From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2005-03-16T00:09:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th March 2005

This is awesome, Tim. I don't know how you find the time, but *please* keep
up the good work!

Curt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Sutherland [mailto:timsuth@ihug.co.nz]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 7:58 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th March 2005
> Importance: High
>
>
> http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20050313.html
>
>    Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th March 2005
>    --------------------------------------
>
>    Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
>    mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim
>    Sutherland.
>
>    Special thanks this week goes to Paul van Tilburg, who
> converted several
>    weeks of newsletters from RubyGarden format to Hobix. This
> provided nice
>    syndication with RSS and Atom. I liked his work so much that I
> decided to
>    save him the trouble of doing the conversion every week and
> just use Hobix
>    myself! I intend to translate the old newsletters into this format as
>    well.
>
>    I'm interested in feedback on the new layout and functionality.
>
> Articles and Announcements
> --------------------------
>
>      * Ruby Central 2005 Codefest Grant recipients
>      ---------------------------------------------
>
>        David A. Black announced that there were five recipients
> of the first
>        Ruby Central Codefest Grant program.
>
>        They each receive up to US$500, to be used for hosting "codefests",
>        where groups of developers meet up at the same physical location to
>        hack.
>
>          1. Ruby Displaytag (Dave Tiu)
>          2. Ruby/AGG and Ruby/View (Andrey Melnik)
>          3. Gambit (James Edward Gray II)
>          4. Ruby Bindings to Lucene Search Engine (Brian McCallister)
>          5. RubyGems cleanup and enhancement (Ryan Davis)
>
>      * Who wants to learn Ruby with me?
>      ----------------------------------
>
>        Andreas Sprotte is looking for a partner to write a RubyCocoa
>        application for the Mac.
>
>        "I want to learn about the model view controller pattern,
>        object-orientation, basic networking and accessing a database. We'd
>        email us back and forth and would collaborate via
> SubEthaEdit once a
>        week.
>
>        The project should be something that could be completed in about 40
>        hours, maybe spread about 4 to 6 weeks."
>
>      * Ruby Developers in Tokyo, Japan
>      ---------------------------------
>
>        Zev Blut posted a job announcement in the form of a Ruby program.
>        Several people posted patches and comments. Zev followed up with
>        "Thanks for all the comments and improvements to the coded
> request for
>        Ruby developers! It was certainly more fun than writing a
> formal job
>        posting. Hopefully, I will get a few resumes in my mailbox..."
>
>      * SIGHTING: Ruby article in Dr. Dobb's
>      --------------------------------------
>
>        Kaspar Schiess spotted an article in the February 2005 issue of Dr.
>        Dobbs called "Amazon.com - Web Services & Ruby". It was
> written by Ian
>        Macdonald. Kaspar reports "The article is well written and
> makes you
>        want to try out the library." (Registration required to
> view article.)
>
> Quote of the Week
> -----------------
>
>    We're breaking the rules here - but this is Ruby-land, so
> that's okay. The
>    quote this week isn't from the ruby-talk mailing list, it's from
>    RedHanded, a blog run by why the lucky stiff. (With some other
>    contributors from time to time.)
>
>    _why had just observed the "haha" count between the Python and
> Ruby lists.
>
>    In response, Wonko the semi-successful magician saw fit to declare
>
>      "It's an established scientific fact that Ruby programmers laugh five
>      times more per day than Python programmers, and thirty times
> more than
>      Java programmers. And unlike the mad half-a-laugh-per-week C++ crowd,
>      it's not all evil cackling laughs, either."
>
> Threads
> -------
>
>    Interesting threads this week included:
>
>   [Codefest Grant - RubyGems cleanup and enhancement]
>   ---------------------------------------------------
>
>    Eric Hodel announced that the Seattle.rb users' group will host the
>    RubyGems codefest. "We would like to solicit your ideas on
> what you want
>    to see cleaned up or enhanced in RubyGems." "For our Codefest we do not
>    plan on making large changes to the way RubyGems works. One
> thing we would
>    like to focus on is making the gem command more friendly when
> you hit ^C,
>    for example."
>
>    gabriele renzi suggested "One little thing I'd appreciate is
> some kind of
>    feedback for the user like a progress bar both in downloading and
>    upgrading cache."
>
>    Curt Hibbs thought a GUI front-end is needed, but that it was
> probably too
>    much work for a codefest. "What I want is something like a
> news reader, or
>    windows file explorer. A desktop GUI with a tree control on
> the left and a
>    detail panel of sorts on the right. With the ability to mount
> and browse
>    multiple repositories as well as your installed gems."
>
>    Richard Lyman had created a mockup GUI front-end at one stage,
> but nothing
>    happened after that. He will have more time at the end of
> April, so may do
>    work on it then.
>
>    Jim Freeze made a different request in another thread. "I like the
>    versioning of libraries, but I particularly like the versioning of
>    applications."
>
>  $ rake --version
>  rake, version 0.4.15
>  $ rake _0.4.13_ --version
>  rake, version 0.4.13
>
>    Jim has a script which launches the application, and would
> like the user
>    to be able to specify which version was run. Perhaps "setenv
>    RUBYGEMS_USE_APP_VERSION_xyz_app 1".
>
>   [Possible ruby job in SF Bay Area]
>   ----------------------------------
>
>    Joel VanderWerf posted a possible job position for a Ruby
> programmer. The
>    requirements included "Ruby: 2 years, responsible for at least
> one project
>    of >10K lines."
>
>    why the lucky stiff noted "I've always held to the old adage: If you've
>    written 10K lines of Ruby code, then you're using it wrong."
>
>    Dave Burt calculated the number of lines in some of the major Ruby
>    libraries and applications. Rails is 2K lines, rdoc is 16K and
> rexml 9K.
>    "So the successful applicant will have written one of the (top
> 5?) largest
>    Ruby projects in existence."
>
>    David Heinemeier Hansson (the main author of Rails) agreed with these
>    sentiments, saying "I, for one, wouldn't fit the description
> above. Number
>    of years is a utter lackluster indicator for job performance. Rewarding
>    the use of 10K lines in Ruby is also fairly questionable."
>
>    Joel defended the requirement, explaining "The app needs to
> interact with
>    3rd party software that has its own highly complex (and often poorly
>    designed) input/output system. It needs to do a large variety of
>    geometrical calculations (not difficult ones). The programmer
> for this job
>    needs to be comfortable with managing a large number of ugly
> details. That
>    skill is distinct (though of course not exclusive) from
> writing a lovely
>    little ruby library."
>
>   [Watir needs a Win32GUI library]
>   --------------------------------
>
>    Bret Pettichord: "We've seen growing enthusiasm for Watir, a
> web-testing
>    library that is good enough that it is convincing people to learn Ruby
>    just so that they can use it." He gave a number of quotes from
> satisfied
>    users.
>
>    Watir controls Internet Explorer via the COM interface, but is running
>    into some limits with that interface. "I'm writing to ask for help. The
>    biggest problem with Watir is its support for various dialogs. These
>    dialogs appear when you use a browser; for example, a login dialog or a
>    security dialog or a javascript dialog. Watir mostly works by accessing
>    the DOM via IE's COM interface. But there is no COM/DOM
> interface to these
>    dialogs."
>
>    Some work has been done using Win32 calls, but Bret thinks it would be
>    better to use a general Win32 GUI testing library that already
> exists. Any
>    suggestions?
>
>   [what about a rails-based gforge like?]
>   ---------------------------------------
>
>    Lionel Thiry asked "isn't there a need for a rails-based gforge like
>    framework?". GForge is a PHP application that provides support for
>    collaborative software development, with forums, mailing
> lists, CVS, bug
>    tracking etc. It is used by Rubyforge.
>
>    gabriele renzi thought that it was quite a complex project,
> and rewriting
>    it in Rails wouldn't gain you much. Lionel countered this by
> quoting the
>    claim from Rails enthusiasts that web applications can be
> developed up to
>    ten times faster with Rails. (Although this claim was actually
> originally
>    made in comparison to Java frameworks, not PHP ones.)
>
>    Martin DeMello felt that GForge was not primarily a web application -
>    "There are a lot of complex details on the server side that
> would have to
>    be redone for very little gain."
>
>   [need for a class_attr methods collection]
>   ------------------------------------------
>
>    Lionel Thiry suggested class_attr methods, similar to attr_reader,
>    attr_writer, attr_accessor but for class instance variables.
>
>    class MyClass
>        @a = "value"
>        class_attr_reader :a
>    end
>    puts Test.a # it doesn't work
>
>    ts gave the following:
>
>    class MyClass
>        @a = "value"
>        class << self
>            attr_reader :a
>        end
>    end
>
>    ts also reminded Lionel not to confuse "class instance
> variable (i.e. @a
>    in your example) and class variables (i.e. @@a)".
>
>   [Great Computer Language Shootout]
>   ----------------------------------
>
>    Isaac noted that Ruby is currently missing about a dozen
> programs from the
>    Great Computer Language Shootout (a set of benchmarks for many
> programming
>    language implementations).
>
>    "If you have a few moments please contribute stylish Ruby programs."
>
>   [nonblock extension for win32?]
>   -------------------------------
>
>    Bill Kelly recalled reading about an issue with blocking IO on Windows,
>    and thought that someone had announced a library for Windows
> that provided
>    non-blocking support. Where could he find this library?
>
>    "One of my applications has an unusable feature on windows at present,
>    because I need a nonblocking way to read from a pipe returned from
>    popen(). Is there any nonblocking way to accomplish this in
> win32 ruby?"
>
>    Daniel Berger explained that the discussion had been about a
> patch to the
>    Ruby interpreter to fix problems with blocking sockets, not a separate
>    library. The patch has been included in CVS. As far as popen()
> goes, the
>    win32-pipe library provides a replacement that will work asynchronously
>    (although the API is different).
>
>    Bill said that he'd probably switch to using sockets so his code was
>    portable.
>
>   [Redesign 2005 Blog]
>   --------------------
>
>    why the lucky stiff linked to the Redesign 2005 Blog. It presents two
>    mockups of a new ruby-lang.org website. These were prepared by the
>    vit-core team.
>
>    Feedback should be posted to the blog.
>
>   [ODBC OG/ActiveRecords]
>   -----------------------
>
>    Luke Galea wanted to use Microsoft Access and Sybase Anywhere databases
>    from Ruby. There aren't any Ruby drivers for these at the
> moment, so he's
>    using Ruby-ODBC. "BUT: I would like to use a nice object-relational
>    library like ActiveRecord or OG.. Has anyone ever had any success using
>    either over ODBC?"
>
>    David Heinemeier Hansson warned that "Generic ODBC adapters are
>    problematic because the databases underneath might use different
>    strategies for stuff like auto-incremented columns. A Access or Sybase
>    adapter that goes through ODBC is certainly possible. I know
> that shashank
>    and a few others were looking into that for Active Record at
> some point."
>
>    Kirk Haines said that the Kansas ORM (Object Relational
> Mapper) should be
>    able to use ODBC connectios. "Kansas, as an ORM, has been
>    feature-incomplete, but stable for many months, and I use it
> on probably
>    20 different production applications. It used DBI for simplicity and
>    coverage, making it lightweight."
>
>   [Quoted Printable (#23)]
>   ------------------------
>
>    James Edward Gray II set out this week's Ruby Quiz. The task
> is to write a
>    filter that handles the "quoted printable" encoding. (This encoding is
>    primarily used in email.)
>
>    For example, the character "<" becomes "=3C".
>
>   [Roman Numerals (#22)]
>   ----------------------
>
>    James also summarised last week's quiz, to write a convertor
> between Roman
>    and Arabic numerals.
>
>    One interesting technique was used by Dave Burt. He defined
>    Object.const_missing so that constants like IX would automatically be
>    converted into RomanNumeral objects.
>
>    "My thanks go out to friends and Romans alike."
>
>   [Malformed UTF-8?]
>   ------------------
>
>    Ian Macdonald had recently been getting ArgumentError exceptions from a
>    calendar library. The error messages states that the calendar event
>    contains malforned UTF-8. Ian gave an example of text that
> gets rejected
>    by String#unpack("U*").
>
>    Simon Strandgaard pointed out the error in the text - it was indeed
>    invalid UTF-8.
>
>    Nikolai Weibull posted a program that checks whether text is properly
>    formed UTF-8. Unlike String#unpack, this program gives the
> actual position
>    of the first invalid character.
>
>   [YAML obj merging]
>   ------------------
>
>    gga wanted to merge two Hash objects in a `recursive' way, e.g.
>
>  irb> a = { 'A' => { 'A1' => 'a' } }
>  irb> b = { 'A' => { 'B1' => 'b' } }
>  irb> b.mix(a) # ficticious method
>  {"A"=>{"A1"=>"a", "B1" => 'b' }}
>
>    Trans said that Ruby Facets provides a weave method which
> "does what you
>    wish and a little more".
>
>   [Is iterating in lock-step possible?]
>   -------------------------------------
>
>    This thread considered external vs internal iteration.
>
>  # External
>  while g.next?; foo(g.next); end
>
>  # Internal
>  g.each { |x| foo(x) }
>
>    The Generator class can be used to convert internal iterators into
>    external ones, but it is slow. (1000 times slower according to William
>    Morgan's benchmarks.)
>
>    Roshan James wanted to iterate over two Enumerable in parallel, without
>    first converting each into an Array. Enumerable#zip can be used for
>    parallel iteration, but it converts its arguments into Arrays.
>
>    ts gave the example of
>
>  %w(eins zwei drei).zip([1,2,3]) {|a, b| puts "#{a} #{b}" }
>
>    It was felt that Generator was indeed the right way to go. If
> it was too
>    slow then the objects being iterated over could be changed to have an
>    external iterator interface.
>
>   [DRb for dummies !]
>   -------------------
>
>    Svend-Erik Kj�r Madsen had a problem using the ACL
> (access-control list)
>    class with drb (distributed Ruby). The solution was as simple
> as require
>    'drb/acl', but the thread gives us a good excuse to demonstrate ACL.
>
>    Quoting part of Svend-Erik's code, with the extra require,
>
>  require 'drb'
>  require 'drb/acl'
>
>  acl = ACL.new( %w[deny all
>    allow 192.168.1.*
>    allow localhost ] )
>
>  DRb.install_acl(acl)
>
>   [Simple extension question]
>   ---------------------------
>
>    Mark Probert asked what the simplest way of clearing an Array
> from C was,
>    i.e. the C equivalent of foo.clear.
>
>    Daniel Berger replied: rb_ary_clear(foo).
>
>    "Tricky, eh? :-P For a complete list of methods, take a look
> at intern.h."
>
>   [Encoding a multipart/form-data for posting via HTTP]
>   -----------------------------------------------------
>
>    Dema announced "After googling around (with no luck) for a while for a
>    function that would encode a hash into a multipart/form-data
> to be sent to
>    a HTTP server via POST, I decided to read the RFC and write my own." It
>    does not yet handle complex cases.
>
>    Dave Burt thought this should be in Net::HTTP::Post.
>
> New Releases
> ------------
>
>      * Fast Change Set Tool
>
>        Zed A. Shaw announced the first release of a revision control tool
>        he's been working on. FastCST allows you to create full changesets
>        between two directories and apply them.
>
>      * GeoIP.rb
>
>        Clifford Heath translated some of the GeoIP C library into
> Ruby. GeoIP
>        is "Geographic database by IP address" and tells you which
> country the
>        user of an IP address is probably in.
>
>      * Rubilicious 0.1.4
>
>        Paul Duncan improved Rubilicious, a Ruby interface to the social
>        bookmarking site del.icio.us. #delete and #update are now
> supported,
>        and #all is much more efficient.
>
>      * Imlib2-Ruby 0.5.0
>
>        Paul Duncan also released his latest bindings to the Imlib2 image
>        processing library. Packaging and documentation were
> improved and an
>        issue that came up when using Imlib2-Ruby with Rails was resolved.
>
>      * Amrita2-1.9.3
>
>        Taku Nakajima issued forth a new version of Amrita2, an XHTML/XML
>        templating library. Support for rich client-side
> Javascript interfaces
>        has been added - Amrita2 now generates both Ruby and
> Javascript code
>        from the template.
>
>      * Irb enhancements
>
>        Cs. Henk made some enhancements to irb, including bash-style
>        multi-line editing and context-sensitive history completion. These
>        features were met with great enthusiasm.
>
>      * priority queue using RBTree
>
>        Joel VanderWerf "patched" together a PriorityQueue implementation
>        using Queue and RBTree (a Ruby red-black tree
> implementation). He also
>        thought that RBTree should be part of the standard Ruby
> distribution,
>        and a couple of people concurred.
>
>      * TkRTTimer class
>
>        This is not exactly a "new release", since Ruby/Tk is part of the
>        standard distribution, however: Hidetoshi NAGAI announced
> the addition
>        of the TkRTTimer class to Ruby/Tk. It can be used in place
> of TkTimer
>        and provides something that is closer to a realtime timer.
>
>      * new eric3 snapshot
>
>        Detlev Offenbach announced a new snapshot of eric3, an IDE that
>        supports Ruby. A Ruby debugger was added.
>
>      * Kwartz-ruby 2.0.0-beta3 - a template system for Ruby, PHP, and Java
>
>        kwatch enhanced his multi-language templating system. It
> now includes
>        include support.
>
>      * Nitro + Og 0.12.0
>
>        George Moschovitis delivered "A careful blend of new features and
>        subtle improvements to the existing infrastructure." Nitro is a web
>        application framework, while Og is an object-relational mapper.
>
>        Nitro now allows action meta-data. This is used for
> example to provide
>        routing (rewrite) rules. The templating engine can also now be used
>        standalone from the rest of the system.
>
>        A new Og feature is automatic generation of finders for all
>        properties.
>
>      * Rails 0.10.1: FCGI stability, WS generator, tons of fixes
>
>        David Heinemeier Hansson announced the latest version of
> the Rails web
>        application framework. "Action Web Service has seen the most
>        interesting improvements feature-wise with a new generator
> and tie-ins
>        with the testing setup." XML-RPC support has been improved.
>
> --
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