From: timsuth@... (Tim Sutherland) Date: 2005-01-12T11:16:27+09:00 Subject: Ruby Weekly News 3rd - 9th January 2005 http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2005-01-03 Ruby Weekly News 3rd - 9th January 2005 --------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------- * [Deadline extended for Codefest Grant program] David A. Black announced: "The deadline for the Ruby Central Codefest Grant Program is being extended to January 30 (instead of January 15). There's been a lot of talk here over the years -- and quite recently -- about missing libraries. Well, that's why the grant program exists :-) This is a good time to think concretely about how you might bring about a meeting and fill what you think is a gap. Keep in mind that grant money can be used for travel. This can make it easier for someone from another area to participate in the project." * [RedHanded] This isn't a specific "article or announcement" but whytheluckystiff has been making many interesting posts to his blog RedHanded. It's definitely worth checking out and is updated regularly (multiple posts per day at the moment!) Posts include ideas on grants for the Ruby Central Codefest Grant Program discussed above. Threads ------- Interesting threads this week included: [Need an extra EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASY GUI for Ruby] --------------------------------------------------- Victor Reyes wanted a way of creating a GUI for Ruby using a simple drag-and-drop interface, rather than by writing code. This is similar to a thread covered last week [GUI toolkit which separates UI specification from driving logic]. Henrik Ronellenfitsch pointed out the [Ruby/GTK2-Bindings] and the Glade GUI Designer. Glade can output an XML file representing the GUI which is then loaded by the Ruby program. Florian Gross said: "There's visualWx which can create Ruby code representing a wxWidgets GUI. It's still in development and a bit rough on the edges, but it already looks very promising: http://visualwx.altervista.org/" The Ruby binding for [WxWidgets] also supports XRC, which is the XML format outputted by many wxWidgets GUI designer tools. Richard Dale wrote: "QtRuby/Korundum can be used with Qt Designer to design the GUI for Qt and KDE apps. You can then either generate ruby code from the .ui files produced with the rbuic tool, or read the UI in at runtime with the 'qui' extension. Qt Designer support is integrated with ruby projects in the next version of the KDevelop IDE." Shashank Date added that there is FormDesigner for VisualuRuby (a GUI system for Windows only). Victor concluded "I guess I have many choices to play with" and Electricmew added another, suggesting [WideStudio]. [ruby-dev summary 25261-25372] ------------------------------ Minero Aoki posted the latest summary of the Japanese mailing list ruby-dev. "Tanaka Akira posted a patch to record GC-related information: * the total number of GC invocation * the number of GC invocation, when an object is collected * the location where the last GC is yielded This patch might help you if you are interested in GC internals." Patches fixing some bugs were also posted and discussed. [Mailing list gateway getting reportted at SpamCop] --------------------------------------------------- Dennis Oelkers wrote: "during the last few days we are receiving SpamCop-reports concerning the submission of mails originating from one of our host repeatedly. We found out that all of those reports are related to someone (or something) submitting mails from ruby-talk which were forwarded by the Usenet <-> mailing list gateway running at our site, so SpamCop determined the gateway as the origin of those mails. Those mails were not even close to uce, they are just 100% legitimate comp.lang.ruby postings, and it seems that the person (or the script?) submitting those postings to SpamCop is always the same." Dennis asked for help with dealing with this issue, worried that he may be forced to shut down the usenet->mailing list gateway. Note that all posts going through this gateway have the following header: "Received: from Usenet via a Usenet to mail gateway located at TU-Berlin.DE. This service provided as a courtesy to the ruby-talk mailing list. If this message is SPAM, its ultimate origin is Usenet, not this gateway program. All subscribers to the ruby-talk mailing list agree to receive the Usenet postings made to comp.lang.ruby via this gateway. Please see http://www.ruby-lang.org/ruby-talk-usenet-policy.html." Hopefully SpamCop will do the right thing and ignore the abuse reports. [[QUIZ] LCD Numbers (#14)] -------------------------- In [Ruby Quiz] this week, the task was to write a program that displays LCD style numbers at adjustable sizes in simple ASCII-art with '-' and '|'. People posted solutions under that thread, and also under [1] and [2]. whytheluckystiff made a post on his RedHanded blog [LCD Numbers Duke It Out] which listed one of the solutions that was less than 300 characters long. [[SUMMARY] Cryptograms (#13)] ----------------------------- Glenn Parker summarised the previous week's Ruby Quiz. [Garbage collector] ------------------- Eustaquio Rangel de Oliveira Jr. asked "Hey, how often the garbage collector runs? When all the memory becomes full? Or there is a pre-defined interval?" Charles Mills answered "It basically runs when a certain amount of memory is used - see malloc_increase and malloc_limit in gc.c. Also, if malloc() fails or attempts to open a file fail do to memory limitations the gc will be run." He also gave links to GCAndMemoryManagement and GCAndExtensions which cover this topic. There was further discussion of the GC when Martin Pirker said since a conservative garbage collection scheme is used, "So, can one help gc? e.g. if an Array or Hash is no longer needed, does an Array.clear or Hash.clear actually zero all internal pointers to help/speed up gc?" Lothar Scholz and Michael Neumann replied, saying that Ruby is only conservative when scanning the C stack (see GCAndExtensions) and not the heap, so Array.clear will not help. New Releases ------------ * [Lafcadio 0.6.0] Francis Hwang made a new production release of [Lafcadio], an object-relational mapping library for use with MySQL. Querying has been improved. * [aeditor-2.0] Simon Strandgaard made an initial "barebones" release of the second incarnation of [AEditor]. The website still lists the 1.x branch as the one to use. * [QtRuby 1.0.6/Korundum 3.4 beta1/KDevelop HEAD] Richard Dale annouced updated Ruby bindings for the Qt and KDE GUI APIs, plus improved Ruby support in the KDevelop IDE. Changes include more #inspect and #pretty_print methods for assisting debugging. * [Logtails 0.1] [Logtails 0.2] Bauduin Raphael was "happy to announce the first public release of [logtails], a graphical tool to open several tails on log files", using KDE GUI libraries. Version 0.2 was later released with many improvements to the GUI. * [Rails 0.9.3: Optimistic locking, dynamic finders, Ruby 1.8.2 compatible] David Heinemeier Hansson declared that the [Rails] web application framework has been updated to work with Ruby 1.8.2. "Dynamic finders" have been added so that e.g. Person.find_by_user_name can be used without having to write any code. Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's DB2 are now supported by ActiveRecord. Many other changes have also been made, check the post for details. * [Ruby/GSL 1.6.0] Yoshiki Tsunesada's [Ruby/GSL], a binding to the GNU Scientific Library, was updated to support GSL-1.6. * [SQLite3/Ruby 0.9.0] Jamis Buck changed his [SQLite3/Ruby] binding to use a C extension by default instead of DL, due to some limitations which exist in the current DL version. This fixes some stability problems with the previous version. * [Ruby Vector Graphics 0.2.0] Tim Hunter introduced the second alpha release of [Ruby Vector Graphics], an add-on library to [RMagick] which adds SVG-style drawing support. * [ParseTree 1.3.2] Ryan Davis announced a new version of [ParseTree], a library that returns an s-expression parse tree for Ruby code. * [rubytorrent 0.1] William Morgan was happy to release [RubyTorrent 0.1], a pure-Ruby BitTorrent peer library. In the thread, Paul Duncan gave a patch which added require 'open-uri' and replaced File.open with open. This change adds support for remote URLS and will be incorporated into the next release. * [Announce SiSU - publishing for e-documents, books, libraries, relational databases] Ralph Amissah writes "SiSU is a (command line) text processing program that produces structured electronic documents from a simple marked up input file (using a markup syntax similar to smart ascii that I claim to be simpler than the most elementary html) in multiple output formats, from html, and structured XML, to pdf via LaTeX". * [win32-open3 0.2.0] Daniel Berger improved win32-open3, which adds Open3 for Win32 platforms.