Sep

9

A status update

Filed Under General, Ruby Benchmark Suite, This Week in Ruby | 3 Comments

More than a month has passed since my last update. Did you miss me? I sure missed you, I truly love you guys. Jokes aside, it was rather uncharacteristic for this blog to go so long without a post, so I feel that a status update is in order before my feed ends up in the Dinosaur reports of your RSS reader. And with humanity facing the imminent threat of the Large Hadron Collider, I didn’t want to be sucked into a black hole without saying a few last words.

At the beginning of August I moved from Markham to Toronto (technically North York). My wife and I were prepared for this move, so it went well. That said, there were negative aspects beyond our control.

The Satellite Dish installer had a few interesting discussions with our property management, and while they eventually agreed to a compromise that would preserve the holiness and virginity of my balcony, they also caused me to miss the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. I really wanted to see the fake singing by the Chinese kid and the computer generated fireworks, but alas nothing. I consoled myself by eating dumplings a la Kung Fu Panda, minus the Kung Fu part.

Perhaps more devastatingly my ISP took its sweet time to activate my DSL service. And when they did, things worked on an off for all of August. When my ISP had problems connecting me to the tubes, I tried what any respectable geek would do. Despite my impression of the Statue of Liberty, standing near the window with my laptop in hand, my attempts to freeload on Wi-Fi were futile.

If these disruptive happenings weren’t enough, I’ve been very busy with work and the book I’m writing (Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers). I’ve written 7 chapters so far and just passed the 300 page mark. The schedule is tight, and there is so much that I want to include, so I have to dedicate almost all of my spare time to the book. On the bright side, I think I’m going to give readers their money’s worth.

The direct consequence of my focus on the book is that This Week in Ruby and This Week in Rails have been interrupted. A few of you enquired about them, bringing to my attention how much you appreciated them. Unfortunately, for the next two months I won’t have time to read all the daily feeds I normally follow and come up with weekly (or bi-weekly) reports of what’s cool and worth mentioning from. My friend Gregg Pollack may take over for the Rails post that gets published on the official blog. Unless someone sends me a complimentary English Bulldog puppy, in which case I promise to do both reports weekly and I’ll even put your picture with a halo over your head on the sidebar of the blog.

Another victim of overcommitment is the (vapor)shootout. Right now I’m at full capacity and need the laptop for both work and the book, so that will have to wait. If you want to lend a hand with the project, feel free to jump right in though.

Finally, while I may not have time for the weekly reports or the shootout right now, I can still spare some time to write posts more frequently. And there is no reason not to indulge in such a rewarding activity. So expect more technical articles, especially now that there are many interesting things to talk about (Google Chrome, Django 1.0, Rails 2.2, etcetera).

Jul

26

This Week in Ruby (July 26, 2008)

Filed Under .NET, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, This Week in Ruby | 3 Comments

This is the 13th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails.

JRuby 1.1.3 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and major speed and memory improvements.
Satish Talim of RubyLearning has announced a new course dedicated to the subject, and also interviewed Charles Nutter for the occasion, who provided some suggestions for RubyLearning participants. This week, Satish also interviewed Guy Naor, the CTO of Morph Labs, a prominent cloud computing Rails hosting company.

On the .NET side, things are moving just as quickly. Some great news emerged from OSCON 2008 regarding IronRuby, including the first binary release and the setting up of a project called ironruby-contrib on GitHub. This already includes the Rails plugin for Silverlight. Meanwhile, Peter Cooper published a great set of IronRuby tutorials to bring C# developers into the Ruby fold.

In the alternative framework world, Mack Framework 0.6 was released, which includes DataMapper 0.9.2 and RSpec support, transactional tests, internationalization and other improvements. The roadmap to Merb 1.0 was also posted on the official blog.

I had previously mentioned a few well known issues with Ruby and XML. Well, it appears that there is hope regarding a libxml-ruby resurrection after all. RedCloth 4 was also released this week.

Two interesting articles were: Don’t forget about RubyForge, which covers the issue of mass migration towards GitHub, and Modules underuse by Jay Fields.

Toronto’s sponsor-less conference RubyFringe is over and according to its participants it was fantastic. I truly regret not being able to participate in it. For those who were there, feel free to share your opinions in the comment section.

One last thing before you go; I must give my “caught-red-handed Ruby Community award” this week to Thiyagarajan Veluchamy. This dude thought it was a good idea to lift the entire content of one of my most popular articles from more than a year ago, even hotlinking the image, and then attributing the post to himself. Did he really think that no one would notice? Its link became popular on Del.icio.us for the Rails tag, and I got all sorts of emails from people who recognized my old (and now somewhat outdated) article. After a brief investigation, it turns out that Thiyagarajan has a habit of stealing content. Other articles appear to be copied verbatim from various blogs. Thiyagarajan, a word of advice, gathering inspiration from a certain post is fine, copying it is not. Especially if you try to pull it off by copying from someone who reports on the most interesting and popular posts in the community. That’s just a really dumb move.

To keep the good times rolling, the fourth edition of This Week in Rails is available on the official Rails blog.

Jul

11

This Week in Ruby (July 11, 2008)

Filed Under Ruby, Ruby on Rails, This Week in Ruby | Leave a Comment

This is the 12th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails.

I’d like to start this edition by apologizing to my readers for the delay in publishing this edition. Things got pretty hectic last week.

As far as I know, there are no updates regarding Ruby’s vulnerabilities, but if you’re aware of any, feel free to state so in the comment section. Meanwhile, BreakingPoint Systems published a couple of extra problems that were discovered while analyzing those pesky security issues. You can read about them here.

As you may have inferred, I’m quite interested in the optimization of Ruby code. Ilya Grigorik wrote 6 nice tips for optimizing Ruby MRI, which may come handy to you.

A new chapter was added to The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne. Read more about it and download it here.

The Ruby community is big on TDD and BDD and there is no doubt that testing is fundamental for good quality software. RailSpike opens a can of worms with its thought-provoking article, Testing is overrated. Whether you agree or not with its findings, it is definitely worth a read.

Ethan Vizitei has had a couple of compelling entries lately. The first is about handling Gmail’s imap from Ruby and the second deals with refactoring Ruby code.

Sinatra is an ultralight Web framework, while Datamapper is considered by many to be a valid substitute for Active Record. Nick Plante shows us how to use them together to create a Pastie clone. If you are into Datamapper or would like to just get a feel for it, consider reading over this cheatsheet as well.

In conclusion, InfoQ published a Metaprogramming roundup and the second part of their RubyKaigi 2008 coverage. The most interesting bit is about the exciting prospective of standardizing Ruby. That would be a leap forward for the language and our community.

To keep the good times rolling, the third edition of This Week in Rails is available on the official Rails blog.

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