From: timsuth@... (Tim Sutherland)
Date: 2004-12-26T17:41:53+09:00
Subject: Ruby Weekly News 20th - 26th December 2004

A little early this week as I'm leaving the country tomorrow for a short
holiday in Melbourne. Do not despair, I will be back just in time to do next
week's writeup. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for all those who are
celebrating either of those holidays.
 -- TimSuth


http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-12-20


                   Ruby Weekly News 20th - 26th December 2004
		   ------------------------------------------

   A summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the
   comp.lang.ruby newsgroup. This summary is brought to you by Tim Sutherland
   (TimSuth).

Articles and Announcements
--------------------------

     * [RedHanded: a new Ruby blog]

           [whytheluckystiff] opened a new blog called [RedHanded] to
           separate his Ruby thoughts from the other crazy things that go on
           at his personal site.

     * [ruby 1.8.2]

           [Santa Matz] snuck down the chimney to release a new stable
           version of Ruby. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this
           release!

Threads
-------

   Interesting threads this week included:

  [Programatically resizing photos]
  ---------------------------------

   Phil Tomson was taking lots of photos in Italy and wanted a way of
   batch-generating low-resolution images for the web. Kaspar Schiess gave a
   simple ImageMagick command to do the trick:

   "convert -resize 320x200 image.jpg image-out.jpg"

   and Kaspar and several others gave examples of Ruby scripts to manipulate
   the geometry of images, all using the [RMagick] library. RMagick is a Ruby
   interface to ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick.

  [ruby-dev summary 25045-25260]
  ------------------------------

   Takaaki Tateishi posted the latest summary of the Japanese list ruby-dev.
   One issue that was summarised considered Minero Aoki's observation that
   optparse would automatically accept -L when told that --line is a valid
   command-line option. He thought that -l should be accepted as an
   abbreviation but -L should not. Nobu committed a change to make optparse
   follow the suggestion.

  [[SUMMARY] Scrabble Stems (#12)]
  --------------------------------

   James Edward Gray II summarised last week's [Ruby Quiz]. He also wrote

  "No quiz this week, as I'll be spending a little time off with the family
  enjoying the holidays. I hope everyone else can do the same, holiday or no.
  The quiz will be back next week to kick off a cryptic new year..."

  [Christmas "gift"] [Merry Christmas]
  ------------------------------------

   Jannis Harder gave us a gift for Christmas using the theme we've seen in
   recent weeks of animated Ruby ASCII-art:

   loop{7.times{|i|puts"\e[2J\e[0;3H_...\n / _  '.\n|.'(@@@@@)\n(*)/ %s \\
   | .o. |\n   (  %s  ) %s"%[i==5?"- -":"e e",(i+3)%7<4?"=":"o",i>0?"-"+
   (" Ho"*i)[0,9]+"!":""];puts"   (     )\n"*2,"    (   )\n"*3,'     "-"';
   sleep([5,3,3,4,5,1,4][i]/6.0)}}

   Christian Neukirchen likewise [got into the spirit] with a Ruby program
   shaped like a Christmas tree that displays a seasonal message.

New Releases
------------

     * [SNMP 0.4.1]

           Dave Halliday updated his [SNMP Library]. "This library supports
           both the v1 and v2c versions of the SNMP protocol and is written
           in pure Ruby so that your network management scripts can go
           anywhere that Ruby does without installing additional libraries or
           tools." Changes in this release include the addition of symbolic
           identifiers.

     * [Ruby/ManageSieve 0.1.0]

           Andre Nathan made the first release of [ManageSieve], an
           implementation of the MANAGESIEVE protocol. [Sieve] is an email
           filtering language.

     * [xmlresume2x 0.2.0]

           Thomas Leitner foretold "here comes the next release of
           [xmlresume2x], a tool which converts r�sum�s stored using the [XML
           R�sum� Library] format into various output formats". New in this
           release is output to HTML, French language support, and support
           for the Windows platform.

     * [PrettyException 0.9.5]

           Dmitry V. Sabanin announced a new version of [PrettyException]. It
           now supports Windows thanks to a patch from Michael Neumann.
           PrettyException provides a dynamic (Javascript) web interface to
           Ruby exceptions.

     * [Ruwiki 0.9.2] [Ruwiki 0.9.3]

           Austin Ziegler fixed some bugs in his Wiki server. Unlike most
           Wikis, [Ruwiki] supports project namespaces. This allows the same
           name to be used in different projects hosted on the same server
           without clashing. Ruwiki 0.9.3 was later released after Austin
           suddenly remembered to run the full suite of Ruwiki test cases and
           found some issues.

     * [Rails 0.9.2: End of requiring models, models in sessions, fixes]

           David Heinemeier Hansson declared that thanks "to the powers of
           const_missing, you no longer need to explicitly require models
           that reside in their own files" in the [Rails] web application
           framework. Some bugs were also fixed.

     * [Help 0.1: access ri from irb]

           Ilmari Heikkinen bit the bullet and wrote [help.rb]. This library
           adds a help method to objects in irb (Interactive Ruby Shell) that
           provides ri documentation. Then e.g. "a = 'foo'; a.help" will
           provide documentation on Strings.

     * [Text::Hyphen 1.0.0]

           Austin Ziegler released one-dot-oh-dot-oh of Text::Hyphen, a
           library to properly hyphenate words according to the rules of
           whatever language the word is written on. It is based on an
           algorithm in TeX. Text::Hyphen replaces Austin's earlier
           Tex::Hyphen library.