T
Tim Sutherland
http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060709.html
Use the link above for a nicer version of this newsletter that's formatted
for the web, including links to threads and other sites. You can also
subscribe to a newsletter-only mailing list, or to RSS/Atom feeds.
Ruby Weekly News 3rd - 9th July 2006
====================================
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.
A short newsletter this week, which is unfortunate because there were so
many great threads :-(
[ Contribute to the next newsletter ]
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* 19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know
----------------------------------------------
A fascinating article by Peter Cooper, posted to his most excellent
blog rubyinside.com. It hit the front-page of Digg (although there
were only a few comments). Even if you're not a Rails user, there is
plenty in the article that applies to Ruby in general, or you can just
check out one of the other thirteen articles he wrote last week.
* ICFP Programming Contest: Interest in Ruby team?
--------------------------------------------------
The ICFP Programming Contest is on July 21-24, and registration is
open, reports Maurice Codik. This is the International Conference on
Functional Programming's annual programming contest, and had 161 teams
last year.
Maurice would like to know of people that are interested in working in
a Ruby team.
* RailsConf Europe, Sept. 14-15: don't put it off!
--------------------------------------------------
David A. Black reminded all about RailsConf Europe on September 14-15,
2006, in London. It has a very respectable list of speakers already.
Registrations and presentations proposals are open.
"RailsConf Europe is brought to you by Ruby Central, Inc. (the
RailsConf people), and Skills Matter, Ltd., our London-based
conference partners."
* Gateway Restored
------------------
Thanks to James Edward Gray II's efforts, we once again have a gateway
between the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, after
more than a month of downtime.
He thanked Dave Thomas (wrote the original gateway code and used to
maintain the gateway), Dennis Oelkers ("who was keeper of the gateway
for so long"), Fred Senault (donated the newsgroup account for the new
gateway), HighGroove Studios (hosting the new gateway script) and
their employee Charles Brian Quinn.
"Without all of the above, there would be no gateway.
My thanks to you all!"
Threads
=======
Retired Ruby Mascott?
---------------------
Pawel Szymczykowski vaguely recalled Ruby having an "anime-girl type"
mascot a few years ago, and indeed found a page of pictures of Ruby-chan,
drawn by Yoshida Masato.
Wilson Bilkovich said it was always unofficial, and a couple of posters
pointed out an old thread discussing Ruby mascots where many people
thought this was an unsuitable choice.
David A. Black:
Pawel: "So the only official Ruby mascott is the gem? Isn't that flying in
the face of the tradition of having a cute, user friendly mascott that can
be found at your local zoo?"
For example, the Perl camel or Python snake [img].
Brad Tilley, not immediately realising the image links were a camel trying
to swallow some poor person's head, and a scary razor-toothed snake, said:
[QUOTE]
You're kidding right? I love Python as much as I love Ruby, but their
snake mascot is not a good mascot (IMO). It's cold-blooded. It eats
small furry cute mammals. It's slimly, it smells, etc. Look at the
problems Pyhton has with naming projects. Eggs... what kind of name is
that? A lot of people think eggs are gross. And snake eggs are even more
gross!
Ruby's gem is much better (IMO). A Ruby is something of value. If I
found a ruby, I would pick it up, dust it of and put it in my pocket.
Rubys are something to be held, admired and passed onto or sold to
others. If I came across a snake, I'd either run from it or kill it
somehow... isn't it human nature to fear snakes? Why have a mascot so
naturally repulsive to 90% of humankind?[/QUOTE]
(Poor snakes, they get such a bad rap. They're actually soft and dry,
not slimy. I'd also expect Ruby users to be fans of eggs, since they go
so well with chunky bacon.)
Brian Mitchell said that the real unofficial community mascots must be the
chunky-bacon foxes from Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Don't forget
"Chip, the Talking Code Block", added Pawel.
text to speech?
---------------
Arun, who teaches blind people in New Delhi to program, asked how to do
text-to-speech in Ruby.
"Now, of course, for a blind person, audio is as important as the screen
is for the sighted, and even to do your first "Hello World" program, you
need text to speech to be working."
Dale Martenson said that on Windows you can use the SAPI interface, which
is wrapped through the Win32 Util library, and gave a simple example of
its use.
John Gabriele thought that Ruby-GNOME supports GNOME's accessibility
interface, so that might be an option for *nix users. Axel suggested the
MBROLA multi-lingual text-synthesis library.
Jamal Mazrui announced that he has written a text editor called TextPal
(in Ruby using wxWidgets) that is "fully keyboard accessible and offers
almost every feature I've found in a text editor (I compared many), and
does so in a manner intended to maximize usability by blind persons." It
is free and open-source.
instance_exec
-------------
Implementations of instance_exec for Ruby 1.8 were discussed. (This, a
feature of Ruby 1.9, is a version of instance_eval that takes arguments.
It can be useful when evaluating a block that was passed from somewhere
else, preventing us from using lexical scoping to pass in an argument.)
This topic was previously covered in February.
New Releases
============
Ruby In Steel 0.7 available - Now On Rails
------------------------------------------
Huw Collingbourn announced that the Steel IDE (a Ruby IDE that is built on
Visual Studio 2005) now has Rails integration.
One-Click Ruby Installer 184-19 Final is available!
---------------------------------------------------
Curt Hibbs said that the final version of the 1.8.4 release of the
One-Click Ruby Installed for Windows is out. Great news for Windows users!
Others
------
There were many new releases not covered in this newsletter, including
Mongrel 0.3.13.3, JRuby 0.9.0, RubySlim, MarkaBoo 0.7.3, RFuzz 0.4,
Equipment (for Camping) v0.1.0, ruby-debug 0.1, Hpricot 0.1 and 0.2, Ruby
Reports 0.4.13, and Facets 1.4.
Use the link above for a nicer version of this newsletter that's formatted
for the web, including links to threads and other sites. You can also
subscribe to a newsletter-only mailing list, or to RSS/Atom feeds.
Ruby Weekly News 3rd - 9th July 2006
====================================
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.
A short newsletter this week, which is unfortunate because there were so
many great threads :-(
[ Contribute to the next newsletter ]
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* 19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know
----------------------------------------------
A fascinating article by Peter Cooper, posted to his most excellent
blog rubyinside.com. It hit the front-page of Digg (although there
were only a few comments). Even if you're not a Rails user, there is
plenty in the article that applies to Ruby in general, or you can just
check out one of the other thirteen articles he wrote last week.
* ICFP Programming Contest: Interest in Ruby team?
--------------------------------------------------
The ICFP Programming Contest is on July 21-24, and registration is
open, reports Maurice Codik. This is the International Conference on
Functional Programming's annual programming contest, and had 161 teams
last year.
Maurice would like to know of people that are interested in working in
a Ruby team.
* RailsConf Europe, Sept. 14-15: don't put it off!
--------------------------------------------------
David A. Black reminded all about RailsConf Europe on September 14-15,
2006, in London. It has a very respectable list of speakers already.
Registrations and presentations proposals are open.
"RailsConf Europe is brought to you by Ruby Central, Inc. (the
RailsConf people), and Skills Matter, Ltd., our London-based
conference partners."
* Gateway Restored
------------------
Thanks to James Edward Gray II's efforts, we once again have a gateway
between the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, after
more than a month of downtime.
He thanked Dave Thomas (wrote the original gateway code and used to
maintain the gateway), Dennis Oelkers ("who was keeper of the gateway
for so long"), Fred Senault (donated the newsgroup account for the new
gateway), HighGroove Studios (hosting the new gateway script) and
their employee Charles Brian Quinn.
"Without all of the above, there would be no gateway.
My thanks to you all!"
Threads
=======
Retired Ruby Mascott?
---------------------
Pawel Szymczykowski vaguely recalled Ruby having an "anime-girl type"
mascot a few years ago, and indeed found a page of pictures of Ruby-chan,
drawn by Yoshida Masato.
Wilson Bilkovich said it was always unofficial, and a couple of posters
pointed out an old thread discussing Ruby mascots where many people
thought this was an unsuitable choice.
David A. Black:
Pawel: "So the only official Ruby mascott is the gem? Isn't that flying in
the face of the tradition of having a cute, user friendly mascott that can
be found at your local zoo?"
For example, the Perl camel or Python snake [img].
Brad Tilley, not immediately realising the image links were a camel trying
to swallow some poor person's head, and a scary razor-toothed snake, said:
[QUOTE]
You're kidding right? I love Python as much as I love Ruby, but their
snake mascot is not a good mascot (IMO). It's cold-blooded. It eats
small furry cute mammals. It's slimly, it smells, etc. Look at the
problems Pyhton has with naming projects. Eggs... what kind of name is
that? A lot of people think eggs are gross. And snake eggs are even more
gross!
Ruby's gem is much better (IMO). A Ruby is something of value. If I
found a ruby, I would pick it up, dust it of and put it in my pocket.
Rubys are something to be held, admired and passed onto or sold to
others. If I came across a snake, I'd either run from it or kill it
somehow... isn't it human nature to fear snakes? Why have a mascot so
naturally repulsive to 90% of humankind?[/QUOTE]
(Poor snakes, they get such a bad rap. They're actually soft and dry,
not slimy. I'd also expect Ruby users to be fans of eggs, since they go
so well with chunky bacon.)
Brian Mitchell said that the real unofficial community mascots must be the
chunky-bacon foxes from Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Don't forget
"Chip, the Talking Code Block", added Pawel.
text to speech?
---------------
Arun, who teaches blind people in New Delhi to program, asked how to do
text-to-speech in Ruby.
"Now, of course, for a blind person, audio is as important as the screen
is for the sighted, and even to do your first "Hello World" program, you
need text to speech to be working."
Dale Martenson said that on Windows you can use the SAPI interface, which
is wrapped through the Win32 Util library, and gave a simple example of
its use.
John Gabriele thought that Ruby-GNOME supports GNOME's accessibility
interface, so that might be an option for *nix users. Axel suggested the
MBROLA multi-lingual text-synthesis library.
Jamal Mazrui announced that he has written a text editor called TextPal
(in Ruby using wxWidgets) that is "fully keyboard accessible and offers
almost every feature I've found in a text editor (I compared many), and
does so in a manner intended to maximize usability by blind persons." It
is free and open-source.
instance_exec
-------------
Implementations of instance_exec for Ruby 1.8 were discussed. (This, a
feature of Ruby 1.9, is a version of instance_eval that takes arguments.
It can be useful when evaluating a block that was passed from somewhere
else, preventing us from using lexical scoping to pass in an argument.)
This topic was previously covered in February.
New Releases
============
Ruby In Steel 0.7 available - Now On Rails
------------------------------------------
Huw Collingbourn announced that the Steel IDE (a Ruby IDE that is built on
Visual Studio 2005) now has Rails integration.
One-Click Ruby Installer 184-19 Final is available!
---------------------------------------------------
Curt Hibbs said that the final version of the 1.8.4 release of the
One-Click Ruby Installed for Windows is out. Great news for Windows users!
Others
------
There were many new releases not covered in this newsletter, including
Mongrel 0.3.13.3, JRuby 0.9.0, RubySlim, MarkaBoo 0.7.3, RFuzz 0.4,
Equipment (for Camping) v0.1.0, ruby-debug 0.1, Hpricot 0.1 and 0.2, Ruby
Reports 0.4.13, and Facets 1.4.