Ruby Weekly News 19th - 25th February 2007

Links are at http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070225.html.

Ruby Weekly News 19th - 25th February 2007
==========================================

   Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
   mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to you
   by Tim Sutherland (email [e-mail]).

   [Whew, September 2006 - February 2007 sure was a long week ;-) ]

Articles and Announcements
==========================

     * Registration Now Open For Gotham Ruby Conference 
     --------------------------------------------------

       Gregory Brown announced that registration has opened for GoRuCo, "a
       one-day, single-track event in New York City dedicated to everything
       Ruby" on April 21st, 2007. Tickets cost US$100.

       He also reminded us that that there isn't much time left to submit
       presentation proposals.

     * last call for the MountainWest Ruby Conf 
     ------------------------------------------

       The 2007 MountainWest RubyConf is coming up on March 16th and 17th. It
       will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has "a great line up of
       speakers, including the JRuby team, Ara T Howard, and a keynote by
       Chad Fowler", writes Pat Eyler.

       Microsoft are supplying an Xbox 360 bundle as a door prize, and a
       "huge pile of books" will also be given away.

     * Ruby blogging contest 
     -----------------------

       Pat Eyler warns that time is running out to submit blog entries on
       "How has Ruby stretched or blown your mind" for the January On
       Ruby/Apress blogging contest.

       "The winner gets three Apress books of his or her choice."

User Group News
===============

     * nyc.rb does video 
     -------------------

       "Last Tuesday was the third anniversary of nyc.rb and the first with
       video", reports Trotter Cashion.

       Congratulations on the milestone!

Threads
=======

  OpenSSL, SOAP4R
  ----------------

   Ze Maria wondered how to use digital certificates with
   SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.

   Mike Wernsing posted the details, showing the useful options to set, e.g.
   "protocol.http.ssl_config.client_cert".

   Emil Marceta noted an extra step that must be done to validate the peer
   certificate, rather than just checking that it's signed by the Certificate
   Authority (CA).

  Ruby and R?
  -----------

   This thread discussed integrating Ruby with R, a programming language
   designed for statistical computing.

   Ara. T. Howard posted a link to the RubyWithRLang page on the SciRuby
   wiki. This page documents usage of the RSRuby library, which embeds R
   within Ruby, "allowing R methods to be called and data passed between the
   Ruby script and the R interpreter".

  Adopt-a-newbie? Based on actual experience.
  -------------------------------------------

   SonOfLilit described his experiences with a Ruby nuby who felt more
   comfortable sending him questions directly, rather than posting to the
   whole list.

   > All of this has brought me to think of an Adopt-a-newbie model. Somehow,
   > every newbie that wants would get an email address of a volunteer from
   > ruby-talk, with whom he can correspond personally and who will answer
   > his basic questions and serve to also encourage him to keep learning.

   What do others think?

   Samantha (the programmer who prompted SonOfLilit's idea) was the first to
   reply:

   > As a newbie, I think that would be awesome. I've emailed off-list with
   > two people so far, and the help has been tremendous. I think that it's
   > an awesome idea. Personally, I don't like putting stuff out there and
   > possibly sounding like a moron ;) so, I get shy asking specific
   > questions when I know that so many people are out there on the list.
   > It's a bit intimidating.

   Logan Capaldo said it sounded interesting, but success would depend on the
   adoptee, as well as the adopter. "I would not want to end up being the
   fount of knowledge and turn into a crutch for the adopted person."

   Han Dao surmised "I guess mentors have the responsibility of being patient
   and newbies have the responsibility of being eager to learn."

   "I understand that some newbies are afraid on posting even on the
   friendliest ML of the world ruby-talk IMHO," said Robert Dober, so he
   volunteered to post other people's "stupid questions" to the list as a
   proxy, so no-one knows who the question was from.

   Several people suggested shy newbies could post on the mailing list of
   their local Ruby user group, if they're uncomfortable posting to a larger
   audience.

  ruby equivalent for property or config.xml ?
  --------------------------------------------

   Gilbert Rebhan asked what the normal way is of storing configuration data
   in Ruby programs.

   Farrel Lifson said YAML files are a good way to go, and Alex Young noted
   that Ruby source files can be a nice way of representing configuration
   values.

 module Config
    DATABASE = {:adapter => 'foo' ...}
    FROBNICATOR = :fozzbangle
    LOCATION = :coozbain
 end

  Screen-scraping
  ---------------

   David Vallner wants to automate interaction with a bunch of "laborious and
   unhelpful" web applications at his work.

   What's the best way to do this?

   "My criteria are being able to handle the fact most of these apps are
   clickfests of ASP / ASP.NET provenience, and the HTML source code could
   probably scare small children, so I'd like to have the toolkit handle most
   of the textmunging."

   Xavier Noria recommended Watir (usually used for testing web applications)
   because "it is the easy and more robust way to do screen-scrapping,
   because it delegates all the parsing, JavaScript, etc. to a real browser".

   Peter Szinek put forward a new library he's written called "scRUBYt",
   which combines Mechanize and Hpricot.

  Lightweight way to create jpeg files?
  -------------------------------------

   Mike Nelson wondered if there's an easy, "lightweight" way to create JPEG
   files from Ruby, without using RMagick (which "seems like it's loaded with
   dependences").

   A.S. Bradbury said that PNG sounded like a better image format for his
   situation, and suggested using the pure-Ruby png library ("gem install
   png"), written by the seattle.rb user group.

New Releases
============

  One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.5-24 released
  ------------------------------------------

   Curt Hibbs released the latested One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows,
   upgrading the SciTE editor to version 1.72.

  Bash completion for the gem command
  -----------------------------------

   Michael Schuerig created a file that enables command-completion for "gem"
   in the bash shell.

  Facets 1.8
  ----------

   A new major version of Facets - "a large collection of core extension
   methods and module additions for the Ruby programming language" - was
   released.

   Trans: "As always thanks to everyone who has contributed, both directly
   and indirectly."

  More releases
  -------------

   See the rubyforge news page for more release announcements.

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