Ruby on Rails Workshop and Training in New Brunswick, CanadaSpheric are hosting a Ruby on Rails training and workshop session called "Why Ruby On Rails?" in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada on October 9th - 11th.. next week! The training is with Ruby veteran, Bruce Tate, and costs $2400. The workshop, however, is free and Bruce Tate is involved directly with that too. It's a bit off the beaten path but if you're in eastern Canada (or even Maine!), check it out.The "UK's first" Ruby on Rails Focused VPS HostingFour months ago I posted "BrightBox: Finally a Rails-focused VPS in the UK?" and now BrightBox's project has come to fruition. BrightBox is a UK based VPS host (although they call them "Virtual Dedicated Servers") that focuses entirely on the deployment of Rails applications. With the installation of a single extra gem, your applications can be rolled out on their system within minutes. To see their different plans and quotas, visit their site.Sup: Ruby Powered Console E-mail ClientSup is a new e-mail client developed in Ruby by William Morgan. Its goal is "to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere." The source is worth looking at merely to see how to develop a solid, console based app using ncurses with Ruby.Rails Rumble: 92 Web Apps Created in 48 HoursJosh Catone has written a great summary of the results of the recent Rails Rumble 48 hour Rails development contest. The overall winner was TastyPlanner, a recipe sharing site.

DeepTest is a new library that allows you to run test suites in separate processes simultaneously. The obvious benefit is that on multiple core machines, as are becoming hip with the kids nowadays, test performance can be increased significantly. Initial tests by the developers showed that a test suite ran in half the time on a dual core machine, although real life performance is bound to vary.

Tracking Down a Rails App Memory LeakTom Copeland posts about how he tracked down a memory leak in a Rails application. The results are interesting. RubyGems Runs on Ruby 1.9-ishEric Hodel reports that all of the tests for RubyGems now pass on Ruby 1.9 and that a 1.9 compatible beta version will be due shortly.R2Check - Tiny app that checks your pre-Rails 2.0 apps for compatabilityMislav Marohnic has built a pretty cool Ruby script that checks the source code of a Rails app for compatibility with Rails 2.0 and then points out the changes required.Advice for Ruby Beginners - Part 1Satish Talim has posted the first part of mass interview with 13 Ruby gurus with questions surrounding topics important to Ruby newbies. The "gurus" (quoted because I'm in the list) include Jamis Buck, Jamie van Dyke, Ola Bini, and a whole range of people from a stunningly diverse array of countries.RubyForge vs CPANDaniel Berger does a quick comparison of Perl's infamous CPAN library and code repository with Ruby's own RubyForge. I was pretty surprised at the numbers.. it seems RubyForge is not only winning on quality but for the size of the Ruby community versus the Perl community, the quantity is amazing.

Charles Nutter says:

Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to "think again" about using Rails in future.