Peter Cooper Page 44 : Ruby Inside

RailsConf EU 2007 – The First Day

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By Peter Cooper / September 18, 2007

Railsconfeu2007
(image credit: James Duncan Davidson)

The European variety of the popular RailsConf Rails Conference is currently in full swing in Berlin, Germany, and runs until the end of this Wednesday, September 19. But for those of us who prefer to watch Yanni concerts on DVD from the comfort of our couch rather than from the ear-pounding front row, some attendees have been uploading photos and blog posts about the event so far.

An announcement about the Reject Conf tonight (September 18) in Berlin. The Reject Conf in Portland was supposedly a total blast, so check it out. It’ll feature some of the talks that didn’t make the list for RailsConf proper. Read More

Autumn Leaves: A Ruby IRC Bot Framework

By Peter Cooper / September 18, 2007

Frobot
(image credit: energymech – a cool C-powered bot)

Autumn Leaves is a “full-featured framework on top of which IRC bots can be quickly and easily built,” developed by Tim Morgan. It provides everything you need to get an IRC bot up and running, with facilities for loading, daemonizing and logging bots out-of-the-box. Tim says Autumn Leaves has a “Rails-like approach” and presents some example code for building your first bot. Read More

StaticMatic: Ruby-Powered Static Web Site System

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By Peter Cooper / September 18, 2007

Staticmatic

StaticMatic is a new alternative to dynamic systems like Ruby on Rails for putting together regular, static Web sites. It uses the superb Haml templating language, and if you’re of the Haml mindset, StaticMatic makes putting together static Web sites a snap. It also allows you to quickly “preview” your sites using a stand alone daemon but also to “build” your site to HTML to upload elsewhere. Read More

Anvil: Another Framework for Developing GUI Applications

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By Peter Cooper / September 12, 2007

Anvil1
Anvil is a new Ruby framework for developing GUI applications by Lance Carlson. It’s a framework around Wx::Ruby (WxWidgets is a popular cross-platform widget toolkit) and offers its own DSL to make developing GUI applications easy. The release blog post has more information, including a great example of the code required to make a basic Anvil app. Interestingly it supports an MVC style of development where the view and control elements of your applications can be separated cleanly.

The first Anvil-powered application is a Ruby based editor called Hamr. Lance is so far the main developer of the Anvil project but he’s keen to get other people involved. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Warrant Separate Posts #1

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By Peter Cooper / September 11, 2007

Welcome to the first “Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Warrant Separate Posts”! This is going to be a somewhat regular feature of all the reasonably interesting things I’m e-mailed about or discover that aren’t getting as much attention as they should, but which aren’t captivating enough to warrant an entire post on their own. So without further ado..thread-dump librarythread-dump is an interesting library that lets you to get a dump of thread activity when a Ruby process quits by Greg Fodor. In his own words:
It allows you to send a SIGQUIT to a ruby process to get a dump of the running threads to STDERR or a file. Read More

Bloom Filters: A Powerful Tool

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By Peter Cooper / September 11, 2007

Gbf
(credit: image source)

BloomFilter is a new Ruby library (available as a gem – gem install bloomfilter) by Bryan Duxbury that provides operations to create and query “bloom filters“, an extremely space-efficient “probablistic data structure” that makes it quick and easy to test set membership. This all sounds incredibly geeky and uninteresting until you discover how bloom filters can be used to make things like ultra-fast, low-overhead spell checkers, spam filters, stop word removers, and other tools that require checking two sets of data against each other. Bryan’s use for bloom filters (and BloomFilter) was to search a big list of 500 million hashes against a set of 40 million hashes. Read More

Ruby East 2007: A Ruby Conference in Pennsylvania on September 28

By Peter Cooper / September 10, 2007

Rubyeast

Ruby East 2007 is a small, one day Ruby conference being held at Penn State University in just two weeks’ time on September 28, 2007. The main speakers are David A. Black, Hal Fulton (of The Ruby Way fame), Amy Hoy, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz. Registration is limited to 300 places, so if you’re interested, get clicking! As an interesting bonus, the winners of the Rails Rumble, currently coming to a close, will be first announced at the conference.

(courtesy of Gregory Brown) Read More

Shoes Roundup: Ruby GUI App Development Goodness

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By Peter Cooper / September 9, 2007

Shoeswindow-1

Just over a month ago I mentioned the release of “Shoes”, a new Ruby library for creating “Web-like desktop apps” by Why The Lucky Stiff. Shoes provides a somewhat platform-independent way of creating desktop applications easily. Now that Shoes is several weeks old, it’s worth pointing to a few resources and tutorials that will come in useful if you decide to start building Shoes-powered apps:

Running with Shoes – A Mini GUI Toolkit by Juixe: A great walkthrough building a simple Shoes application.

Cut Holes in Shoes and Get A Mask by Why The Lucky Stiff: A demonstration of using masks to create fancy text graphics. Read More

RubyConf 2007 Registration Now Open

By Peter Cooper / September 7, 2007

The registration process for RubyConf 2007 is now open! The conference is due to be held at the Omni Charlotte Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States between November 2 – 4 (Friday through Sunday). The official site hasn’t been updated yet (as of Friday September 7) but the registration form is available here. Tickets are $250. Read More

Railsify: A New Repository of Rails Plugins

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By Peter Cooper / September 7, 2007

Railsify

Railsify.com is a new site, developed by Adam Cooke, that acts as a central resource for Rails plugins and related tools (Rake tasks, toolkits, etc). Adam has a blog post with more background and details.

This isn’t the first such site. Agile Web Development has had a plugins directory for a while now, but Railsify is impeccably presented, has its own domain, and has even become part of a nascent “network” of Rails sites along with RailsForum.com and RailsWork.com. Read More

Official Ruby Logo Contest – Win a Plate And 100,000 Yen!

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By Peter Cooper / September 3, 2007

Rubyvit

The Ruby Visual Identity Team are on the look out for a new “official” Ruby logo to represent Ruby in a more powerful way online. The team says that while they’ve released the current logo pack, it’s “not well known as a logo that represents the programming language Ruby itself.” To resolve this, the team are looking for a new Ruby logo that can be used to represent Ruby officially, and have launched a contest. The full details of the contest and how to submit your entries are available here.

Unlike the Rails(tm) logo, the team specify that while copyrights are to be assigned to the Ruby Association, the logo will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. Read More

RM-Install: A new multi-platform, enterprise-level Ruby on Rails stack

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By Peter Cooper / September 3, 2007

Rm-Install2

RM-Install is a new, free Ruby on Rails stack developed by FiveRuns, a company that provides enterprise-level management solutions for Ruby on Rails applications. Of course, Rails and Ruby are already available for free, but RM-Install provides you will everything you need in one deployment. The components include Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, MySQL 5.0, SQLite 3.3, Subversion 1.4, Apache 2.2, OpenSSL, ImageMagick, Mongrel (with clustering support), Capistrano, Gruff, Rake and RMagick.

Currently RM-Install is available for OS X (Intel) and Linux only, but versions for OS X (PowerPC) and Windows will follow soon. Perhaps this is the holy grail of getting a Rails development environment up and running (with ImageMagick no less) in minutes? Read More

Superators: Add new operators to Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / August 30, 2007

Superators

I know there’s going to be some controversy around this clever piece of code by Jay Phillips. He’s developed “Superators“, a library that finally makes it easy to create new operators within Ruby that look like line noise. Always wanted a “-~+~-” or “===~-+~++” operator? Now it’s within your grasp! As Aleks Clark says: “Job security and spiffy DSL construction in one neat package.” Read More

Videos from The Ruby Hoedown Now Online

By Peter Cooper / August 28, 2007

Hoedownvids

The Ruby Hoedown was a North Carolina based Ruby conference that took place on August 10-11, 2007. From all accounts, it was a roaring success, and now the videos of the presentations given have been made available. Topics include:

Ruby and Rails Testing Techniques by Marcel Molina, Bruce Tate, and Chad Fowler.
Exploring Merb by Ezra Zygmuntowicz.
Next-Gen VoIP Development with Ruby and Adhearsion by Jay Phillips.
Building Games with Ruby by Andrea O.K. Wright.
Does Ruby Have a Chasm to Cross? by Ken Auer.
Using C to Tune Your Ruby or Rails Application by Jared Richardson.

All this along with some lightning talks and two keynotes by Bruce Tate and Marcel Molina. Read More

MyConfPlan For Sale, All Money Goes To Charity

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By Peter Cooper / August 28, 2007

Confplansale

You might recall, a few short months ago, that Dr. Nic built and released a site called MyConfPlan. Its prime objective was to enable RailsConf 2007 visitors to easily plan their schedules, although it had support for other events too. Dr. Nic has now put the site up for sale on eBay, and is donating all of the proceeds to charity as part of his pledge to donate to charity for RailsConf Europe. The auction ends in the next couple of days and is already at $470 Australian dollars (about $42 $386 US Dollars). Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper