It has always been a trend with Rubyists to take things that have poor interfaces and give them better ones. Javan Makhmali from Inkling Markets has lived up to this trend, and given us Whenever, a library that wraps cron's syntax with a Ruby API (cron being a UNIX task scheduling tool).

It's pretty rare I recommend new blogs to follow on Ruby Inside. Not because I don't like them - I link to their posts all the time! - but because it's hard to tell if a new blog is going to keep going and be worth your while.

At the last regular London Ruby User Group meetup, James Coglan gave a talk on how to implement a Scheme interpreter in 15 minutes. He recorded a video of the coding in progress beforehand so he could focus on the narration so unfortunately the video (available in a higher resolution here from Vimeo) is without sound. There is, however, a ZIP file of HTML slides available to help you follow along.

A handful of random Ruby links, articles, and resources to end off the week..

Did you miss the Scotland on Rails conference this year? No need to fret though, as Engine Yard are hosting videos of all the presentations made at this popular conference. With 27 presentations covering topics from deployment to testing, there is something here for everyone.

The great thing about the Ruby language is that there’s always multiple ways of doing things. The same goes for reading the documentation of your installed gems. Here’s a few ways of viewing the RDoc documentation of your gems other than running the gem server command.

Joe Damato has been on a roll lately, first with a 6 line EventMachine fix that yielded impressive results, then a configure.in fix to give 30% more performance, and now by getting a 2-10x performance boost with a fix to Ruby 1.8's threading.

The Ruby Toolbox gives Ruby developers a categorized overview of 100 or so different libraries ranked on how commonly used they are. It's not perfect as it only pays attention to projects hosted on Github and the ranking system is based on the number of watchers and forks they have, but it's enough to give you a basic overview of the activity within a certain area.

The Interactive Ruby Shell, more commonly known as IRB, is one of Ruby's most popular features, especially with new developers. You can bash out a one-liner, try a method you've just learned about, or even build a small algorithm or two without going the whole way to writing a complete program.

Paul Dix, of Feedzirra fame, strikes again! This time with Typhoeus (Github repo), a high-speed, parallel HTTP request library for Ruby. At first glance, you could be forgiven for wondering what the point is when we already have John Nunemaker's awesome HTTParty to build simple HTTP clients, but Typhoeus is, in many ways, like HTTParty on ten cans of Red Bull.