Peter Cooper Page 30 : Ruby Inside

Describe Your Perfect Conference: Win Ruby Hoedown Tickets!

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By Peter Cooper / August 1, 2008

Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown, the “Ruby conference for the South” enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008 (yes, in a week’s time!). Speakers include David Black, Chris Wanstrath, Giles Bowkett, Robert Dempsey, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, and late registration is $199. If you fancy a last-minute trip to what should be a great sophomore Ruby event, register now!. Huntsville isn’t a crazy distance from Birmingham, Atlanta, or Nashville, so it shouldn’t be too hard to attend if you’re already in that corner of the country.

Describe Your Vision of the Perfect Ruby Conference.. Read More

Ruby on Bells: The Ruby-Powered Musical Glass Playing Machine

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By Peter Cooper / July 29, 2008

Ruby on Bells is a demo of the Madrona fork of RAD (Ruby Arduino Development) itself a Ruby bridge to Arduino, an open source electronics prototyping platform. Powered by a simple Ruby script, a set of glasses are hit by small mallets on servos, resulting in a Philip Glass-esque cacophony. It’s a compelling demo, and if physical computing intrigues you, the tools available to Ruby and Arduino developers are now mature enough to bring interesting results within easy reach.

A longer “behind the scenes” video explaining how it was put together and how the code looks is also available. The code used is a very simple Ruby-based DSL. Read More

Ruby 1.9 Drops Support For 9 Platforms (Ruby 1.9.0-3′s Release Bombshell)

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By Peter Cooper / July 28, 2008

Photo credit: Blakespot. License: CC 2.0 Attribution

Yuki Sonoda has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.0-3, a snapshot release of the still-experimental Ruby 1.9 (wait until Christmas for the production ready 1.9.1). Minor releases aren’t typically covered here on Ruby Inside, but the dropping of support for nine platforms in Ruby 1.9 might be of significant interest to some:

Ruby 1.9 no longer supports the following platforms because they have no active maintainer.

BeOS
WinCE
OS/2
Interix
bcc32
Classic MacOS
djgpp
VMS
human68k

I will remove platform-specific codes for them from Ruby, unless someone become a maintainer by 25 Sep. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for July 2008

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By Peter Cooper / July 28, 2008

It’s time to thank Ruby Inside’s excellent sponsors!

I want these posts to be relevant and useful, so I try to include any news or developments the sponsors have had, so even if you don’t care for what the sponsors are selling or providing, it’s worth a quick check to make sure you’re not missing out on anything useful. If you have any suggestions on how these posts could be better then, of course, leave a comment.

Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are mine and not necessarily shared by the sponsor(s)! Read More

Interview with TechCrunch Ruby Developer, Mark McGranaghan

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By Peter Cooper / July 26, 2008

Until last week, Mark McGranaghan was a full-time Ruby developer for TechCrunch, the popular Web 2.0 news site. He worked extensively on CrunchBase, a wiki-style database of companies, people, and investors in the world of Web 2.0. His last assignment was the free-to-use CrunchBase API which went live last week.

I caught up with Mark to ask him about his time working at one of the world’s most famous blogs with one of the world’s most famous bloggers! You might be surprised to learn that head Cruncher Michael Arrington – who is never slow to point out Twitter’s downtime – is pretty cool with Rails and what works well for his developers works for him. Read More

A Great Set of IronRuby Tutorials To Bring C# Developers Into The Ruby Fold

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By Peter Cooper / July 24, 2008

IronRuby is a .NET implementation of Ruby being developed by Microsoft (specifically, by John Lam). The project has matured significantly in the past year, and IronRuby is well on its way to running Rails applications (it already works with very simple ones). IronRuby’s major benefit is that it allows Ruby code to access a massive range of .NET libraries and services.

Justin Etheredge has put together a great set of tutorial blog posts designed to get you up to speed with IronRuby:

Getting IronRuby Up and Running walks you through getting the source code, compiling it with Visual Studio 2008 (if you don’t have this, a link to the free “Express” edition is provided), associating the .rb file extension, and running some initial tests.

RedCloth 4.0 Released: 40x Faster Textile Rendering

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By Peter Cooper / July 22, 2008

RedCloth is a popular Ruby library for converting Textile-formatted text into HTML. Initially developed by WhyTheLuckyStiff, it’s now under the guardianship of Jason Garber, who has just released version 4 (RubyForge or Github). This is a significant update, following on from 3.0.4 which was released almost three years ago, and features a handful of significant improvements and changes:

New SuperRedCloth (RedCloth 4.0) is a total rewrite using Ragel for the parsing.
Markdown support has been removed.
Single newlines become <br> tags, just as in traditional RedCloth and other Textile parsers.
HTML special characters are automatically escaped inside code signatures, like Textile 2.

FOSCON: Ruby Event in Portland, OR – July 23, 2008

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By Peter Cooper / July 22, 2008

FOSCON is a “free, fun gathering” of Ruby developers held alongside the O’Reilly OSCON conference currently taking place in Portland, Oregon. It’s tomorrow (Wednesday, July 23) at CubeSpace (near the Oregon Convention Center) from 6pm. The always proactive Portland Ruby Brigade have organized it, and a surprising number of interesting presentations are already planned, including one on IronRuby from John Lam of Microsoft. A live coding competition will also be taking place. Read More

Starling: A Ruby Persistent Queue Server That Speaks Memcached

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By Peter Cooper / July 22, 2008

It’s been around for a while now, but Starling is a “light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol.” Starling makes it ridiculously easy to set up a network-accessible queue (or many queues) for, say, asynchronous job processing between multiple processes and machines. It was developed by Twitter to handle the heavy amount of queueing necessary to keep their service ticking over. Starling is proven in production, with not only Twitter using it in anger, but FiveRuns too. FiveRuns have even created their own fork that, they say, is significantly faster.

Why the sudden interest in Starling? Well, Glenn Gillen has written an excellent introductory guide to setting up Starling over at RubyPond.com. Read More

RubyFringe Roundup: The Best Ruby Conference Ever?

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By Peter Cooper / July 21, 2008

(Photo credit: Kieran Huggins)

RubyFringe – described as a “pricey, limited-attendance smoozefest” by Ruby documentation co-ordinator James Britt or as “an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture” by the organizers – went ahead last week and appears to have been a significant hit. A small conference with a reasonably high ticket price (though far less than RailsConf Europe!), RubyFringe was set to be a very unique sort of conference with parties, drinks and out-of-hours entertainment laid on, and a limited number of tickets made available to ensure a more intimate gathering. Read More

libxml-ruby 0.8.0 Released: Ruby Gets Fast, Reliable XML Processing At Last

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By Peter Cooper / July 17, 2008

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Ruby’s is not known for its deftness with XML. On RubyFlow, I considered calling the community to arms over it, and solicited twenty responses on what the problem is, and what we could do about it. Robert Fischer was lamenting on the state of Ruby’s libxml library, and didn’t seem to like REXML much either. Tim Bray has also had a few complaints about REXML. It seemed there was a problem to be fixed; a gap in the market, as it were, for a decent XML parser for Ruby. Hpricot, despite really being an HTML parser, would have to get us by in the meantime. Read More

Autumn: Easy, Feature-Rich IRC Bots in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / July 15, 2008

Autumn is a framework by Tim Morgan that makes it easy to develop powerful IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bots with Ruby. Version 3, a significant update, was launched just a week ago. The code is available on Github, so it’s ready to fork, tweak and work on to your heart’s content.

An instance of an “Autumn app” is laid out in a similar way to a Rails app. There are config, doc, script, libs, tmp, and log folders, containing much what you’d expect, as well as a leaves folder (Autumn refers to “bots” as “leaves”) that contains any number of folders each containing data, helpers, models, tasks, and “views” for individual bots. Read More

Engine Yard Gets $15m Cash Injection; Buys Enough Red Bull To Keep The Lead For 37 Years?

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By Peter Cooper / July 14, 2008

Engine Yard, probably the first major Rails-focused hosting company, has today taken a second round of finance of $15m. This second round, from Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates, follows on from January’s $3.5m from Benchmark.

So where will the money go? Ezra Zygmuntowicz says:

We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.

This assertion is without doubt, as Engine Yard continues to fund and support the development of Rubinius and Merb, and supports several popular Ruby and Rails sites with sponsorships. Read More

Six Quick Optimization Tips for the Ruby Interpreter

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By Peter Cooper / July 11, 2008

Ilya Grigorik of Igvita has put together a great article called 6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI. In it, he walks through six different things you can do to improve the performance of your code when running on the regular Ruby interpreter (MRI). For example, interpolation is quicker than concatenation when working with strings, destructive operations prevent wasteful object duplication, and hand-written blocks are a lot faster than Symbol#to_proc.

And.. metaprogramming, of course, comes in for some much deserved performance criticism:

Ruby has a wonderful property of being highly dynamic, which in turn, allows us to create all kinds of spectacular meta-programming scenarios. Read More

Join Why The Lucky Stiff (And Others) For an Online “ShoesFest”

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By Peter Cooper / July 9, 2008

You’ve used Shoes, Why The Lucky Stiff’s GUI-app toolkit for Ruby, right? No? You’ve at least heard of it? (If the answer to this is also no, seriously chastise yourself now.)

Ernest Prabhakar has announced that two online “ShoesFests” will be taking place, involving why the lucky stiff and “friends,” with the hope of alluring wannabe hackers (whether on Shoes itself or Shoes-based applications):

The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes, a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper