Rails Rumble is an annual Ruby (and Rails) development contest where developers attempt to build a working web app in 48 hours. This year it took place between 22-23 August and you can now vote on the top 22 applications (as ranked by an expert panel - disclaimer: I was on the panel). Despite its name, Rails Rumble is not only for Rails applications - this year, any application that uses Rack could be entered. I wasn't aware of this before the contest took off, but hopefully with this in mind many more Sinatra and Ramaze entries could join the fold next year.

Ruby Version Manager ^{GitHub repo} (a.k.a. RVM) makes it ridiculously easy to install and switch between multiple Ruby versions on OS X and Linux. Over the last 24 hours, I've been playing with RVM and talking to creator Wayne E. Seguin and have been blown away with how cool (and simple) it is - you will definitely want to check this one out.

I've just had word from David Flanagan - co-author of The Ruby Programming Language, published by O'Reilly - that O'Reilly are running a temporary sale on the e-book edition. The PDF e-book is now just.. $9.99 for a limited time only. That's a pretty good deal considering O'Reilly are selling the print book for $40 (though it's only $26.39 on Amazon).

Sometimes taking an app down for debugging purposes is just not an option. Luckily a new tool called Hijack can provide a live IRB prompt for an existing Ruby process in the same way that Erlang provides hot swapping of code (changing the definition of a system while the system is still up and running).

Gemcutter is a new gem hosting repository that aims to replace RubyForge as the canonical repository for gems. The project has been around for a couple of months, but Thoughtbot recently announced they're helping out with a forthcoming redesign of the site. 

Since Why The Lucky Stiff's supposed disappearance yesterday, I've been coming across a lot of interesting links with mirrors of his projects, discussions surrounding his disappearance, and lots of other juicy stuff. I think it's worth keeping track of this stuff so I'm kicking off a compilation post dedicated to Why related links.

I recently came across the interesting-looking Monk framework. It allows you to specify a list of dependencies for technologies to use in your project (in the form of git repositories or gems), and it will take care of extracting them into your application's vendor folder.

Simone Carletti of Altura Labs recently announced on his blog the release of a new pure-Ruby Whois library, inventively named "Whois".

TwitterLand (Github repository) is a single Ruby library that packages up access to, currently, 5 different Twitter-related data services. Note, however, it's not a library that allows you to post to Twitter - you'll want Twitter4R or John Nunemaker's Twitter gem for that.

Here's a list of some prominent forthcoming Ruby and Rails events scheduled through to the end of the year. Only events with tickets ready to buy right now are included - events which have already sold out are not included.