Dash, a new metrics service from FiveRuns, has been moved to private beta (for which you can apply) allowing interested developers to take part in assessing a new way to monitor your applications. The new service from FiveRuns is an extensible monitoring service for gathering metrics from your critical daemons and applications.

Want to install Ruby, RubyGems, and a collection of common gems on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) in just a few minutes? Here's the skinny.

In late 2008, 399 Ruby developers took part in the 2008 Ruby GUI Survey, conducted by Alex Fenton. The results are now available. There's a brief summary of the results, as well as an excellent 20 page report (!!) and a separate 16 page PDF giving the per-question totals.

Heist is a Scheme interpreter by James Coglan written in Ruby. Scheme is a programming language that's a dialect of Lisp, was an influence upon Ruby, and still a popular choice for learning functional programming (such as in the classic Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs).

Looking for a job where you can work on Ruby and Rails apps? You're in the right place! Recently we've had several Rails-focused positions added to the Ruby jobs board.

Managing and organizing multiple JavaScript files in your Rails applications can be a real pain, especially when it comes to deploying your application and you need to minimize those JavaScript files down for better application performance.

Can you remember what a hideous chore it was to deploy Ruby-based apps (Rails apps being a key example) before early 2008? FastCGI, proxying schemes, plain old CGI - it was all a bit of a mess. It was so bad, in fact, that in January 2008 we posted No True "mod_ruby" Is Damaging Ruby's Viability On The Web and kicked off a major discussion about it (115 comments!)

If you read a lot of Ruby blogs, you might see people talking about testing (or its behavior driven equivalent) as if it's the holy grail, yet most Ruby books and online tutorials fail to cover it in much detail at all. Last year, Jamie Van Dyke wrote an article for The Rubyist called Building A Gem Using BDD to put things right (the article was licensed exclusively to the magazine until recently).

Bom dia to all of Ruby Inside's Brazilian (and Portuguese) readers! You can now, if you prefer, read (and subscribe to) the Portuguese language edition of Ruby Inside at http://www.rubyinside.com.br/ (if you'd rather just subscribe to the feed, it's here, or check it out on Twitter @rubyinside_br)

Marc-André Cournoyer has proven that almost anything is possible by developing a small, functional, and surprisingly "unslow" Ruby VM called TinyRB. Some basic testing shows that it's faster than 1.8 on a Fibonacci benchmark, though slightly slower than JRuby, Rubinius, and YARV (Ruby 1.9).