Peter Cooper Page 21 : Ruby Inside

4 Upcoming Ruby and Rails Events To Check Out (in Berlin, London, Hawaii, and Washington)

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2009

RailsWayCon – Berlin, Germany, May 25-27, 2009

Overview: RailsWayCon is, in many ways, a logical replacement for RailsConf Europe this year. Taking place in Berlin, as RailsConf Europe did, there’s a wide range of well known Ruby and Rails faces attending and a significant number of sessions organized into three tracks.

Well-known attendees/speakers: Amy Hoy, Yehuda Katz, Neal Ford, Thomas Fuchs, Michael Koziarski, Steven Bristol, Ola Bini, Stefan Tilkov, Jonathan Weiss

Registration: You can buy a ticket to the main conference for €699 for both days or €349 for a single day. Freelancers and students get significant discounts. Click on “Registration” on the official site to learn more. Read More

The Mega RailsConf 2009 Round Up

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2009

A week ago, RailsConf 2009 kicked off in Las Vegas. As usual, it didn’t fall short on drama, interesting sessions, and inspiration for the 1000+ attendees. This post is an after-event summary and long-term source of links to the best RailsConf 2009 related content found so far (a bit like our mega RailsConf 2008 round up post). If you have anything to add, post a comment and it might even be added to the post!

Summaries

Rails Magazine Special Edition: Issue #2 of the Rails Magazine is a special edition dedicated to RailsConf 2009. The PDF edition is free but you can also buy a print copy. Read More

Rubystein: Wolfenstein 3D Recreated in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / May 11, 2009

At RailsConf 2009 (of which a summary will be coming soon to Ruby Inside), Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui of Phusion (the guys behind Passenger) gave a presentation called Scaling Rails. As part of this, they wanted to demonstrate that Ruby is powerful enough to run a 3D game at a decent speed so they built Rubystein, a Wolfenstein 3D clone in Ruby, using the Gosu game development library.

Rubystein is not a true clone in the sense that it’s exactly the same as Wolfenstein 3D, but the principles are the same. It’s heavily tailored to Ninh and Hongli’s presentation, however, and features a “pack of Mongrels”, various Rubyists, and *** **** as a boss. Read More

Programming Ruby 1.9 (The New Pickaxe) Now In Print

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By Peter Cooper / April 30, 2009

Whether you love it or not, as a Rubyist you probably have a copy of Programming Ruby (also known as The Pickaxe) floating about. It was the first English language Ruby book to be published and was instrumental in boosting Ruby’s popularity in the early noughties.

Now, after quite some time, the latest, third, edition of Programming Ruby has gone into print and is now available in both print and PDF/e-book formats. Direct from the publisher, The Pragmatic Programmers , you can pick it up as a eBook + Paper Book package for $59.95, an eBook only for $25, or the print version for $49.95. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #23

By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

Open Gem: A RubyGems Plugin to Quickly Get Inside Gems

Adam Sanderson has written an extremely useful RubyGems plugin called open_gem. It makes it really quick to inspect what’s inside your gems, e.g.: gem open rails. You’ll need to be running RubyGems 1.3.2 first.

Testy – A New BDD Testing Framework

Sure, we already have RSpec, but Testy is an intriguing new BDD testing framework by Ara T Howard. It’s very minimalist. You don’t need to learn(any.clever.dsls) and there are just two new method calls to learn. It produces machine readable results for continuous integration purposes and is generally very flexible and light. Read More

Post Retracted: It’s Not a Ruby Inside Thing

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By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

Update: I retract the post Be Professional or Be Edgy: How Context Can Keep Everyone Happy of April 27, 2009 in full. It covered an issue that started as a Ruby-related thing, but quickly became focused on the behavior and sentiments of some Rails communities. Ruby Inside is a Ruby news blog; therefore my editorial was unuseful and made for dull reading. I apologize for falling into such boring territory.

If you have no idea what I’m going on about and have time to kill, go here or here or visit one of the several threads on RubyFlow about it.

Regardless, I am leaving the comments here for the public record as they have been referenced elsewhere. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for April 2009

By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

It’s time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going.

Big Nerd Ranch – Ruby and Rails Training

Big Nerd Ranch offers intensive, head-down computer programming courses taught by experts in a retreat environment. Classroom, accommodations, and dining all take place within the same building, freeing you to learn, code, and discuss with your programming peers and instructors.

The current focus is on their Ruby on Rails Bootcamp taking place from June 8 to June 12. Charles B Quinn will be instructing. 5 full days of learning Rails in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More

Heroku, The Git-Powered Ruby Hosting Platform, Goes Commercial

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By Peter Cooper / April 25, 2009

It was way back in November 2007 that we first mentioned Heroku, the then online Rails development and app hosting environment. It’s a little more than that now – it bills itself as the “instant Ruby platform” – and you can host Rails, Sinatra, Ramaze, and other Rack apps and deploy them entirely using Git.

Today, Heroku has taken its next big step with its commercial launch. In its first two years, Heroku has been used to run 25,000+ apps and now users can pay for extended services. The free level remains which gives you one “dyno” (essentially a complete Ruby stack with a certain amount of processing power), two dynos then cost $0.05 per hour, all the way up to 40 dynos that’ll put you back $1.95 an hour. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #22

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By Peter Cooper / April 24, 2009

It’s been just over a year since the last Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts post (number 21, specifically). I think I felt that RubyFlow filled the gap for quick-fire group posts, but.. it doesn’t, quite (even though it’s going great guns!) There are still a lot of awesome things out there that should be highlighted here but that, perhaps, don’t need their own post. So.. the series is back.

Enjoy!

How to Write a RubyGems Command Plugin

Following on from our news about the new version of RubyGems and its plugin functionality, Gabriel Horner has put together a great tutorial that covers how to create your own plugin from scratch. Read More

David Black’s Ruby 1.9 Video Tutorials

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By Peter Cooper / April 23, 2009

Popular Ruby trainer and author David A Black has partnered up with Envycasts (from the Rails Envy guys) to produce a set of two Ruby 1.9 video tutorials / screencasts. You can buy each part (part 1, 2) on its own for $9 or the two together as a set for $16. If you choose the set, you’ll also get a 40%-off coupon for David’s new book, The Well Grounded Rubyist (the followup to Ruby for Rails).

I’ve watched both of the videos and they’re up to the usual extremely high production standards that Envycasts is becoming known for (see this review of their Rails 2.2 screencast and PDF). Read More

RubyGems 1.3.2: Now with Plugins

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By Peter Cooper / April 22, 2009

Last week, the latest version of Ruby packaging library/tool, RubyGems, was released. Version 1.3.2 not only has a bunch of bug fixes (including supporting https URLs for gem sources) and improvements, but a number of new features. The biggest new feature is support for plugins. Plugins can be used to add commands to the gem command line tool or install/uninstall hooks. InfoQ’s Mirko Stocker has put together a good summary of the new functionality along with some comments directly from RubyGems maintainer Eric Hodel.

Ryan Davis has already released a plugin called graph that produces a graph of your gems and their dependency states. Read More

Minor Updates for Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 Released

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By Peter Cooper / April 19, 2009

Over on the official Ruby news site, Urabe Shyouhei has announced the release of minor updates to both Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, namely 1.8.6p368 and 1.8.7p160:

Updates to already-released Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.8.6 have been released.

This time we have fixed dozens of bugs, including workarounds for CVE-2007-1558 and CVE-2008-1447. Many segfaults are also fixed. For a complete list of what has been fixed, please read the ChangeLogs (1, 2).

The released tarballs are available at:

These updates are only worth pursuing if it’s of utmost importance that you have the latest point release of your chosen Ruby version installed – in critical production environments, perhaps. Read More

9 Ruby and Rails Jobs for April 2009

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By Peter Cooper / April 17, 2009

It never ceases to surprise me how many good Ruby and Rails jobs there are around, despite the economic difficulties. Okay, most of those on our jobs board are New York or San Francisco focused, but.. we have telecommuting positions listed too! So if you’re looking for a Ruby job you’re in the right place (for now)! We’ve had several positions added to the Ruby jobs board over the last month:

Ruby Zen Master (San Francisco, CA): Get Satisfaction is a “people-powered customer service” powerhouse. They help bring customers and companies together to resolve problems. They’re looking for smart, dedicated people with a passion for building great software to work at their South Park, San Francisco offices. Read More

Passenger Gets Nginx Support With New Version 2.2.0

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By Peter Cooper / April 16, 2009

Phusion has just announced the release of Passenger 2.2.0, a significant update to the dream-come-true Apache module for deploying Rack-based Ruby applications (including Rails, Sinatra, and Ramaze apps). Or… is it? With 2.2.0 Passenger is now an Nginx module too! So if Apache isn’t quite your cup of tea and you were thinking of fleeing back to Nginx (or perhaps you already did), there’s now an option to make deploying Ruby webapps on Nginx as easy as on Apache.

Peepcode’s Geoffrey Grosenbach has even produced a screencast demonstrating how to get going with Passenger on Nginx. Check it out! If you aren’t yet using Nginx, Passenger’s installation routine will install the whole thing for you and by just adding a single server block into the Nginx configuration file, your app will be rolling. Read More

17 Videos Covering Basic Ruby Techiques

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By Peter Cooper / April 15, 2009

Tekniqal.com is a site offering a series of 17 Basic Ruby tutorials in screencast form. In a way, it’s like Railscasts, but focusing solely on basic Ruby techniques. So far there are 17 tutorials covering basic topics from whitespace and identifiers through to symbols and hashes, but it looks like there’ll be more in future.

These videos probably won’t be of much direct use to the average Ruby Inside reader directly, but if you have developers under you or friends who need to learn Ruby and you want them to get a quick fire, bite by bite introduction to some of the concepts involved, point them to Tekniqal. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

RailsWayCon – Berlin, Germany, May 25-27, 2009

Summaries

Open Gem: A RubyGems Plugin to Quickly Get Inside Gems

Testy – A New BDD Testing Framework

How to Write a RubyGems Command Plugin