Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th February 2005

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2005-02-07

                   Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13rd February 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
--------------------------

     * [[WANTED] Feedback and developers for Win32 Utils]

           Daniel Berger announced that the "Win32 Utils Team is looking for
           a little help". Firstly, input from people using Ruby on Windows as
           to which functionality needs to be added. Secondly, they're looking
           for developers who can help with writing interfaces to the Windows
           API. Example projects to be done are adding image support to the
	   win32-clipboard package and writing a port of the Win32::Screenshot
	   Perl module.

     * [raleigh.rb February Meeting]

           Nathaniel Talbott reminded Rubyists in North Carolina that the
           Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade (raleigh.rb) are having another user
           group meeting on the 10th of March.

     * [extra Seattle.rb meeting]

           In other user group news, pat eyler announced that there's an
           extra Seatte.rb meeting coming up in a different location from
           usual. "Since there are some Seattle.rb folks who live south of
           Seattle, we've decided to get together for a hacking
           session/meeting in Kent this Saturday."

     * [Ruby developers in Argentina]

           Michel Martens would like to be able to get in contact with Ruby
           developers in Argentina, and encouraged them to sign up at the
           BuenosAiresGroup wiki page.

Quote of the Week
-----------------

   Jeremy Henty [sputtered] "Look, I'm *not* addicted to Ruby! I could give
   up writing Ruby code any time I wanted to, just like that! I just don't
   *want* to!"

Threads
-------

   Interesting threads this week included:

  [Stopping a thread]
  -------------------

   Bill Atkins had an instance variable @thread that referred to some Thread.
   He wanted to know how to stop @thread from the main thread. Assaph Mehr
   said that @thread.kill was what he wanted.

  [a Ruby pdf writer that supports images]
  ----------------------------------------

   Artotoy has a website that produces invoices as PDFs, using PDF::Writer,
   but recently discovered that PDF::Writer seemed not to have support for
   images.

   Dan Fitzpatrick said that he was working on porting the PHP FPDF library
   to Ruby. It was working for simple cases but needed a few weeks to work
   out the bugs and add more advanced features.

   Fredrik Jagenheim pointed out that the CVS version of PDF::Writer did have
   support for images, through a method add_jpeg_from_file. The library's
   author, Austin Ziegler, just hasn't got around to releasing a new version
   yet.

  [How come this doesn't work as expected?]
  -----------------------------------------

   Chris Gehlker was curious as to why the code
       "testAry = testAry.each { |n| n.to_i }"
   didn't modify testAry. Several people explained that each just
   returns the original receiver and does not keep the block return-values
   around. map (a.k.a. collect) should be used instead.

  [Object#to_ruby and Object#to_c]
  --------------------------------

   Ben Giddings saw [a post] on the Ruby blog [RedHanded] that he thought was
   interesting. (That post quoted Ryan Davis' blog, so you're now reading
   this fourth-handed: a summary of a post that pointed to a blog that quoted
   another blog that actually said something.)

   It shows how ParseTree and RubyToC can be used to add to_c and to_ruby
   methods to any Method. For example,

  class Example
     def example(arg1)
       return "Blah: " + arg1.to_s
     end
  end
   
  e = Example.new
  puts(e.method(:example).to_ruby)

   results in

  def example(arg1)
  return "Blah: " + arg1.to_s
  end

  [access to process list]
  ------------------------

   Sven Bauhan wanted to get a list of system processes from within Ruby and
   wondered if there was a better way than "proclist = `ps ax`". Daniel
   Berger said that a library called sys-proctable is available for this.

  [Performance of CGI::Cookie]
  ----------------------------

   benny found that his web application was three times slower when
   CGI::Cookie was used. He discovered a post on ruby-talk that linked the
   problem to the CGI::Cookie's use of SimpleDelegator. Matz said that the
   fix would be merged into Ruby 1.8.3. The patch is as simple as

  -  class Cookie < SimpleDelegator
  +  class Cookie < DelegateClass(Array)

   The reason for the big performance difference is that with
   SimpleDelegator, every time you create an instance of Cookie it has to
   define all the delegated methods on itself. In comparison,
   DelegateClass(someClass) defines these methods just once.

  [[SUMMARY] Solving Tactics (#18)]
  ---------------------------------

   James Edward Gray II summarised last week's [Ruby Quiz]. The problem was
   to take a simple board game and determine who would win if both players
   chose optimal moves: the first player or the second.

   From the [original quiz description] by Bob Sidebotham, "There's a little
   pencil and paper game, Tactics, played on a 4x4 grid. The play starts with
   an empty grid. On each turn, a player can fill in one to four adjacent
   squares, either horizontally or vertically. The player who fills in the
   last square loses."

   They key optimisation in the solutions was to recognise that since squares
   are either "on" or "off", the board state can be represented as a 16-bit
   integer. That means there are only 65536 board we need to consider. The
   rest of the solution simply determines which boards will result in
   eventual wins for the first player and which will end in eventual losses.
   (It uses the "dynamic programming" algorithmic technique.)

  [ruby-dev summary 25481-25641]
  ------------------------------

   Kazuo Saito summarised the Japanese list ruby-dev. One of the items was
   about the process of merging the Ruby/DL2 library into Ruby 1.9.

  [Amazon + 43Things]
  -------------------

   martinus heard that Amazon was investing in [43 Things], a website well
   known to many in the community for its use of the [Ruby on Rails] web
   framework. If you've seen recent news articles about Amazon investing in a
   "blog site", this is the site they're talking about.

   As Tobias Luetke observed, "[t]he future of Ruby on Rails is indeed bright
   on so many levels its not even funny".

  [[QUIZ] Yahtzee (#19)]
  ----------------------

   James Edward Gray II posted this week's [Ruby Quiz]: to make a game that
   plays the game "Yahtzee" dice game.

   For those looking for an extra challenge, adding an AI player or
   implementing "Triple Yahtzee" were suggested.

  [A Ruby-relevant quote from Alan Kay]
  -------------------------------------

   Curt Hibbs quoted Alan Kay (the creator of Smalltalk) in a recent ACM
   Queue interview: "Even if you're designing for professional programmers,
   in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design.
   You will get much better results regardless of what you're trying to do if
   you think of it as a user-interface design."

   Curt felt that this was the approach Matz took in designing Ruby.

   PA posted an old [page] that quotes some tongue-in-cheek comments by Steve
   Wart on "why Smalltalk never caught on". Also on the page was the
   following quote

  "
  >So, yes, in Smalltalk you can definitely dig your own grave.
  >But you can also climb out of it.
  >At least Smalltalk gives me a shovel and ladder.
   
  I'm not sure that's a good metaphor. It conjures up images of an army of
  once-dead Smalltalk zombies digging themselves out of their graves and
  terrorising the Land of the Statically Typed. :-)
  "

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

     * [LXL (Like Excel) 0.2.0 - A mini-language that mimics Microsoft Excel
       formulas]
     * [LXL (Like Excel) 0.3.0]

           Kevin Howe improved quoting and parsing in [LXL], an evaluator for
           a language similar to that used for formulas in Microsoft Excel.
           He later released version 0.3.0 which added some major new
           features: namespaces, ranges, percentages and deferred function
           calls. It is also now installable as a gem.

     * [Net::SSH 1.0.0]

           Jamis Buck released the one-dot-oh-dot-oh version of Net::SSH, a
           library that implements the SSH2 client protocol. Some bugs were
           fixed, and the project is now in maintenance mode, with no new
           features planned.

     * [Daemons 0.0.1: control your daemon scripts with start/stop commands]

           Thomas Uehlinger was "proud to release the first version of
           Daemons", a tool that allows you to run Ruby scripts in the
           background, providing commands to start, stop and restart them.

     * [Syck 0.50 -- The new YAML is here for testing]

           why the lucky stiff announced that the new Syck branch is ready
           for testing. This is a library for dealing with the YAML markup
           format. It's several times faster than the old version, and _why
           expects that there will be no major API changes between now and
           the 1.0 release. "Finally, I can go back to drawing ponies out on
           the bridge by the old reservoir..."

     * [rubydium 0.3 and nanovm 0.1]

           Alexander Kellett released a complete rewrite of the first
           rubydium - it is now aiming to be a fast Ruby interpreter written
           in Ruby.

     * [Recipe Browser 0.4]

           Belorion rewrote his Recipe Browser to use the [Rails] web
           framework.

     * [RedCloth 3.0.3 -- Humane Text for Ruby]

           why the lucky stiff put out some small fixes for RedCloth, a
           library that processes the humane text-formats Textile and a
           Markdown-subset into XHTML (and soon LaTeX and PDF). "Humane" text
           formats are those often used in Wikis, forums and blogs to allow
           people to write text that ends up formatted without having to use
           ugly tags (for example, many humane formats turn '*foo*' into
	   bold-text 'foo').

     * [Announcing a respawned rcairo]

           戈vind Kol蚶 announced Ruby support for Cairo, "a resolution and
           device independent vector graphics drawing library, which provides
           a postscript like drawing model".

     * [ParseTree 1.3.4 Released]

           Ryan Davis released a new version of [ParseTree], a "little brown
           stinky ferret that digs down a hole and violently rips the AST
           away from the warm bosom of ruby" (to [quote] Ryan in another
           thread). In other words, it extracts the parse-tree for a class or
           method from the Ruby interpreter and returns it as an s-expression
           using Arrays, Strings, Symbols and Integers. A couple of bugs were
           fixed in this release.

     * [Samizdat RDF Storage 0.1]

           Dmitri Borodaenko announced the first release of Samizdat RDF
           Storage as a stand-alone library. It provides optimised storage of
           RDF data in relational databases.

     * [Numeric Integration Library (calculus, analysis)]

           beng released a new library for doing numerical integration of
           single-variable functions. It includes several different
           integration methods, including Simpson's, Monte Carlo sampling,
           Gauss', Adaptive Quadrature, and Romberg's.

     * [RubyTorrent 0.3 (beta)]

           William Morgan was "happy" to announce the first beta of
           RubyTorrent, a peer library for BitTorrent.