From: "trans. (T. Onoma)" Date: 2005-01-18T22:13:22+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Weekly News 10th - 16th January 2005 Thanks for the news Tim. Very nice, very helpful. I've noticed though that a number of threads go unmentioned. I know there's no way to really delve into them all, but I was thinking, it might be possible to put together a script that takes a from and to date, crawls over ruby talk archive, and builds a base "template" for the news. It could list all thread subjects and all [ANN] with links too. Then one could more easily go back and fill in the info. Should save plenty of time. Anyhow, just a thought. Thanks again. T. On Tuesday 18 January 2005 05:11 am, Tim Sutherland wrote: | http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2005-01-10 | | Ruby Weekly News 10th - 16th 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 | -------------------------- | | * [Tutorial: Distributed pipes with DRb] | | Ilmari Heikkinen wrote a document (DistributedPipes) that | describes how the author used the DRb (Distributed Ruby) library | to write a distributed mp3 encoding system. This is then | generalised to work with any program that uses pipes for | communication. | | * [RedHanded welcomes two bloggers from Japan] | | [whytheluckystiff] announced that "Daigo Moriwaki and Michiaki | Baba from Japan will be joining [RedHanded] this week. They will | be blogging about activities in Japan and general Ruby stuffs." | | * [Building, Packing and Distributing Ruby Applications] | | Erik Veenstra wrote a [tutorial] that describes how to | distribute a Ruby application as a single executable that includes the Ruby | interpreter and the program (using Erik's Tar2RubyScript and RubyScript2Exe | tools). | | Threads | ------- | | [apt-listbugs] | -------------- | | Thursday wrote: | | "I didn't see Debian's apt-listbugs in raa or rubyforge so it was kinda | neat to find out it uses ruby. If you use Debian and Ruby, you might be | interested in taking a look at the code. | | http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/apt-listbugs | | apt-listbugs is written and maintained by Masato Taruishi. | | Description: | | apt-listbugs is a tool which retrieves bug reports from the Debian Bug | Tracking System and lists them. Especially, it is intended to be invoked | before each upgrade/installation by apt in order to check whether the | upgrade/installation is safe." | | [Web Testing in Ruby] | --------------------- | | Laurent Julliard asked | | "I'm trying to find a Ruvby package that would allow us to test a web | based application directly through the Web interface. The idea here is that | the Ruby testing application would basically behave like a web browser | | : GET/POST requests, manipulate HTML forms received as objects so | | that it is easy to fill them out and send them back to the server" | | Daniel Berger said this sounded like Perl's "LWP and/or WWW::Mechanize | modules" and several people listed [WebUnit] which is designed to solve | exactly this problem. | | JonathanKohl: | | "There is Chris Morris' IEC and the new Watir library. Currently both | utilize the Internet Explorer "automation" interface (referred to as | COM, OLE, ActiveX, etc.) using WIN32OLE. IEC works more with form | submits, while Watir manipulates objects on a web page by sending | messages to objects. Both IEC and Watir can be downloaded from Rubyforge: | http://rubyforge.org/projects/wtr/" | | Bret Pettichord: | | ... "we plan to use dependency | injection to allow Watir-based tests to run either using the IE/COM | driver, like they do currently (Windows only), or a new driver that will | use Selenium to allow the tests to run in any browser on any platform. | | Selenium is sever-side test automation software that currently supports | in-browser testing on IE, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux. | Seriously. The tests actually run in your browser of choice using a | javascript automation engine that is implanted into the browser from the | server. It's not fast, but it is very accurate and convincing. | | You can see this for yourself, if you point a browser of your choice at | http://selenium.thoughtworks.com/demo1/TestRunner.html | | This is just a very rough mock up of what we are aiming for. The version | of Selenium that is currently released only works with the static test | files that you see in this demo, which i think is pretty boring. But we | have prototypes checked in that allow Java and Ruby scripts to execute | against this very same API." | | [[SUMMARY] LCD Numbers (#14)] | ----------------------------- | | Last week's [Ruby Quiz] was summarised by James Edward Gray II. The task | was to write a program that displays LCD style numbers at adjustable | sizes in simple ASCII-art with '-' and '|'. | | "There were three main strategies used for solving the problem. Some used | a template approach, where you have some kind of text representation of | your number at a scale of one. Two might look like this, for example: | | [ " - ", | " |", | " - ", | "| ", | " - " ] | | "The second strategy used was to treat each digit as a series of segments | that can be "on" or "off". The numbers easily break down into seven | positions: | | 6 | 5 4 | 3 | 2 1 | 0 | | Using that map, we can convert the two above to a binary digit, and some | did: | | 0b1011101" | | The third strategy was to use a finite state machine. | | [[QUIZ] Animal Quiz (#15)] | -------------------------- | | This week's [Ruby Quiz] is by Jim Weirich. | | "It works like this. The program starts by telling the user to think | of an animal. It then begins asking a series of yes/no questions | about that animal: does it swim, does it have hair, etc. Eventually, | it will narrow down the possibilities to a single animal and guess | that (Is it a mouse?). | | If the program has guessed correctly, the game is over and may be | restarted with a new animal. If the program has guess incorrectly, it | asks the user for the kind of animal they were thinking of and then | asks for the user to provide a question that can distinguish between | its incorrect guess and the correct answer. It then adds the new | question and animal to its "database" and will guess that animal in | the future (if appropriate)." | | Solutions were posted under the same thread. | | [Segfault in timer.rb] | | Erlend Oye got segfaults when running RSSScraper under builds of Ruby | 1.8.2 and 1.9.1 that he had created with cygwin. They all seemed to be | occuring when Thread.start was called. | | Ville Mattila pointed out | | "The cygwins signal handling is not most robust and ruby threading | implementation depends on working signals. However there is cygwin1 | delopment snapshots that might cure Erlend's problem. Erlend could | you check the latest snapshot from http://cygwin.com/snapshots/ | | Also I think you'll get better OS features (OLE and stuff like that) | if you use native ruby i.e. one click installer or compile it | yourself (migw or msvc)." | | The [One-Click Ruby Installer] for Windows currently uses Microsoft's | Visual Studio compiler (MSVC) and users can also build Ruby with the | MingW system (Minimalist GNU for Windows), see the HowToBuildOnWindows wiki | page for instructions. Neither of these suffer from the cygwin issues. | | New Releases | ------------ | | * [XDCC-Fetch 1.239] | | martinus was happy to announce the first release of | [XDCC-Fetch], a GUI tool for collecting, searching and downloading | broadcasted XDCC announcements within IRC channels. | | * [YARV: Yet Another RubyVM 0.1.0] | | SASADA Koichi released version 0.1.0 of [YARV], a project aiming | to develop the fastest Virtual Machine for Ruby in the world. | | * [Ruby Facets, v0.6.1] | | trans updated [Ruby Facets], a collection of extensions for core | Ruby classes. "Methods are stored in their own files, allowing | for extremely granular control of requirements." | | * [sys-uname 0.7.0] | | Daniel Berger improved sys-uname, a Ruby library that provides | platform information similar to that returned by the unix uname | command. It works on win32 as well as unix systems. The Windows | support now uses WMI + OLE instead of a C extension. | | * [Net::SFTP 0.9.0] [Net::SSH 0.9.0] | | Jamis Buck released the first in a planned series of beta | releases of his pure-Ruby SFTP client [Net::SFTP] with the aim to arrive at | version 1.0.0 before too long. Jamis also announced a new version of | [Net::SSH], a pure-Ruby SSH2 client. | | * [Syntax 0.5.0] | | Jamis Buck intoned "[Syntax] is an experimental Ruby library for | syntax highlighting source code. Currently, it supports Ruby, | XML, and YAML." | | * [xmlresume2x 0.2.1] | | Thomas Leitner delivered a new release of [xmlresume2x], a tool | which converts r��sum��s stored using the [XML R��sum�� Library | format] into various output formats. | | * [Nitro + Og 0.8.0] | | George Moschovitis updated [Nitro], his web application | framework and Og, an object-relation mapping library. Changes include a new | automatic validation system and many important bug fixes. | | * [Tar2RubyScript 0.4.3] | | Erik Veenstra made some enhancements to [Tar2RubyScript], a tool | that transforms a Ruby program into a single file, easing | distribution. | | * [EasyPrompt 0.1.0] | | Francis Hwang made the initial release of the EasyPrompt | library, which provides a simple interface for interactive prompts in | command-line programs. | | * [Instiki 0.9.2 - OSX build] | | Alexey Verkhovsky reports that "[t]hanks to Ben Schumacher, a | native OSX build of Instiki 0.9.2 is now available". (Instiki is | a Wiki implementation.) | | * [Nemo 0.1.0 + Wee 0.4.0] | | Michael Neumann announced Kevin Howe's Nemo project along with | an updated version of Wee (developed by Michael). "Nemo is a | web-application platform that uses object metadata to | automatically construct web-interfaces (Editors and Viewers). It | is highly object-oriented with strong emphasis on reusable | components." | | * [Ruby Vector Graphics 0.3.0] | | Tim Hunter issued an update to [RVG], "a library for drawing 2D | graphics with an API based on the SVG specification". It uses | RMagick (the Ruby binding for ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick). | New in this release is support for patterns. | | * [Pimki 1.4] | | Assaph Mehr updated [Pimki], a personal information manager | (PIM) based on the Instiki wiki system. This release incorporates the | Instiki changes in Instiki 0.9.2, fixes some bugs and adds features like | edit on double-click. | | * [CreditCard 1.0] | | Lucas Carlson introduced [CreditCard], a library that can "tell | you whether a credit card number is self-consistent using known | algorithms for credit card numbers". Lucas intends to develop a | full payment processing gateway for Ruby in the future. | | * [Flash/Ruby 0.1.0] | | leon breedt announced the first public release of Flash/Ruby, | which is a Ruby binding for a library he wrote called libflash. | It is used to embed Macromedia Flash in a GTK+ application. | | * [RubyScript2Exe 0.3.1] | | Erik Veenstra updated [RubyScript2Exe], which collects a Ruby | application along with the Ruby interpreter into a single | executable for Windows or unix. RubyGems support has been | improved, and .dll and .o files are correctly handled. -- ( o _ ��������� // trans. / \ transami@runbox.com [8,16,20,29,78,65,2,14,26,12,12,28,71,114,12,13,12,82,72,21,17,4,10,2,95]. each_with_index{|x,i| $><<(x^'Begin landing your troops'[i]).chr} -Tadayoshi Funaba