A lot of people seem to want to reinvent the wheel where Ruby is concerned, and I wish them all luck, but Tomasz Węgrzanowski has taken the unique step of trying to make the existing C-based Ruby interpreter faster instead, with intriguing results.. He even goes as far as to hack Ruby's source code to remove inefficiencies in how Fixnum objects are compared. I totally dig this and would love to support further efforts to implement non-damaging optimizations to the existing interpreter.

Rails' ActionMailer library can send e-mail for you, and while it can be set up to use almost any SMTP server, special requirements by Google's GMail SMTP server have presented Rails users from taking advantage of it. Ages ago I mentioned a solution to the problem, but it involved downloading a separate application called 'msmtp' and performing an ugly system call from your application.

(photo credit: mrpattersonsir)

If you were in the Rails community six months ago, you might remember the Caboose Rails Documentation Project, a drive to raise $5,000 USD to spend on improving the Rails documentation. It turns out they actually ended up with $15,000 due to the overwhelming support of the community, but the process got mired in debate about what to do with the cash.

This post just links to a few Ruby videos I've found on Google Video that I hadn't seen before.

Steve Odom writes about how he uses Capistrano and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to deploy a Rails application to a fresh server within minutes. He includes the scripts and techniques he uses.

Antonio Cangiano has put together a reasonably meaty list of 10 Ruby on Rails performance tips. On the surface, his advice seems pretty good, but Rails veterans Evan Weaver and Josh Susser have quickly stepped in to question the motivation of Antonio's suggestions. Step into the debate or just enjoy some reasonably effective, if sometimes misguided, tips.