Peter Cooper Page 58 : Ruby Inside

QCon: Conference in London, UK, This March Has Extensive Ruby Track

4 Comments

By Peter Cooper / January 7, 2007

Qconlondon

QCon is a collaboration between InfoQ and JAOO to host the biggest enterprise software development exhibition and conference in Europe this March. With tutorial sessions on March 12 and 13, the exhibition and conference start on Wednesday, March 14 and run through to Friday, March 16.

The conference is a major affair, with two nights of social events, two days of tutorials prior to the main conference, and 11 tracks of panels, keynotes, and presentations. The tracks include .Net, AJAX, Java, Agile practices, SOA, usability, and Ruby. The Ruby track is hosted by popular Rubyist Obie Fernandez, and features presentations from Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers), Rich Kilmer (founder of RubyConf), *** **** (Mongrel creator and Ruby God), James Adam (Rails Engines), and Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Engine Yard). Read More

Upside Down Ruby

By Peter Cooper / January 5, 2007

Upsidedown
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. Copyright, Why The Lucky Stiff.

Prolific God-of-Ruby-And-All-Things-Bacon Why The Lucky Stiff has posted up several teasing scans and snapshots of new artwork for his Poignant Guide to Ruby on Flickr. Enjoy! Read More

Hobo: A Rapid Web App Builder for Rails

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / January 5, 2007

Hobo

You may have thought Ruby on Rails was enough to get Web applications developed quickly, but enter Hobo. Hobo makes the process of creating Web applications and prototypes even quicker. For example, out of the box, with no lines of code written, you get a dummy app with a user signup, login, and authentication system.

Hobo can be installed as a gem so you can create new applications from scratch with the hobo command line tool, or as a plugin so you can add Hobo features to existing applications. Learn more in the installation guide. Hobo also includes a templating system and mark up language called DRYML (Don’t Repeat Yourself Markup Language) that allows you to include things using custom defined HTML tags, rather than <%= %> blocks. Read More

The Easiest Way To Start A New Rails Projects With SVN

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / January 2, 2007

You’re about to start a new Rails project. Do you type rails <project name>? No, “Stop using the rails command“, says Josh Susser. If you create a dummy / default Rails project that’s set up just the way you like it with plugins, your own extensions, and all those carefully defined svn:ignore flags, you can just create a new Rails project with a simple svn copy. So simple, but I’ve totally missed this idea, and it’s a real timesaver. Read More

Lots of great Rails Console Tips and Tricks

By Peter Cooper / January 1, 2007

Amy Hoy has written a great tutorial running through the Rails console that’s suitable for both complete novices and experts (there are a couple of tricks she mentions that I didn’t know at least!). Amy appears to have taken up Slash7 with a new zeal lately, so let’s hope we’ll see more great content like this on her blog through 2007! Read More

why’s 2006 Ruby Roundup

By Peter Cooper / January 1, 2007

Roundup

Over at RedHanded, why the lucky stiff has presented a great round up of the life of Ruby in 2006. He also has about 30 quotations specially collected from various people in the Ruby community (including me) that sum up 2006 in terms of Ruby. It’s a great read. Read More

2006 Ruby Advent Calendar Roundup

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2006

Adventtree

I promised a quick round up of all of the days on the 2006 Ruby Advent Calendar for those who didn’t want the agony of reading it every day, so here you are:

Using Amazon S3 From Ruby

Erubis – A Faster ERB

Over 400 Ruby Code Snippets

Ruby Obuscation – Making Ruby Look Scary

Negaposi – Just – and + Makes A New Language

Inhabitants of the Ruby Slum

Syntax Coloring Tool

A Showcase of Ruby on Rails Applications

13 Great Ruby Presentations and Screencasts

Build a Chat Server in Minutes with Ruby and GServer

English Name Equivalents for Ruby’s Special Variables

Managing Rails Plugins with Piston

Preloading Large Data Sets Using rake migrate

Rails Weenie – The best way to share Rails knowledge

S3 + Rake = Easy Backups for SVN Repositories, Databases, and Code

The 2005 Ruby Advent Calendar

Extending ActiveRecord

Simplifying Edge Rails Setup

Kwala – Ruby Code Quality Checker

Niche Ruby Libraries

JuneBug – A Light but Powerful Ruby Wiki

CriteriaQuery – Cuter ActiveRecord Finders

Ruby and Rails Videos on YouTube

Ruby Desktop Wallpaper

The Merry Christmas Tree

I promise this is the last mention of the advent calendar until at least next Fall! Read More

Ziya – Easy Flash-based Charts for Rails Apps

7 Comments

By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2006

Ziya

ZiYa is a Rails plugin developed by Fernand Galiana and DeLynn Berry that makes it a snap to create complex charts to show in your Rails applications. It uses Flash as the engine for creating and showing the charts, but you don’t need to have any Flash knowledge to use the plugin as all of the parameters are passed through from Ruby. Read More

How To Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning With Ruby

By Peter Cooper / December 28, 2006

“How To Think Like A Computer Scientist” is a range of online books (distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License) developed by various authors each focusing on a different programming language and explaining computer science concepts with it. Elizabeth Wiethoff has now started the Ruby edition and has made her work so far available online.

(Update: Also seen at RedHanded) Read More

Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book Available

By Peter Cooper / December 26, 2006

Neighborly-1

Mr. Neighborly’s funky Ruby book is now available to read online (or as a PDF), but, naturally, if you want to support him (or if you read the PDF or HTML version and find it entertaining) then there’s a print version you can buy too for an extremely reasonable $10. Read More

“Ruby” Becomes 4th Most Popular Girl’s Name in the UK

9 Comments

By Peter Cooper / December 25, 2006

Rubyname

Christmas Day deserves a frivolous story! How about the incredibly rapidly growing popularity of the name “Ruby” in the UK? Reasonably popular until the mid 1930s, the name dropped off the charts until around 2000. Since 2002 the name has leaped from the 70th most popular girl’s name up to 4th!

Unfortunately, however, the surge in popularity is not likely to be linked to the Ruby programming language’s prowess, but more to the surge in popularity of ‘old names’ and the character of Ruby Allen in the nation’s favorite soap, EastEnders, with the Office for National Statistics even attributing the rise in popularity to the character. Read More

Have a Merry Christmas!

By Peter Cooper / December 22, 2006

Rac12

I’m taking a break for a several days over Christmas. I would schedule a few posts to run, but I tend to find people don’t want to be online over this period anyway! However, the Ruby Advent Calendar continues regardless. If you haven’t been checking it out, drop by now for 20+ days of tips, libraries, useful Ruby sites, and other nuggets of Ruby goodness. It runs right up until Christmas Day. Expect to see the blog back in action from Wednesday, 27th December, and till then.. have a merry Christmas!

Note: After Christmas is over there will be a post linking to all of the advent calendar days separately for those who don’t want to follow the calendar directly. Read More

How To Build A 5,000,000 Image Search Engine With Ruby, Alexa and S3

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2006

Cameraimage

Note: This story actually dates back from May 2006, but I don’t remember hearing about it then, and it’s tucked down inside Alexa’s Developer’s Corner.

Using the Alexa Web Search Platform as a source of data, Derrick Pallas put together a search engine using Ruby, RMagick and Amazon S3. With AWSP’s data set and CPU cluster he fetched 5,000,000 photos from the Web, analyzed their EXIF info with RMagick , and uploaded them to Amazon S3. The result was Camera Image Search, a search engine that can show you pictures taken with certain cameras or with certain exposure times / focal lengths / etc (for some reason the Manufacturer drop down does not appear to work, but other fields do). Read More

Heckle: Tortures Your Tests For Revealing Confessions

6 Comments

By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2006

Cmbiz041

Heckle is a great new library from Kevin Clark (though Ryan Davis wrote a proof of concept at RubyConf) that ‘torments your tests’. It uses ParseRuby and RubyToRuby to rip your code apart and forces random data into your code (currently it does this for strings, symbols, regexps, ranges, booleans, and numbers) to see how good your tests really are.

Simply, it’s fuzz testing for your Ruby tests, and that’s a good thing if you want your test suites to be strong and far-reaching. Read More

Producing Dynamic Graphics with RMagick and Rails 1.2

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / December 19, 2006

Dynra2

Geoffrey Grosenbach demonstrates how you can use Rails 1.2′s “respond to” features to return dynamic graphic files on request. Short, sweet, to the point, and a great demonstration of the dynamic response capabilities of Rails 1.2. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper