Mauricio Fernandez continues to extend his Ruby God status with this excellent article about a search library he just developed using pure Ruby. It's simple (mere hundreds of lines), fast (queries in the milliseconds), and practical (he's already using it to index Ruby documentation).

Sometimes strange things happen. I've been developing a small, basic recursive descent parser for Ruby called RDParse. Just before writing this post I decided to Google that name, and lo and behold the first result is a Ruby recursive descent parser called RDParse, created by Dennis Ranke, that I posted to Code Snippets for posterity several months ago. Since both of these libraries are unlikely to be used at once and that Dennis doesn't seem to be maintaining his version, I've decided to stick with RDParse as the name of mine for now.

Softies on Rails is a popular Rails blog that looks at Ruby on Rails from the perspective of .NET developers. They've just announced that they're holding a special one-day workshop where they cover how they went from .NET to Ruby on Rails for Web development and how other .NET developers can do the same.