Josh Susser is reporting on Mark Carey's announcement that the "SDForum Ruby Conference" (informally known as the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference) is now requesting papers for the conference taking place between April 21-22, 2007. Interested parties can submit their proposals to proposals2007 [at] rubysf [dot] net. All proposals submitted before February 4, 2007 will be given consideration, and those submitted after then may not, so if you want a chance to give a presentation, you need to be quick!

Mark A. McBride has put together a great article about processing credit cards with Ruby on Rails using the Active Merchant plugin.

In case the title of this post is giving you deja-vu, we've looked at "How To Create A Ruby Extension In C" before at Ruby Inside. We've also looked at using RubyInline to make the process even faster by not having to write a specialized C extension.

It's good to start seeing those Rails 1.2 guides coming out of the woodwork. Hopefully I'll get able to do a roundup of them shortly, but for now Andre Lewis presents a quick, practical guide to nesting CRUD resources in Rails 1.2.

SyntaxHighlighter is a WordPress plugin that provides code presentation and syntax highlighting features for your blog (if it's WordPress powered, naturally!). It supports a plethora of languages such as C, C++, C#, HTML, and PHP, as well as Ruby. On my blogs so far I've tended to use a homebrew approach with the Syntax gem, but this WordPress plugin should make it a whole lot easier in the future. If you're a WordPress powered blogger who likes to post code snippets, check it out.

No editorial on this, as I want to get it out quick, and I know some readers aren't subscribers to the official Rails blog.. but.. Rails 1.2 has just been released! Or, more accurately, Rails 1.2.1, as the obligatory bug-fix release followed on a little more quickly than usual :) You might want to get it straight away before the servers melt down with the rush tomorrow. Just use gem install rails --include-dependencies as usual.

In Concerns in ActiveRecord, Jamis Buck writes about a simple technique of using modules to mix in functionality shared by multiple models without resorting to STI. This technique has been possible in Rails since.. ever, but I must admit I'd never considered it before, so I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful.