News 22nd-28th November 2004 ruby-talk	0	93	30 November 2004
Ruby Weekly News 8th-14th November 2004 ruby-talk	8	129	17 November 2004
Ruby Weekly News 15th-21st November 2004 ruby-talk	2	107	23 November 2004
Ruby Weekly News 6th - 12th December 2004 ruby-talk	6	101	14 December 2004

Ruby Weekly News 18-24th October 2004

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