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Slashdot

• 

  Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution From Nuclear Fuel Rods

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 9:00pm MST by timothy

  
  

  New submitter Required Snark writes "UC Davis researchers have found a mechanism where the sodium in sea water can cause uranium nano-particles to be released from nuclear reactor fuel rods. Normally the uranium oxide compounds composing the rods are very resistant to leaching into water. This could have serious consequences for the Fukushima disaster, since sea water was used for emergency cooling."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  How Allan Scherr Hacked Around the First Computer Password

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 7:11pm MST by timothy

  
  

  New submitter MikeatWired writes "If you're like most people, you're annoyed by passwords. So who's to blame? Who invented the computer password? They probably arrived at MIT in the mid-1960s, when researchers built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn't, writes Bob McMillan. Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early '60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft. In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn't nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he'd designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system. 'There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,' he remembered in a pamphlet (PDF) written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. 'Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.' To spread the guilt around, Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them — J.C.R. Licklieder — promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab's director Robert Fano, and leaving 'taunting messages' behind."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 6:35pm MST by Peter Cooper

  It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-)

  Headlines

  Rails 3.2 Released
  DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8.

  Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd Edition (Updated for Rails 3.2)
  Michael Hartl's "Rails Tutorial" site has been incredibly popular over the last year and he's now finishing up a 2nd edition that's fully updated to Rails 3.2 standards. The first 5 chapters are already good to go and can be read no-cost, as always, at railstutorial.org.

  Articles and Tutorials

  Backing Up with Backup: A Neat DSL for Backup Operations
  Pat Allan loves Michael van Rooijen's 'backup' gem so much that he wants to to convince you to use it, by showing you two examples of why he finds it so useful. It does seem pretty handy..

  Why Every Ruby Developer Should Learn Smalltalk
  Smalltalk was the first purely object oriented language (though Simula included objects before it) and it heavily inspired Ruby's initial development. Victor Savkin thinks that Rubyists could learn a lot from playing with Smalltalk.

  The Right Way to Code DCI in Ruby
  DCI (Data, Context and Interaction) is an interesting object oriented pattern that's been discussed in the Ruby community lately, but Mike Pack thinks most articles oversimplify its use. In this post, he digs into the idea.

  The 'Rails and Spine.JS' Series
  Ken Collins is working on a series of posts about using the Spine.js JavaScript MVC framework alongside a Rails app. This is the first of three posts so far.

  systemd Socket Activation and Ruby
  systemd is a system and service manager for Linux (and replacement for the System V init daemon). Here, Marcin Kulik looks at how a socket-based Ruby server can take advantage of systemd's socket activation feature.

  RVM Stable (and More)
  Michal Papis of Engine Yard looks at the 'stable' release of RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and how to install and use it. Some handy RVM tips here.

  Modularized Association Methods in Rails 3.2

  Testing Rails Engines With RSpec

  Factory Girl 2.5 Gets Custom Constructors

  Media

  RailsCasts: Upgrading to Rails 3.2
  In the latest RailsCasts episode, Ryan Bates looks at the newly released Rails 3.2 and shows off some of its new features. Short and sweet in just 9 minutes.

  Web Programming and Updating Frameworks with Yehuda Katz
  The Ruby Rogues sit down with Yehuda Katz to discuss Web frameworks, JavaScript, Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Rack, and more. And just why is to_json a problem? If you have a spare hour, find out :-)

  Libraries and code

  SitemapGenerator: Generate XML Sitemaps from Ruby
  Originally a Google idea, XML sitemaps are now used by several search engines and SitemapGenerator will generate Sitemap 0.9 compliant sitemaps for you from Ruby. Includes Rails integration too but is otherwise framework agnostic.

  tconsole: A MiniTest Testing Console for Rails
  tconsole is a testing console for Rails based around MiniTest (also supporting Test::Unit). It allows you to issue commands concerning what tests to run, and see their test output.

  Lisp in 32 Lines of Ruby
  Implementing a small Lisp interpreter is the super geeky equivalent of 'hello world' and Michael Fogus (author of The Joy of Clojure) deftly pulls it off in 32 lines of Ruby here.

  Tork: Continuous Testing using Forked Processes

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Rubyist (or Pythonista) Required at RackSpace [San Antonio, Texas]
  Hosting company Rackspace is looking for a developer with Ruby or Python experience (and maybe even Erlang!) to work in its foundation software development team. If Git, Capistrano, MongoDB, and Rails are all interesting to you, check it out.

  Ruby Framework Engineer Job at Zendesk [San Francisco]

  Want your job featured in Ruby Weekly? Learn more here.

  

Slashdot

• 

  January 28 is Data Privacy Day

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 6:08pm MST by timothy

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "A bit early, but just a reminder that January 28 is international Data Privacy Day in the U.S., Canada, and many European countries. Various events are being held around the globe: the head of the FTC opened a weekend forum on the topic by calling out Facebook and Google, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner is holding a symposium on 'Surveillance by Design', and of course Google recently announced they'll be tracking you more thoroughly in the future."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Mars-Bound Probe Serves As Radiation Guinea Pig

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 5:19pm MST by timothy

  
  

  sighted writes "This week's huge solar storm will benefit future astronauts, thanks to the rover Curiosity, now on its way to Mars. The rover is equipped with an instrument that measures the radiation exposure that could affect a human astronaut en route to the Red Planet. Scientists are just starting to pore over the data from the blast of particles. Don't worry about the poor robotic geologist, though: 'No harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event,' says NASA."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  USPTO Declares Invalid Third of Three Critical Rambus Patents

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 4:55pm MST by timothy

  
  

  slew writes "This is a followup to this earlier story about 2 of 3 of Rambus's 'critical' patents being invalidated. Apparently now it's a hat-trick." There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing." The linked article offers a brief but decent summary of the way Rambus has profited over the years from these now-invalidated patents.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  White House Chief Technology Officer Steps Down

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 4:35pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  New submitter Krazy Kanuck writes "The White House is running a story on their OSTP blog that Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra is stepping down after being appointed to the post by President Obama in 2009. There is some mention of him returning to his home state of Virginia, and the Washington Post suggests a possible bid for lieutenant governor."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  DARPA Funding a $50 Drone-Droppable Spy Computer

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 3:56pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Shmoocon security conference, researcher Brendan O'Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the disassembled hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5"-by-4"-by-1" spy computer. With a contract from DARPA, O'Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to be spy nodes, ready to be dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, (one model impersonates a carbon monoxide detector) thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wi-Fi network. O'Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each, so sacrificing one for a single use is affordable."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  North Star May Be Wasting Away

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 3:34pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  sciencehabit writes "The North Star, a celestial beacon to navigators for centuries, may be slowly shrinking, according to a new analysis of more than 160 years of observations. The data suggest that the familiar fixture in the northern sky is shedding an Earth's mass worth of gas each year."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Flaw In YouTube Takedown Process Exposed

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 3:14pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  New submitter BraveThumb writes "One independent rap group found it impossible to post their song on YouTube. When they tried to put up their video, they were informed that the copyright belonged to Universal Music, even though the rap group wasn't signed to any label. Another group working with Universal had used the music in a video of their own, which then accidentally leaked online. YouTube's filtering software then blocked the original. The Hollywood Reporter shares what happened and concludes by saying, 'For an industry that's pursuing copyright reform, the portrayal of a copyright regime that works against young artists can't be a good thing.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  When Viruses Infect Worms

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 2:33pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "Bitdefender reports that there exist viruses which, when they encounter other viruses, will merge and combine effects so that they create a new virus. 'A virus infects executable files; and a worm is an executable file. If the virus reaches a PC already compromised by a worm, the virus will infect the exe files on that PC — including the worm. When the worm spreads, it will carry the virus with it. Although this happens unintentionally, the combined features from both pieces of malware will inflict a lot more damage than the creators of either piece of malware intended. While most file infectors have inbuilt spreading mechanisms, just like Trojans and worms (spreading routines for RDP, USB, P2P, chat applications, or social networks), some cannot replicate or spread between computers. And it seems a great idea to “outsource” the transportation mechanism to a different piece of malware (i.e. by piggybacking a worm).'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is At Stake & What You Can Do

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 1:51pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere, but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). Michael Geist has a full rundown on what is at stake and what you can do, wherever you live."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Bill Gates Gives $750M To AIDS Fund

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 1:29pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  redletterdave writes "Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates pledged $750 million to the troubled global AIDS fund on Thursday and urged governments to continue their support to save lives. Since the fund was launched 10 years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $1.4 billion to the charity, having already contributed $650 million prior to the latest donation. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria accounts for around a quarter of international financing to fight HIV and AIDS, as well as the majority of funds to fight TB and malaria."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  FBI Building App To Scrape Social Media

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 1:08pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Russian Rocket Fleet Grounded Again

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 12:24pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Velcroman1 writes "Failed pressure chamber tests have forced Russia to postpone two manned launches to the International Space Station — echoing a 2011 situation that left the country's space transport vehicles grounded and led to speculation that scientists may be forced to abandon the orbiting space base. Six astronauts are currently aboard the ISS including two Americans: Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit. 'There is plenty of margin for the current space station crew to stay onboard longer, if necessary, and plenty of margin in our manifest for upcoming launches,' a NASA spokeswoman said. But Soyuz issues are scary nonetheless. 'This re-entry capsule now cannot be used for manned spaceflight,' an unnamed source told Interfax."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Mars Rover Opportunity Turns 8

  Posted: January 27th, 2012, 12:01pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  New submitter el borak writes "Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. What may be the greatest car the U.S. has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125m km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It was on January 25, 2004 that the rover Opportunity bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  This Week in Ruby: Nominate Your Ruby Heroes, Include/Extend, Ruby on Netbeans, Jekyll-Bootstrap, and more

  Posted: January 20th, 2012, 9:32am MST by Peter Cooper

  Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter.

  Headlines

  Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards
  The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year.

  Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award
  Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Congrats to the Heroku team.

  Articles and Tutorials

  Hashes and Encapsulation
  Jon Leighton demonstrates why accessing hash elements in a "obj.hashthings['foo']" style isn't the way to go and how to act in a way that respects encapsulation, a tenet of object orientation.

  Explaining Ruby's Include and Extend
  Aaron Lasseigne gives a simple introduction to the ideas behind the 'include' and 'extend' methods.

  Why Sinatra's Halt is Awesome
  Myron Marston draws attention to Sinatra's 'halt' method which you can use to immediate stop a request within a filter or route, and explains why he likes it for handling exceptions in Sinatra apps.

  Replace Your Test Helpers with a Reusable API
  Eric Hodel makes an interesting argument that instead of leaning on test helper files all of the time, perhaps there are common bits of functionality you can bake into your library or app's own APIs.

  assert_nothing_tested..
  Ryan Davis demonstrates why his popular minitest testing library doesn't have an assert_nothing_raised assertion by picking on a relatively useless test in Rails.

  A Workaround for Ruby Support on Netbeans 7.1
  Back in February 2011, Netbeans (a popular IDE) dropped its official support for Ruby but the JRuby team offered to pick up the slack. Thomas Enebo has been working on it and has some code to make Ruby support work on Netbeans 7.1 here.

  Faster TDD Feedback With tmux, tslime.vim, and turbux.vim

  Rails or Sinatra: The Best of Both Worlds?
  Over at RubySource, Darren Jones rounds up the opinions and assessments of several well known Rubyists when it comes to choosing Sinatra or Rails for a project. An interesting high level collection of ideas.

  How to do Fuzzy Matching in Ruby with fuzzy_match

  Media

  The Ruby Rogues on Versioning and Releases
  The world's favorite Ruby podcast, Ruby Rogues, is back with an episode all about the versioning of code, Ruby libraries, gems, and more. This time out, James Edward Gray II takes the helm.

  Private Pub (RailsCasts)
  Private Pub is a gem for use with Rails to publish and subscribe to real-time messages through Faye. You get real-time updates through an open socket without tying up a Rails process. Ryan Bates shows you how to use it in a mere 7 minutes.

  Libraries and code

  ROFLBALT: A Terminal-based ASCII Side Scroller Game
  At RailsCamp X, Paul Annesley and Dennis Hotson built this nifty little side scrolling game which works straight from your terminal (256 color support needed though). Surprisingly good for a quick effort.

  TwoStroke: A JavaScript Implementation Written in Ruby
  Charlie Somerville presents an interesting working (but incomplete) JavaScript implementation, written entirely in Ruby. One of those projects that may seem useful somewhere down the line but for now is just a neat idea.

  Guard::RSpectacle: An RSpec Plugin for Guard
  Guard::RSpectacle automatically tests your application with RSpec when files are modified. This sounds like guard-rspec on the surface, but RSpectacle acts as an 'embedded' runner within a running Rails app and reloads changed files on the fly.

  Juvia: An Open Source Commenting System from Phusion
  For a while now, Hongli Lai of Phusion (the geniuses behind Passenger and REE) has been working on a Rails-based open source commenting system that you can include into your site using JavaScript.

  Jekyll-Bootstrap: A Quick Way to Start Off Your Own Jekyll-Powered Site
  Jekyll is a blog-focused static site generator, and Jekyll users often recommend cloning an existing Jekyll blog to use as a starting point. Jekyll-Bootstrap takes this idea to the next level by attempting to be the definitive Jekyll framework to clone.

  Socialization: Liking and Following for your Rails 3 Apps

  OEmbedr: Lightweight, Flexible OEmbed Consumer Library
  oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites OEmbedr makes consuming oEmbed from any source simple.

  Hobson: A Resque-based Distributed Test Runner
  Hobson distributes your test suite across N machines and aggregates the results live on a locally run webapp. I haven't tried it yet but on a trawl through the source code it seems to be for Cucumber and RSpec only.

  Cracking WPA networks with MacRuby

  Vesper: A New Sinatra-based Webapp Framework
  Yes, it's 'yet another' webapp framework but Vesper is based on top of Sinatra, already has several plugins, and features a handy 6 minute screencast on its homepage.

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Ruby Framework Engineer Job at Zendesk [San Francisco]
  The fantastic folks over at Zendesk, the help desk and support ticket app, are looking for a creative and seasoned Ruby engineer to focus on improving their code base. They want full stack engineers who can improve and refactor their frameworks and lead an open source effort by publishing some of the resulting gems.

  Ruby on Rails Developer at Unpakt [New York City]

  Want your job featured in Ruby Weekly? Learn more here.

  Last but not least..

  Owning Rails: Marc Andre Cournoyer's Online Rails Masterclass
  Marc Andre Cournoyer (of Create Your Own Programming Language fame) is running another of his highly praised 2 day, online Rails masterclasses. Marc's given me a discount code you can use to get 80 dollars off - it's 'rubyweekly'. I disclose that I make a commission on this but I won't promote trash and the testimonials speak for themselves :-)

  The Programming Language Masterclass: Another Marc-Andre Class
  Along similar lines, Marc Andre Cournoyer also runs a more general class aimed at giving you an understanding of the inner workings of programming languages and programming language implementation. 'SAVEME50' gets you a discount and it's in mid February.

  
• 

  The Last Week in Ruby: RSpec 2.8, Redcar 0.12, Torquebox 2.0 beta, articles and more

  Posted: January 16th, 2012, 4:36am MST by Peter Cooper

  Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter. While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site in future.

  Follow @RubyInside
  !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="http://www.rubyinside.com//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");

  Also, if you're interested in getting one interesting programming related quote or link each day on Twitter, check out @codewisdom.

  Follow @CodeWisdom
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  Headlines

  RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic
  RSpec 2.8 and rspec-rails 2.8.1 have been released and some users have been reporting significant performance improvements. Other tweaks include improved documentation, better tag and filtering options, random example execution, and 'rspec --init' for adding RSpec to an empty Ruby project.

  TorqueBox 2.0 Beta 2 Released
  Torquebox is a popular JBoss-powered application server for Ruby webapps that provides a smorgasbord of useful backend features. This beta of the 2.0 release boasts the latest versions of JRuby and JBoss and new support for WebSockets/STOMP.

  Redcar 0.12 Released: An Editor Built in Ruby
  Redcar is a programmers' text editor written in Ruby and this latest release has streamlined its installation and added Mac OS X Lion support.

  Articles and Tutorials

  The Status of DataMapper
  DataMapper is a popular Ruby ORM and an interesting alternative to ActiveRecord. In this post, Piotr Solnica explains what's happening with DataMapper 2.0 and how it aims to implement the Data Mapper pattern in full. The systems outlined in this post could resolve a lot of issues people have been having with ActiveRecord, it seems.

  Does My Rails App Need A Service Layer?
  Jared Carroll picks up on a common thread being discussed in the Rails world lately: service layers. He explains what 'services' are, what types of service can exist, and tries to briefly explain his opinion on their usage within the context of Rails. I'm not entirely comfortable with his conclusion but it's a good introduction nonetheless.

  An Exhaustive Explanation of Minimax: A Staple AI Algorithm
  An appealing explanation of an algorithm that can be used to 'intelligently' play Tic Tac Toe, complete with a simple Ruby implementation.

  How Airbnb Upgraded from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0

  Rails Development on Ubuntu 11.10: Setting Up a Dev Environment
  Eric Proctor wanted to refresh his setup for 2012 so sat down to install a Rails development stack from scratch on Ubuntu 11.10. He shares the process here in case you want to repeat it for yourself.

  How to Create A Local Copy of the Rails API Docs and Guides
  If you're like many Rails developers, you might frequently hit the Rails docs and guides via Google searches, but if you want access to these useful resources when offline, Aslam Najeebdeen has the answer.

  Hosting Your Own Local RubyGems Server
  Want to have your own in-house RubyGems server? It's easy and Michael Erasmus shows you how in this post.

  Ruby Float Quirks
  Clemens Helm stumbles across a rudimentary floating point representation issue, but one that can trip you up nonetheless if you're not aware of it.

  Installing RefineryCMS with Rails 3.1.3

  Capybara, Cucumber and How the Cookie Crumbles
  Steve Richert of Collective Idea wanted to punch through Capybara and be able to set cookies that would "Just Work" from anywhere in his Cucumber suite. Here, he shows you how he did it.

  DDD Aggregates in Rails with ActiveRecord

  Screencasts

  Pretty URLs with FriendlyId (RailsCasts)
  If you are tired of model ids in the URL, overriding to_param can only get you so far. The friendly_id plugin can help by making it easy to generate a URL slug and maintain a history. Ryan Bates shows us how in a mere 7 minutes.

  Libraries and code

  Puma: A Ruby Web Server Built For Concurrency
  Puma is a simple, fast, and highly concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby webapps. It can be used with any application that supports Rack and makes the audacious claim that it 'is considered the replacement for WEBrick and Mongrel.'

  confstruct: Yet Another Configuration Object for Ruby
  Confstruct optimistically bills itself as 'yet another configuration gem.' It's definable and configurable by hash, struct, or block and aims to provide the flexibility to do things your way, while keeping things simple and intuitive.

  coffee-script-pure: A Pure Ruby CoffeeScript Compiler
  CoffeeScript was originally implemented in Ruby so it's interesting to see Charlie Somerville bring it full circle by reimplementing the current CoffeeScript compiler in pure Ruby.

  gon-sinatra: Get Your Sinatra Variables in your JavaScript

  rack_session_access: Rack Middleware for 'rack.session' Environment Management
  rack_session_access makes it possible to change values within the application session of your Rack-backed app.

  Rglpk: Ruby Wrapper for the GNU Linear Programming Kit

  liquid.js: A JS, In-Browser Implementation of the Liquid Templating Language

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Ruby and Rails Entwickler bei blau Mobilfunk GmbH [Hamburg, Deutschland]
  Unfortunately I don't speak German but it's great to see a wider variety of locations in the jobs. So if you're looking for a Rails job in Germany or know someome who is, check this out.

  Lead Rails Developer at Unpakt [New York, New York]

  Last but not least..

  Exceptional Ruby: Master The Art of Handling Failure in Ruby
  I can't help but continue to recommend Avdi Grimm's awesome 'Exceptional Ruby' e-book if you want to dig deep into the world of exceptions and error handling in Ruby. I enjoyed it a lot (and I'm not even making a bean on this recommendation :-))

  

Slashdot

• 

  SOPA Makes Strange Bedfellows

  Posted: January 8th, 2012, 8:24am MST by timothy

  
  

  davide marney writes "What do 1-800-Contacts, Adidas, Americans for Tax Reform, Comcast, the Country Music Association, Estee Lauder, Ford, Nike and Xerox all have in common? According to OpenCongress.org, they all have specifically endorsed H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. A total of 158 corporations have signed up in favor of the bill, and only 87 against. $21 Million has been donated to Congressmen who favor the bill, but only $5 Million to those against. Thanks to OpenCongress for these insights. This goes a long way towards explaining why this bill has so much traction, despite all its negative publicity."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Where Were the Robots In Fukushima Crisis?

  Posted: January 8th, 2012, 7:29am MST by timothy

  
  

  mdsolar writes "When the huge Fukushima nuclear disaster first started, many on Slashdot were calling for robots to come to the rescue. This is the story of why our overlords were caught napping. Not to worry though, ¥1 billion has been allocated to correct the robot problem. They will be properly welcomed."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Chance To Snap Up Your Own Observatory

  Posted: January 8th, 2012, 6:28am MST by timothy

  
  

  Hugh Pickens writes "Like to own your own five-story observatory equipped with a 12" Meade Schmidt Cassegrain catadioptric telescope and a 20-inch Shafer-Maksutov telescope — the second-largest of its kind in the world? Well, there's one for sale at Marina Towers in Swansea, at an observatory that could be Wales' largest telescope. The Swansea Astronomical Society moved out two years ago, blaming increased rent and other costs. So the city council has asked interested parties to submit their proposals and financial offers by the end of March. Brian Spinks, the chair of the society, says the extra rent and running costs meant the society's members would have had to find around £40,000 over the next 10 years. 'The members can no longer be expected to finance such a public presence from their annual subscription. If we had to find £40,000 over the next 10 years it would kill the society.' The observatory was built in 1988 and includes a domed roof, an access tower that houses a spiral staircase, a stained-glass roof by artist David Pearl and panels of carved poetry by Nigel Jenkins. 'We'd like to see a mixed-use development that incorporates features of the existing observatory building,' says Coun Gareth Sullivan, Swansea council's cabinet member for regeneration. 'Bringing the observatory back into use would add even more vitality to the promenade.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor To Governments

  Posted: January 8th, 2012, 4:57am MST by timothy

  
  

  Voline writes "In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India's Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices. The Indian government then "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on 'the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship' between the U.S. and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec. If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  North Korean Nuclear Facilities, From 30,000 Feet

  Posted: January 8th, 2012, 2:00am MST by timothy

  
  

  Harperdog writes "Niko Milonopoulos, Siegfried S. Hecker, and Robert Carlin analyze terrific overhead photos of North Korea's nuclear facilities, discussing the rate of building and what the photos show. Also points to options for dealing with North Korea and their energy needs."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Microsoft Scraps 'Where's My Phone Update?' Site

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 11:03pm MST by timothy

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft disappointed some Windows Phone users on Friday by saying it would stop providing specifics about who will get software updates and when, and announcing vaguely that a new update is 'available to all carriers that request it.' The update fixes a few issues, including one that caused the on-screen keyboard to disappear and another that caused problems with synching Gmail. Eric Hautala, general manager of customer experience engineering for Windows Phone, said Microsoft will no longer say when people will get updates based on their country, phone model and carrier."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  China To Begin Submitting Air Pollution Reports

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 8:02pm MST by timothy

  
  

  smitty777 writes "China will start to publish air pollution reports, possibly in response to reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing which has been publishing its own data. This report is significant in that it's based on the PM2.5 standard, which measures the more harmful particles that are less than 2.5 microns. This comes on the heels of a separate report that lists China as the worst polluter worldwide. According to this report, China now produces 6,832 m tons of CO2, a 754% increase since 1971. While the U.S. is in second at 5,195 m, this represents an increase of only 21%. This article notes 'the rapid growth in emissions for China, India, and Africa. This will continue as their middle classes buy houses and vehicles. The growth in Middle East emissions is staggering, a reflection of their growing oil fortunes.' While we're on the subject of India, their pollution levels are thought to be responsible for a dense cloud of fog that is so thick it created a cold front, and is repsonsible for a number of deaths."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  OLPC XO-3 To Debut At CES, Starting Under $100 (But Not For You)

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 5:01pm MST by timothy

  
  

  Computerworld is one of many publications heralding the expected arrival next week of the long-awaited OLPC tablet, and making much of one very cool feature: the price. The initial XO laptops from OLPC never quite made it to the hoped-for under-$100 level. But at least with an ordinary LCD screen, says project founder Nicholas Negroponte, the new XO-3 actually has. (An optional daylight-readable Pixel Qi screen bumps the price up, but it's not clear quite how much.) Both OLPC and Pixel Qi will be at next week's CES; hopefully I'll get a chance to provide some first-hand details, and ask whether there will be another round of the Buy One Give One program, so users outside the reach of big government buying programs can both further the project and play with the product; so far, the word is that these will only be available for large government buyers. (TechCruch has better pictures of the new device.)

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Japan Plans To Scrap Nuclear Plants After 40 Years

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 3:54pm MST by timothy

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes with this news as carried by the San Francisco Chronicle: "After the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima plant, 'Japan says it will soon require atomic reactors to be shut down after 40 years of use to improve safety.' If, however, a nuclear plant is deemed still safe it may continue operation."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  EPA Crowdsources Massive Photo Project

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 2:50pm MST by timothy

  
  

  coondoggie writes "Challenges from U.S. government agencies are all the rage these days and the Environmental Protection Agency today became the latest group to issue one: Take cool pictures of your surrounding environment to become part of historical record. The EPA's Locations Challenge looks to update a 40-year old agency project known as 'Documerica' which included more than 15,000 photographs of images of American environmental problems and everyday life. In the 1970s the EPA hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems for the project."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Ask Slashdot: Tech-Related Summer Camps For Teenagers?

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 1:43pm MST by timothy

  
  

  First time accepted submitter jcreus writes "I am a teenager (aged 14, though turning 15 before summer), and I've recently been looking for summer camps in the USA. My interests include physics, mathematics (to a lesser extent) and computer science (I already know several programming languages). However, I haven't been able to find anything really exciting. The difficulties I've found include the fact that most are general-oriented, whereas I'm seeking something specific. Furthermore, some are USA-student-only (and I'm European), and most computer-science oriented camps seem to be for non-programmers. What are your experiences with such camps?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  NYC Mayor Bloomberg Vows To Learn To Code In 2012

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 12:36pm MST by timothy

  
  

  theodp writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to take a coding class in 2012 via Twitter ('My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012! Join me.'). So, is this just a PR coup for Codeacademy, or could EE grad (Johns Hopkins, '64) Bloomberg — who parlayed the $10 million severance he received after being fired as head of systems development at Solomon Brothers into his $19.5 billion Bloomberg L.P. fortune — actually not know how to program? Seems unlikely, but if so, perhaps Bloomberg should just apply to be a Bloomberg Summer 2012 Software Development intern — smart money says he'd get the gig!"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Israel Says It Will Treat Online Credit Card Theft As It Would Terrorism

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 11:35am MST by timothy

  
  

  In the wake of the online theft of at least 6,000 credit card numbers belonging to Israelis, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that "Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action." Also at Reuters, with a few more details about the believed thief, known as OxOmar: "After Israeli media ran what they said were interviews conducted with OxOmar over email, the Haaretz newspaper said a blogger had tracked the hacker down and determined he was a 19-year-old citizen of the United Arab Emirates studying and working in Mexico."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Another Stab At Sorting Hybrid Hype From Reality

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 10:34am MST by timothy

  
  

  Attila Dimedici writes "Eric Peters makes the case that hybrids have been over-hyped. His argument is that in order to sell people on hybrid cars, automakers have emphasized the energy efficiency of hybrids in ideal conditions and failed to tell people that in most ordinary driving conditions they will not come close to meeting the numbers given. He refers to a recent case where an individual has chosen to forego membership in a class action law suit and has instead chosen to go to small claims court. He suggests that there is a significant chance that she will win there and that this will open up all of the manufacturers of hybrid vehicles to similar lawsuits. The article was on a rather partisan website, so I am curious what factors he has chosen to overemphasize to make his case. (Or what factors he has chosen to ignore to the same end.) I know that Slashdot has a large contingent of hybrid and EV supporters who are well educated on the subject (as well as a large contingent of those who are not so well educated)."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  DARPA Chooses Leader For 100-Year Starship Project

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 9:32am MST by timothy

  
  

  Hugh Pickens writes "With Nasa scaling back its manned space programs, the idea of a manned trip to the stars may sound audacious, but the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) study is an effort seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible. The goal is not to have the government fund the actual building of spacecraft destined for the stars, but rather to create a foundation that can last 100 years in order to help foster the research needed for interstellar travel. Now DARPA has provided $500,000 in seed money to help jumpstart the effort and chosen Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, to lead 100YSS. Jemison, who is also a physician and engineer, left NASA in 1993 after a six-year stint in which she served as science mission specialist aboard space shuttle Endeavour, becoming the first black woman to fly in space. Since leaving the space agency, she has been involved in education and outreach efforts and technology development. Rounding out her resume, Jemison also served as a medical aofficer for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, is a professionally trained dancer, speaks Russian, Swahili and Japanese, and was the first real astronaut to make a cameo in an episode of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.' Jemison won the contract with her proposal titled 'An Inclusive Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth & Beyond.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic

  Posted: January 7th, 2012, 6:53am MST by Peter Cooper

  RSpec 2.8 has been released, along with rspec-rails 2.8.1 for the full Rails 3.x integration experience.

  RSpec is a BDD-focused testing tool that's particularly popular in the Rails world where everyone except DHH is using it (if you believe the hoopla). RSpec has faced accusations of being less than speedy in the past, but it seems 2.8 has had a performance firework shoved up its tailpipe:

  

  David Chelimsky, the creator of RSpec, also notes that in RSpec 2.8:

  • the documentation has been significantly improved
  • there's improved support for tags and filtering
  • random example running order support (with user definable seed)
  • rspec --init will create a spec directory and some starter code on a blank project - ideal for Ruby library development!

  Overall, 2.8 seems like a good step forward, and if you've been feeling a little constipated in the spec running department lately, RSpec 2.8 might help you get things flowing again (though as with Ruby 1.9 vs 1.8, your mileage may vary depending on your usage.)

  
• 

  The Past 2 Weeks in the World of Ruby: 40 Links to Bring You Up to Speed (January 2012)

  Posted: January 6th, 2012, 8:03am MST by Peter Cooper

  Ruby Weekly has just tipped over 10,000 subscribers but I know not everyone is into getting their news via e-mail, so here's the latest frequent roundup of the latest Ruby and Rails news for you, all on the Web :-)

  Key News, Releases, and Headlines

  Hungry Academy Application Process Closes This Weekend
  LivingSocial's 'Hungry Academy' will provide a paid, on-site 5 month Ruby and Rails learning experience and mentorship program to a small group of lucky applicants. Interested? You've only got a few days left to apply.

  DOS Attack Vulnerability Found in Ruby 1.8's Hash Algorithm
  Ruby 1.8.7-p352 and earlier are affected by a wide reaching (as in Python and Java are also affected!) hash related vulnerability. Ruby 1.9 is entirely unaffected.

  JRuby 1.6.5.1 Released: Fixes the Hashing Vulnerability
  JRuby 1.6.5.1 is a minor patchlevel release of JRuby that's mostly interesting because of the potential hash-based DOS vulnerability it papers over. Plenty of info in this post.

  KidsRuby 1.0 Released
  KidsRuby is a kid-focused (but just as useful for adults!) Ruby editor aimed at being an environment for teaching the Ruby language. It includes tutorials and a Logo-esque turtle graphics system for more visual types of learning.

  Rack 1.4.0 Released
  Rack is the modular Ruby Web server interface that sits between servers like Apache and nginx and systems like Rails or Sinatra. Rack 1.4 drops support for Ruby 1.8.6 and includes a bevy of tweaks, bug fixes and minor new features (including support for the 'teapot' HTTP status code ;-)).

  Rails 3.2.0 RC2 Released: Rails 3.2 Gets A Step Closer

  rbenv 0.3.0 Released: Minor Updates and Fixes

  Articles and Tutorials

  Never Create Ruby Strings Longer Than 23 Characters
  A linkbaity title but an interesting article nonetheless by Pat Shaughnessy about a curiosity of how MRI Ruby 1.9 handles strings. Why are 24 byte strings far slower to process than 23 byte ones? Find out here.

  Giving Rails 2 the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline
  Not quite ready for Rails 3.1 yet but still want an asset pipeline on your Rails 2 app? Davis W Frank was in that situation and in this post explains how he sorted it out.

  The & Operator in Ruby
  Pan Thomakos looks at the uses for the & operator and its associated methods in Ruby, including bitwise ANDing, set intersection, and the unary &.

  DelayedJob 3.0 Release Rundown

  How Collections Work in the AWS SDK for Ruby

  Ruby Gems API Console: Play with RubyGems.org's API on the Web
  An interesting API console that's set up to play with the RubyGems.org JSON API. Click the drop down to the left to see all of the prebuilt requests.

  MiniTest Quick Reference
  MiniTest is the unit testing library that comes in the Ruby 1.9 standard library and which also acts as a compatibility layer for test/unit on 1.9. Matt Sears has put together a handy round up of the assertions and matchers offered by MiniTest::Unit and MiniTest::Spec.

  Structural Design Patterns in Ruby
  Gregory Brown looks at seven structural design patterns laid out by the Gang of Four, the Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Proxy, Decorator, Facade and Flyweight.

  'bundle exec rails' Executes Bundler.setup 3 Times
  Rails core team member Santiago Pastorino notes that running 'bundle exec rails' is an inefficient mistake and explains why. (TLDR: Just use 'rails', it'll work out the particulars.)

  1 and 2 Letter Ruby Gems
  Mike Gunderloy looks at Ruby gems that only have a single letter as their name. It's a mixture of junk and curiosities.

  'Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity' by Reg Braithwaite
  Ruby's own 'Raganwald' has compiled his essays about combinatory logic, method combinators and Ruby meta-programming into a handy and inexpensive e-book. Cerebral stuff.

  Evaluating Alternative Decorator Implementations in Ruby

  Deprecating a Legacy Subsystem in Rails

  Libraries and code

  Momentum: A Rack Handler for SPDY Clients
  SPDY is a experimental networking protocol developed by Google (and already used in Chrome) for delivering Web content more quickly. Momentum is a Rack handler that can receive connections from SPDY clients and run Rack apps. Lots of info in the README.

  Webmachine: Expose Your App's Resources Via HTTP Declaratively
  webmachine-ruby is a port of Erlang's Webmachine. Both projects aim to expose parts of the HTTP protocol to your application in a declarative way, so you're less concerned with handling requests directly and more with describing the behavior of the resources in your app.

  EmberJS-Rails: Ember.js for Rails 3.1 Developers
  Ember.js is the new name for the Sproutcore 2.0 framework, a powerful system for building rich JavaScript-driven Web applications.

  Celluloid 0.7: Actors for Concurrent Programming in Ruby
  Celluloid provides a simple and natural way to build fault-tolerant concurrent programs in Ruby. With Celluloid, you can build systems out of concurrent objects just as easily as you build sequential programs out of regular objects. 0.7 has just been released.

  hogan_assets: Compiles Mustache Templates with Hogan.js on Sprockets

  Gitview: A JS Widget to List GitHub Repositories
  Gitview is a JavaScript widget you can include on any page to show off your GitHub repositories. Github-badge has done this for years, but Gitview has an interesting GitHub style presentation format including the weekly commit bars.

  Screencasts, Presentations, and Podcasts

  Some Thoughts on Ruby Classes After 18 Months of Clojure
  An enjoyable 25 minute romp through Brian Marick's thoughts on structuring objects in Ruby based on his experiences with the Clojure Lisp dialect.

  Sending HTML Email (RailsCasts)
  Ryan Bates is back for his weekly RailsCasts episode, this time looking at how to not only send HTML e-mail, but how to put it together (along with the obligatory inline CSS) too.

  Debugging Scary Crashes of Rubinius
  Dirkjan Bussink has been debugging memory corruption in Rubinius and has put together a 55 minute video explaining how he debugged it. Surely a must watch for any wannabe Rubinius hackers. A 453MB download though..

  'Architecture the Lost Years' by Robert Martin at Ruby Midwest 2011
  I really enjoyed this keynote by 'Uncle Bob' at the recent Ruby Midwest 2011 conference. He talks about application architecture and how the typical 'Rails way' of approaching it has key disadvantages compared to a decoupled approach.

  ActiveRecord Anti-Patterns for Fun and Profit
  At November's Ruby Midwest 2011, Ethan Gunderson gave a talk on common mistakes made when working with ActiveRecord and how to make everything all better.

  Smalltalk On Rubinius (or How to Implement Your Own Programming Language)
  At September's Golden Gate Ruby Conference, Konstantin Haase gave a talk about implementing a programming language using Ruby and the Rubinius compiler tool chain.

  Getting Started with Rails: RailsCasts
  Ryan Bates takes it back to basics this week with a quick 7 minute sweep through some of the sites, tools, and books you'll find useful when starting out with Rails as of late 2011.

  Vim for Rails Developers Screencast
  An inexpensive 34 minute screencast by Ben Orenstein that teaches you how to use the popular Vim text editor when working with Rails projects. Ben has a lot of experience in this area.

  The Ruby Rogues on Benchmarking and Profiling
  Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson rejoins the Rogues for an hour long chat about benchmarking and profiling Ruby code. There's a lot of depth here and it makes for a typically good and roguish listen.

  MacRuby for Fun and Profit by Joshua Ballanco (55 minutes)

  Ruby Jobs

  C/Unix Agent Engineer [Portland, Oregon]
  New Relic, the Web app performance monitoring and management folks, are looking for someone who loves Ruby but is an experienced C or C++ developer who understands multithreading, database contention, and object-oriented design.

  Senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer at Outbid.com [Oakland, California]

  Software Developer at Geoforce, Inc. [Lewisville, Texas]

  Network Software Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]

  
• 

  9 Ruby and Rails Jobs for January 2012

  Posted: January 2nd, 2012, 3:06pm MST by Peter Cooper

  Recently Forbes wrote about the rise of 'developernomics', noting that companies are seeing programmers as a 'safe haven' investment in otherwise troubled times. Maybe.. maybe not.. but the Ruby and Rails job market is as hot as ever, so if you're looking for a new position, be sure to negotiate well! ;-)

  To promote a job, see our Post A Job page. Your listing not only ends up on the Ruby Inside and RubyFlow sidebars but also in the 10114 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free (as a bonus) and on our 7305 follower @rubyinside Twitter account.

  Senior Engineer - Edinburgh, United Kingdom

  FreeAgent, the pioneers in web-based accounting, is looking for a senior engineer to join their engineering team in a brand new office in beautiful Edinburgh. It's a fantastic opportunity to join a young, exciting and fast-growing company, and help develop a much-loved and high-traffic customer-facing web app — click here to learn more.

  Ruby Developers (Jr and Sr) for Awesome Social Media Tech Co. - Redwood City, California

  Wildfire Interactive is looking for a Ruby Developers (both junior and senior) to work on social media technology (lots of working with the Twitter API, for example). They want truly talented Ruby developers with a passion for clean code and great products. Their current technology stack includes Ruby on Rails & Sinatra, and they're in the process of building a number of pure Ruby components so it's not just a Rails job — click here to learn more.

  Ruby on Rails Developer - Austin, Texas

  Facilities Technology Group is a small company with a software product used by thousands of hospitals around the country to manage and maintain the maintenance of equipment. They're busy migrating an old ASP classic based version of their product to Rails and are looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer to help join the team to make it happen — click here to learn more.

  Back and Front End Developers at New Relic - Portland, Oregon

  If you've been reading Ruby Inside for a while, you'll already know New Relic, the leaders in webapp performance management and monitoring. They've got a couple of different positions open, first they're looking for a back end Rails developer and.. a front-end Rails developer too!

  Software Engineer and Generalist - San Francisco, California

  Samasource is an award-winning technology social enterprise that provides dignified, internet-based work to people living in poverty. They're looking for a Software Engineer / generalist to join their team and write code that meaningfully impacts the human condition — click here to learn more.

  Software Developer - Lewisville, Texas

  Geoforce, Inc. is looking for a Ruby and JavaScript Developer to work in a team environment to write and maintain Ruby and Javascript code. Experience with geospatial tools is a big plus — click here to learn more.

  Senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer - Oakland, California

  Outbid.com is a unique peer-to-peer auctioning platform designed to allow users to host their very own live online auctions. They're looking for a senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer to join their growing product development team — click here to learn more.

  Network Software Engineer - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  Carnegie Mellon University is looking for a Network Software Engineer to be responsible for the design and development of network-related systems and services that operate, automate, and protect Carnegie Mellon's campus and global data networks — click here to learn more.

  To promote a job, see our Post A Job page. Your listing not only ends up on the Ruby Inside and RubyFlow sidebars but also in the 10114 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free (as a bonus) and on our 7305 follower @rubyinside Twitter account.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Progressive Era Hacker Griefed Marconi Demonstration

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 1:36pm MST by samzenpus

  
  

  nbauman writes "In June 1903, Gugliemo Marconi and his partner Ambrose Flemming were about to give the first demonstration of long-range wireless communication at the Royal Institution in London, which, Marconi said, could be sent in complete confidentiality with no fear of the messages being hijacked. Suddenly, the silence was broken by a huge mysterious wireless pulse strong enough to take over the carbon-arc projector and make it sputter messages in Morse Code. First, it repeated the word 'Rats' over and over again (abusive at that time). Then it tapped out, 'There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.' Further rude epithets followed. It was Nevil Maskelyne, a stage musician and inventor who was annoyed because Marconi's patents prevented him from using wireless. It was the first hacking, to demonstrate an insecure system."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  New York Times Hacked?

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 12:50pm MST by samzenpus

  
  

  First time accepted submitter porsche911 writes "It looks like the NYTimes have been hacked and a large number of subscribers spammed with messages about cancellation of their service. The phone system is overwhelmed as well. The Times is currently saying the email is a fake, but that raises other worries. They were one of the only 3rd parties that had the email in question so it appears either someone really screwed up or they've suffered a data breach."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Summary of the M-Edge Vs. Amazon Lawsuit

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 12:03pm MST by samzenpus

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "According to a lawsuit filed by Kindle accessory maker M-Edge, Amazon is a threatening, deceitful, and interfering big brother figure. M-Edge accuses the Kindle maker of patent infringement, contract interference, false advertising, unfair business practices, and extortion. A summary of the lawsuit and events over the course of the last 3 years paints a very dark picture of Amazon's tactics for crushing competition and stealing the best ideas from its partners. It sounds as though M-Edge may have a very strong case against Amazon, and if it wins we could see Amazon forced to remove its own Kindle accessories from Amazon.com."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Data Exposed In Stratfor Compromise Analyzed

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 11:19am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  wiredmikey writes with an excerpt from an article in Security Week: "Following news that security and intelligence firm Stratfor is downplaying the recent hack of its systems, Identity Finder today shared a detailed analysis of the data released so far by the attackers. Based on the analysis, 50,277 Individual Credit Card Numbers were exposed, but 40,626 are expired, leaving just 9,651 that are not expired. In terms of emails, 86,594 Email addresses were claimed to be exposed by the hackers, but only 47,680 were unique. The hackers have released personal information for Stratfor subscribers whose first names begin with A through M, with N through Z expected to be released soon. In addition to the presently published data compromised during the attack, the attackers claim that 200GB of company email containing 2.7 million emails was captured as well." As of posting, Stratfor's website is still down.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Recent Discovery Contains Oldest Depiction of the Tower of Babel

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 10:36am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  smitty777 writes "The recent discovery of the Tower of Babel stele by a team of scholars shows what might be the earliest depiction of the ancient Tower of Babel. The stele belongs to Martin Schøyen, who also owns a large number of pictographic and cuneiform tablets, some of the earliest known written documents. The tablet (reconstruction) depicts King Nebuchadnezzar II, under whom Babylon was a cultural leader in astronomy, mathematics, literature and medicine. It's also interesting to note the somewhat recent Slashdot article linking the common ancestry of languages to this area."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Samsung Reconsidering Android 4.0 On the Galaxy S

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 9:50am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  ghostoftiber writes "The original Galaxy S was the redheaded step child of the Samsung device line. ... Samsung announced over Christmas that the original Galaxy S was done, leaving its faithful fans in a position of having another year on their contracts with no upgrade path. Users were predictably incensed, and it looks like Samsung changed their minds. There's also the Samsung Vibrant development forum if you want Ice Cream Sandwich running on your Vibrant right now." The original source is bit iffy and implies that the release will not be fully featured (probably due to hardware constraints). Business Insider contacted Samsung directly and an official response is expected today.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Apple Fined By Italy For Misleading Customers About Warranty Terms

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 9:08am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  beaverdownunder writes "An Italian watchdog has fined Apple 900,000 euros ($1.2m, £750,000) for failing to inform Italian shoppers of their legal right to two years of technical support, recognizing instead only a one-year standard warranty. This had led people to pay extra for Apple's own support service, AppleCare, which overlapped with the government-mandated guarantee."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Justifications For Creating an IT Department?

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 8:22am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  jjoelc writes "This may sound like an odd request, so first some background. I work at a broadcast television station, and I have found it to be very common for IT to be lumped in with the engineering department at many stations. I believe this is mainly because the engineers were the first people in the business to have and use computers in any real capacity, and as the industry moved to file-based workflows it has simply stayed that way. I believe there is a need for IT to be its own department with its own goals, budgets, etc. But I am having a bit of a rough time putting together the official proposal to justify this change, likely because it seems so obviously the way it should be and is done everywhere else. So I am asking for some pointers on the best ways to present this idea to a general manager. What are the business justifications for having a standalone IT department in a small business? How would you go about convincing upper management of those needs? There are approximately 100 employees at the station I am currently at, but we do own another 4 stations in two states (each of these other stations are in the 75-100 employee range). The long term goal would be to have a unified IT department across all 5 stations."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 7:35am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has benchmarked the Texas Instruments PandaBoard ES and compared its performance against Intel Atom N270, Atom Z530, Pentium M, and Core Duo T2400 processors. The OMAP4660 dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 development board generally loses out to Intel's older competition, but does manage to win in ray-tracing and other tests, and is advantageous on a per-Watt basis."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  IBM Granted Your-Paychecks-Are-What-You-Eat Patent

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 6:51am MST by Unknown Lamer

  
  

  theodp writes "On IBM's Smarter Planet, at least as envisioned in Big Blue's recently-granted patent for 'providing consumers with incentives for healthy eating habits', the FDA will team up with employers and insurers to determine your final paycheck based upon what you eat. IBM explains that whether a given food item is considered healthy may vary based on a number of factors, including 'individual health histories, family health histories, food intake, exercise routines, medications, and other health related factors', and may even be time dependent ('incentives are greater for consumption of a particular food item during a designated lunch time and less for consumption of the particular food item during other periods of time'). Before being issued, IBM's patent request languished for ten years and was only granted after a Patent Examiner's rejection was overturned on appeal. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has been a cheerleader for pay-for-monitored-healthy-eating on a national level, which seems to be neatly aligned with the goals of his fellow CEOs on the Business Rountable, who told President Obama in 2009, 'It's very important that we don't have a government [healthcare] plan competing with a private plan and finding out that our employees or the citizens in general could go to a plan that doesn't have the same incentives and requirements and behavioral characteristics to make sure that they do the right things long term'."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Prospects Darken For Solar Energy Companies

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 6:10am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Hugh Pickens writes "Although global demand for solar power is still growing — about 8% more solar panels will be installed this year compared with 2010 — bankruptcies, plummeting stock prices and crushing debt loads are calling into question the viability of the solar energy industry that since the 1970s has been counted on to advance the world into a new energy age. Only a handful of manufacturers are now profitable in the face of too much capacity, which has contributed to a plunge in prices as government subsidies have been curbed. Prices for solar panels started 2011 near $1.60 per watt, but a buildup of inventory forced manufacturers into a fire sale toward the end of the second quarter that has pushed prices to near $1 per watt now. 'The prices that we're seeing today are likely not covering manufacturing costs in many cases,' says Ralph Romero. With at least seven solar-panel manufacturers filing for bankruptcy or insolvency in the last several months and six of the 10 largest publicly traded companies making solar components reporting losses in the third quarter, public-market investors are punishing the solar sector, sending shares down nearly 57% this year. Although winners are expected to emerge eventually, the question is how much more carnage there will be before that happens. 'The fact of the matter is, nobody really knows which solar companies will be pushed out of business or be forced to merge,' writes industry analyst Rodolfo Avalos. 'Nobody also knows how long it will take for the solar industry to improve even when the forecasted solar global demand for the next 5-10 years is quite promising.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Auction of Copyright Troll Righthaven's Website Underway

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 3:12am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Tootech sends this quote from Vegas Inc: "The online auction of the righthaven.com website domain name got underway Monday, with bidders having until Jan. 6 to submit offers. A judge has authorized a receiver to auction the intellectual property of Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC, the newspaper copyright infringement lawsuit filer. The auction is aimed at raising money to cover part of Righthaven's $63,720 debt to a man who defeated Righthaven in court. The man, Wayne Hoehn, and his attorneys defeated Righthaven when a judge threw out Righthaven's lawsuit against him over Hoehn's unauthorized post on a sports betting website message board of a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by columnist and former publisher Sherman Frederick. Hoehn was a defendant in one of Righthaven's 275 lawsuits filed since March 2010."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Passive Optical Diode Created At Purdue University

  Posted: December 28th, 2011, 12:19am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  wbr1 writes "Researchers at Purdue University have managed to create a silicon device that acts as a passive diode for infrared optical signals. From the Purdue news release: 'The diode is capable of "nonreciprocal transmission," meaning it transmits signals in only one direction, making it capable of information processing, said Minghao Qi (pronounced Chee), an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. "This one-way transmission is the most fundamental part of a logic circuit, so our diodes open the door to optical information processing," said Qi.' One of the same researchers had already (using similar technology) created a way to convert laser pulses to RF."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Melting Glaciers Cutting Peru Water Supply

  Posted: December 27th, 2011, 10:20pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a story that may repeat itself in all mountainous areas dependent on glaciers for their water supply, the glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly (PDF) that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected. Of the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades, researchers now believe, 'those years don't exist.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Intel Medfield SoC Specs Leak

  Posted: December 27th, 2011, 8:05pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  MrSeb writes "Specifications and benchmarks of Intel's 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla's latest iteration of Atom and first real system-on-a-chip oriented for smartphones and tablets — have leaked. The tablet reference platform is reported to be a 1.6GHz x86 CPU coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and an as-yet-unknown GPU. The smartphone version will probably be clocked a bit slower, but otherwise the same. Benchmark-wise, Medfield seems to beat the ARM competition from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia — and, perhaps most importantly, it's also in line with ARM power consumption, with an idle TDP of around 2 watts and load around 3W."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Linux-Powered Christmas Display Puts Rudolph To Shame

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 5:25pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  xmas2003 writes "Over at Linux.com, Zonker writes about Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease. This annual Internet tradition uses a hi/low-tech combo of LAMP'ed Redhat Web Servers, a 7+ year old Thinkpad running Unbuntu for the X10 control, and an old-school webpage design that could be politely described as Web 0.0 — wait until you see the animated cursor — D'OH! The site is free (and totally fun) as it also raises awareness and donations for Celiac Disease — over $70,000 to the University of Maryland. Nifty pictures of the crazy christmas display can be seen on the Christmas Blog (notice Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg in post #220) plus watch videos of it in action with comedic history' Nothing quite says Christmas like a giant, inflatable HULK wearing a Santa Hat... along with three wise men of Elmo, SpongeBob, and Homer Simpson. The Slashdot Effect of turning 21,000 Christmas lights ON & OFF this evening should provide quite a Christmas Eve show to Alek's neighbors... and also the International Space Station."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  The Bitcoin Strikes Back

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 3:59pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  smitty777 writes "Slashdot readers are no doubt informed of the infamous crash of Bitcoin. In fact, its demise was followed closely here. Wired has a recent article tracking Bitcoin's climb out of chaos. Valued at $17 before the crash, it had lost 90% of its value due to the hacking incident, down to a low of $2. It climbed back up to $3 in December, and is currently valued at $4. From the article: 'Bitcoin boosters have traditionally suggested that Bitcoin is an alternative to [the world's] currencies. But we'll suggest an alternative explanation: that Bitcoin is not so much an alternative currency as a "metacurrency" that allows low-cost and regulation-free transfer of wealth between nations. In other words, Bitcoin's major competitors aren't national currencies, but wire-transfer services like Western Union.' Still, Bitcoin has significant obstacles to overcome, such as covert mining, criminal uses, and other security issues." Amir Taaki of the Bitcoin Consultancy (who did an interview here a while back) disputes the reasoning and the conclusions in the Wired article.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Study Finds Online Cheating Is Infectious

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 2:35pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  Freddybear writes "A study of online gamers in the Steam community finds that those who are friends with cheaters are more likely to begin cheating themselves. From the article: 'First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters. Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person's number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters, you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community. Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  US Federal Reserve Data On Loans During Crisis Released

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 1:14pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  oDDmON oUT writes "Pursuant to a FOIA request, Bloomberg has acquired numbers from the Fed on loans made to banks and businesses during the financial crisis between 2007 and 2009. They also posted a direct link to the spreadsheets in zipped format and updated their data visualization of the lending."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 11:55am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  GMGruman writes "The BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control slip. But for these five technologies — mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps — it has already slipped, and Forrester and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many just won't deliver what IT hopes."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  What Do We Do When the Internet Mob Is Wrong?

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 10:32am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  New submitter cornicefire writes "By now most people have heard the news and seen the picture of the boy who was killed over the new Nike sneakers. There are Facebook pages devoted to fist-shaking protests about materialism and greed. Yada yada yada. But while the scuffles over the shoes were real, the death was not. The photo was just a stock photo of some kid in a lab. We know this because of some old school reporters — Steve Earley and Justin Fentin of the Baltimore Sun. In the rush to celebrate crowdsourcing, many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,' but there are times when keeping that gate locked is a good idea. After all, if one of the crowd discovered the error, the signal would barely rise above the noise. There are people claiming that anyone questioning the facts is being disrespectful. Is there something we can do about the mobocracy? How can we support the best traditions of journalism while fixing the worst? How can we nurture accuracy?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Cyber Insurance Industry Expected To Boom

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 9:12am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "The high profile hacks to Sony's systems this year were quite costly — Sony estimated losses at around $200 million. Their insurance company was quick to point out that they don't own a cyber insurance policy, so the losses won't be mitigated at all. Because of that and all the other notable hacking incidents recently, analysts expect the cyber insurance industry to take off in the coming year. 'Last October, the S.E.C. issued a new guidance requiring that companies disclose "material" cyber attacks and their costs to shareholders. The guidance specifically requires companies to disclose a "description of relevant insurance coverage." That one S.E.C. bullet point could be a boon to the cyber insurance industry. Cyber insurance has been around since the Clinton administration, but most companies tended to "self insure" against cyber attacks.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Why the Occupy Movement Skipped Silicon Valley

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 7:50am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "Eric Schmidt says what we all suspected: Silicon Valley has largely been immune to the Great Recession. He said, 'Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality. We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world.... Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Crowdsourced List of SOPA Supporters

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 6:53am MST by timothy

  
  

  Fraser Cain writes "GoDaddy listened to reason, and reversed their position on SOPA. Here's a crowdsourced list of every other company supporting SOPA with web address, Twitter feed, contact emails and phone numbers. Perhaps they should be contacted to find out if they still fully support SOPA, or have changed their mind."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  East Coast vs. West Coast In the Quest For Young Programming Talent

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 6:28am MST by timothy

  
  

  McGruber writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech interns are in high demand in the Bay area. According to the author, 'Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response — sometimes even luring candidates away from college.' Meanwhile in NYC, CIOs lament that they are unable to retain 20-something techies according to a report in Network World. Says one CIO, 'It puts us in a really uncomfortable position to have this kind of turnover because knowledge keeps walking out the door. We invest in training people and bringing them up to speed to where they need to be, and boom they're gone. That has been my biggest struggle and concern.' It's the pay, stupid!"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Face-Scanning Vending Machine Denies Children Access To Pudding

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 4:50am MST by timothy

  
  

  smitty777 writes "What do you do when you spend over a billion dollars on products targeted specifically for adults? Simple, just put a device on your pudding dispensing vending machines that scans faces, and denies the delicious food to the kiddies. The Minority Report-like device will apparently judge the age of the individual based on the space between their eyes and ears. If the criteria is not met, the vending machine will shut down and ask the individual to step away from the machine. There are some vending machine combos that this makes sense for, but seriously — pudding?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  ISO Updates C Standard

  Posted: December 24th, 2011, 2:02am MST by timothy

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard is known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. It provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft)."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Dell and Baidu Introduce a Smartphone With Forked Version of Android

  Posted: December 23rd, 2011, 11:14pm MST by timothy

  
  

  cortex writes "XDA developers is reporting on the release of a new smart phone which runs a forked version of Google's Android operating system: 'Dell and Baidu, the Chinese search giant with over 80% marketshare in its home-country, unveiled the Streak Pro on Tuesday (via Computerworld). The device has a 4.3 AMOLED screen with 960×540 resolution and packs a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor. Most notably, however, is the operating system it runs: a forked Android version dubbed Baidu Yi, which replaces Google's services with those of Baidu.' How will this impact Google's support for Android and open source in general?'

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Taliban Seizes and Burns PCs, Cell Phones To Stop Obscenity

  Posted: December 23rd, 2011, 8:18pm MST by timothy

  
  

  retroworks writes "As translated from Central Asia Online, Cellular News reports that militants from South Waziristan set ablaze about 300 cellular phones and a number of computers in Wana because the devices were allegedly used to spread obscene materials. Prior to taking the action, they gave everyone fair warning with 'leaflets.' 300 cell phones down, 5 or 6 billion to go.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Ask Slashdot: Best Inexpensive VPS Provider?

  Posted: December 23rd, 2011, 5:40pm MST by timothy

  
  

  David Greene writes "After many years of waiting for my provider to upgrade DSL service from the measly 1.5 Mbps I have now, I've decided to go another route. Unfortunately, no other provider in the area (Twin Cities) offers static IPs and permission to run servers. I am looking for a VPS solution to host the public parts of my personal site. What can the Slashdot community recommend as a good, inexpensive VPS provider for personal use? This will mainly be hosting a blog and a couple of Free Software projects (wikis, git repositories, etc.). I would prefer something with KVM so I can manage my own OS install but I am open to other options. Root shell access is essential."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  Let’s Build a Simple Video Game with JRuby: A Tutorial

  Posted: December 14th, 2011, 5:34pm MST by Peter Cooper

  Ruby isn't known for its game development chops despite having a handful of interesting libraries suited to it. Java, on the other hand, has a thriving and popular game development scene flooded with powerful libraries, tutorials and forums. Can we drag some of Java's thunder kicking and screaming over to the world of Ruby? Yep! - thanks to JRuby. Let's run through the steps to build a simple 'bat and ball' game now.

  

  The Technologies We'll Be Using JRuby

  If you're part of the "meh, JRuby" brigade, suspend your disbelief for a minute. JRuby is easy to install, easy to use, and isn't going to trample all over your system or suck up all your memory. It will be OK!

  One of JRuby's killer features is its ability to use Java libraries and generally dwell as a first class citizen on the JVM. JRuby lets us use performant Java powered game development libraries in a Rubyesque way, lean on Java-based tutorials, and basically have our cake and eat it too.

  To install JRuby, I recommend RVM (Ruby Version Manager). I think the JRuby core team prefer you to use their own installer but rvm install jruby has always proven quick and effective for me. Once you get it installed, rvm use jruby and you're done.

  Slick and LWJGL

  The Slick library is a thin layer of structural classes over the top of LWJGL (Lightweight Java Game Library), a mature and popular library that abstracts away most of the boring system level work.

  Out of the box LWJGL gives us OpenGL for graphics, OpenAL for audio, controller inputs, and even OpenCL if we wanted to do heavy parallelism or throw work out to the GPU. Slick gives us constructs like game states, geometry, particle effects, and SVG integration, while allowing us to drop down to using LWJGL for anything we like.

  Getting Started: Installing Slick and LWJGL

  Rather than waste precious time on theory, let's get down to the nitty gritty of getting a basic window and some graphics on screen:

  • First, create a folder in which to store your game and its associated files. From here I'll assume it's /mygame
  • Go to the Slick homepage and choose "Download Full Distribution" (direct link to .zip here).
  • Unzip the download and copy the lib folder into your /mygame as /mygame/lib - this folder includes both LWGWL and Slick.
  • In /mygame/lib, we need to unpack the natives-[your os].jar file and move its contents directly into /mygame.

    Mac OS X: Right click on the natives-mac.jar file and select to unarchive it (if you have a problem, grab the awesome free The Unarchiver from the App Store) then drag the files in /mygame/lib/native-mac/* directly into /mygame.

    Linux and Windows: Running jar -xf natives-linux.jar or jar -xf natives-win32.jar and copying the extracted files back to /mygame should do the trick.

  • Now your project folder should look a little like this:

    

    If so, we're ready to code.

  A Bare Bones Example

  Leaping in with a bare bones example, create /mygame/verybasic.rb and include this code:

  $:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__)
  
  require 'java'
  require 'lwjgl.jar'
  require 'slick.jar'
  
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.BasicGame
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.Input
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer
  
  class Demo < BasicGame
    def render(container, graphics)
      graphics.draw_string('JRuby Demo (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
    end
  
    # Due to how Java decides which method to call based on its
    # method prototype, it's good practice to fill out all necessary
    # methods even with empty definitions.
    def init(container)
    end
  
    def update(container, delta)
      # Grab input and exit if escape is pressed
      input = container.get_input
      container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)
    end
  end
  
  app = AppGameContainer.new(Demo.new('SlickDemo'))
  app.set_display_mode(640, 480, false)
  app.start
  

  Ensure that ruby actually runs JRuby (using ruby -v) and then run it from the command line with ruby verybasic.rb. Assuming all goes well, you'll see this:

  

  If you don't see something like the above, feel free to comment here, but your problems most likely orient around not having the right 'native' libraries in the current directory or from not running the game in its own directory in the first place (if you get probable missing dependency: no lwjgl in java.library.path - bingo).

  Explanation of the demo code

  • $:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__) pushes the 'lib' folder onto the load path. (I've used push because my preferred << approach breaks WordPress ;-))
  • require 'java' enables a lot of JRuby's Java integration functionality.
  • Note that we can use require to load the .jar files from the lib directory.
  • The java_import lines bring the named classes into play. It's a little like include, but not quite.
  • We lean on Slick's BasicGame class by subclassing it and adding our own functionality.
  • render is called frequently by the underlying game engine. All activities relevant to rendering the game window go here.
  • init is called when a game is started.
  • update is called frequently by the underlying game engine. Activities related to updating game data or processing input can go here.
  • The code at the end of the file creates a new AppGameContainer which in turn is given an instance of our game. We set the resolution to 640x480, ensure it's not in full screen mode, and start the game.

  Fleshing Out a Bat and Ball Game

  The demo above is something but there are no graphics or a game mechanic, so it's far from being a 'video game.' Let's flesh it out to include some images and a simple pong-style bat and ball mechanic.

  Note: I'm going to ignore most structural and object oriented concerns to flesh out this basic prototype. The aim is to get a game running and to understand how to use some of Slick and LWJGL's features. We can do it again properly later :-)

  All of the assets and code files demonstrated here are also available in an archive if you get stuck. Doing it all by hand to start with will definitely help though.

  A New Code File

  Start a new game file called pong.rb and start off with this new bootstrap code (very much like the demo above but with some key tweaks):

  $:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__)
  
  require 'java'
  require 'lwjgl.jar'
  require 'slick.jar'
  
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.BasicGame
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.Image
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.Input
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException
  java_import org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer
  
  class PongGame < BasicGame
    def render(container, graphics)
      graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
    end
  
    def init(container)
    end
  
    def update(container, delta)
      input = container.get_input
      container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)
    end
  end
  
  app = AppGameContainer.new(PongGame.new('RubyPong'))
  app.set_display_mode(640, 480, false)
  app.start
  

  Make sure it runs, then move on to fleshing it out.

  A Background Image

  It'd be nice for our game to have an elegant background. I've created one called bg.png which you can drag or copy and paste from here (so it becomes /mygame/bg.png):

  

  Now we want to load the background image when the game starts and render it constantly.

  To load the game at game start, update the init and render methods like so:

  def render(container, graphics)
    @bg.draw(0, 0)
    graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
  end
  
  def init(container)
    @bg = Image.new('bg.png')
  end
  

  The @bg instance variable picks up an image and then we issue its draw method to draw it on to the window every time the game engine demands that the game render itself. Run pong.rb and check it out.

  Adding A Ball and Paddle

  Adding a ball and paddle is similar to doing the background. So let's give it a go:

  def render(container, graphics)
    @bg.draw(0, 0)
    @ball.draw(@ball_x, @ball_y)
    @paddle.draw(@paddle_x, 400)
    graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
  end
  
  def init(container)
    @bg = Image.new('bg.png')
    @ball = Image.new('ball.png')
    @paddle = Image.new('paddle.png')
    @paddle_x = 200
    @ball_x = 200
    @ball_y = 200
    @ball_angle = 45
  end
  

  The graphics for ball.png and paddle.png are here. Place them directly in /mygame.

  

  We now have this:

  

  Note: As I said previously, we're ignoring good OO practices and structural concerns here but in the long run having separate classes for paddles and balls would be useful since we could encapsulate the position information and sprites all together. For now, we'll 'rough it' for speed.

  Making the Paddle Move

  Making the paddle move is pretty easy. We already have an input handler in update dealing with the Escape key. Let's extend it to allowing use of the arrow keys to update @paddle_x too:

  def update(container, delta)
    input = container.get_input
    container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)
  
    if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_LEFT) and @paddle_x > 0
      @paddle_x -= 0.3 * delta
    end
  
    if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_RIGHT) and @paddle_x < container.width - @paddle.width
      @paddle_x += 0.3 * delta
    end
  end
  

  It's crude but it works! (P.S. I'd normally use && instead of and but WordPress is being a bastard - I swear I'm switching one day.)

  If the left arrow key is detected and the paddle isn't off the left hand side of the screen, @paddle_x is reduced by 0.3 * delta and vice versa for the right arrow.

  The reason for using delta is because we don't know how often update is being called. delta contains the number of milliseconds since update was last called so we can use it to 'weight' the changes we make. In this case I want to limit the paddle to moving at 300 pixels per second and 0.3 * 1000 (1000ms = 1s) == 300.

  Making the Ball Move

  Making the ball move is similar to the paddle but we'll be basing the @ball_x and @ball_y changes on @ball_angle using a little basic trigonometry.

  If you stretch your mind back to high school, you might recall that we can use sines and cosines to work out the offset of a point at a certain angle within a unit circle. For example, our ball is currently moving at an angle of 45, so:

  Math.sin(45 * Math::PI / 180)   # => 0.707106781186547
  Math.cos(45 * Math::PI / 180)   # => 0.707106781186548
  

  Note: The * Math::PI / 180 is to convert degrees into radians.

  We can use these figures as deltas by which to move our ball based upon a chosen ball speed and the delta time variable that Slick gives us.

  Add this code to the end of update:

  @ball_x += 0.3 * delta * Math.cos(@ball_angle * Math::PI / 180)
  @ball_y -= 0.3 * delta * Math.sin(@ball_angle * Math::PI / 180)
  

  If you run the game now, the ball will move up and right at an angle of 45 degrees, though it will continue past the game edge and never return. We have more logic to do!

  Note: We use -= with @ball_y because sines and cosines use regular cartesian coordinates where the y axis goes from bottom to top, not top to bottom as screen coordinates do.

  Add some more code to update to deal with ball reflections:

  if (@ball_x > container.width - @ball.width) || (@ball_y < 0) || (@ball_x < 0)
    @ball_angle = (@ball_angle + 90) % 360
  end
  

  This code is butt ugly and pretty naive (get ready for a nice OO design assignment later) but it'll do the trick for now. Run the game again and you'll notice the ball hop through a couple of bounces off of the walls and then off of the bottom of the screen.

  Resetting the Game on Failure

  When the ball flies off of the bottom of the screen, we want the game to restart. Let's add this to update:

  if @ball_y > container.height
    @paddle_x = 200
    @ball_x = 200
    @ball_y = 200
    @ball_angle = 45
  end
  

  It's pretty naive again, but does the trick. Ideally, we would have a method specifically designed to reset the game environment, but our game is so simple that we'll stick to the basics.

  Paddle and Ball Action

  We want our paddle to hit the ball! All we need to do is cram another check into update (poor method - promise to refactor it later!) to get things going:

  if @ball_x >= @paddle_x and @ball_x < = (@paddle_x + @paddle.width) and @ball_y.round >= (400 - @ball.height)
    @ball_angle = (@ball_angle + 90) % 360
  end
  

  Note: WordPress has borked the less than operator in the code above. Eugh. Fix that by hand ;-)

  And bingo, we have it. Run the game and give it a go. We have a simple, but performant, video game running on JRuby.

  If you'd prefer everything packaged up and ready to go, grab this archive file of my /mygame directory.

  What Next? Object orientation

  As I've taken pains to note throughout this article, the techniques outlined above for maintaining the ball and paddle are naive - an almost C-esque approach.

  Building separate classes to maintain the sprite, position, and the logic associated with them (such as bouncing) will clean up the update method significantly. I leave this as a task for you, dear reader!

  Stateful Games

  Games typically have multiple states, including menus, game play, levels, high score screens, and so forth. Slick includes a StateBasedGame class to help with this, although you could rig up your own on top of BasicGame if you really wanted to.

  The Slick wiki has some great tutorials that go through various elements of the library, including a Tetris clone that uses game states. The tutorials are written in Java, naturally, but the API calls and method names are all directly transferrable (I'll be writing an article about 'reading' Java code for porting to Ruby soon).

  Packaging for Distribtion

  One of the main reasons I chose JRuby over the Ruby alternatives was the ability to package up games easily in a .jar file for distribution. The Ludum Dare contest involves having other participants judge your game and since most participants are probably not running Ruby, I wanted it to be relatively easy for them to run my game.

  Warbler is a handy tool that can produce .jar files from a Ruby app. I've only done basic experiments so far but will be writing up an article once I have it all nailed.

  Ludum Dare

  I was inspired to start looking into JRuby and Java game libraries by the Ludum Dare game development contest. They take place every few months and you get 48 hours to build your own game from scratch. I'm hoping to enter for the first time in just a couple of days and would love to see more Rubyists taking part.

  
• 

  A Lagom Review of O’Reilly’s ‘Sinatra Up and Running’

  Posted: December 14th, 2011, 8:15am MST by Peter Cooper

  Sinatra Up and Running is a new book published by O'Reilly and written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that covers the popular Sinatra web application DSL in a brisk 103 pages, acting as a tutorial to newcomers and a handy reference for old hands.

  TLDR: It's a short, sweet, relatively cheap and very well written book about Sinatra. Recommended. Buy here.

  An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. It's typically used in a negative context to lament restrictions and lack of risk taking within Nordic society (DHH touched on this briefly in a recent Mixergy interview) but the flip side of the Jante coin is lagom: the idea and ideal of having just the right amount of something.

  Sinatra Up and Running is, second to K&R, the most lagom technical book I've read. At a mere 102 pages you may wonder whether it's worth buying - it is. Unlike most technical books - yes, including mine - it skips the waffle and provides a perfect level of detail going through from what Sinatra is, to how it works, and on to an example project that covers just 13 pages. Don't be fooled, though, this isn't one of those tiny format O'Reilly handbooks; it's a regular, full size book - just a thin one!

  

  Structure

  The book is split into three key sections:

  1. Sinatra's "fundamentals." We cover similar ground to the Sinatra README but I prefer the less generic examples in the book. How to build routes, use views, use sessions, caching, HTTP headers, and even Sinatra 1.3's new streaming functionality.
  2. Behind the curtain. The bulk of the book takes a peak under the kimono into areas where online documentation occasionally trips over or fails to mention. How is Sinatra implemented and what is its basic execution model? How do you create extensions for it? How does it integrate with Rack middleware? And how can you use Sinatra in a modular style?
  3. Blog engine project. A snappy run through a simple Git and Sinatra powered 'blogging' system.

  As a core piece of printed documentation for a project, the book does a great job at sharing the basics, inspiring you to dig further and, of course, its short length puts Sinatra into context with the gargantuan Rails framework, where even a 400 page book would struggle to cover the essentials.

  So, should you buy it?

  Sinatra Up and Running is a good book and well written. I enjoyed it and picked up or was reminded of quite a few interesting bits and pieces. I'll probably refer to it from time to time. If your Sinatra experiences are rather on and off or you've not played with it for a while, it's a great, well-paced introduction.

  If, however, you're already a Sinatra guru and/or working with Sinatra on a day by day basis and have all of the main patterns memorized, there's not a great deal you're going to get out of it. Buy it to be a completionist or to support the authors, but if you want a book demonstrating in depth how to integrate Sinatra with everything or how to big giant Web applications, this isn't for you.

  Inexperienced Rubyists may also find the book's direct no-nonsense style intimidating. If you know what a code block is, you're good to go. This may seem like a bizarre observation to most Rubyists, but I've encountered many beginners who've wanted to "build a Web site" and immediately leapt into an advanced Rails book, only to be confused. If you're still new to Ruby, read The Well Grounded Rubyist or Beginning Ruby first.

  And I'm going to stop here, because that would be lagom :-)

  Where to buy

  There are several options for buying the book. Check out O'Reilly (print, PDF, Mobi, and ePub), Amazon.com (print and Kindle), and Amazon.co.uk (print and Kindle) or your own favorite local bookstore.

  
• 

  Ludum Dare for Rubyists: An Online 48 Hour Game Coding Competition

  Posted: December 13th, 2011, 7:55am MST by Peter Cooper

  Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It's been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.

  

  The next Ludum Dare contest is taking place this coming weekend between December 16-19, 2011 and I want to encourage Rubyists to take part. The competition tends to be dominated by Java, Flash, Microsoft XNA developers, and HTML5 developers, so it'd be great to see more Ruby entries (of which there have only been a couple so far).

  During August's event, I, along with hundreds of others, was glued to Notch's livestream watching him code his game, Prelude of the Chambered (a 6 minute version is on YouTube). I was inspired enough to port his Java code into Ruby using JRuby, producing
  potc-jruby (sadly far slower than the original Java version). This time, I plan to enter for real and build my own original game.

  How to Take Part in Ludum Dare

  Go to the Ludum Dare homepage, read the rules and guide, register on their WordPress blog, wait until the 'theme' has been decided, and start coding once the countdown is finished.

  During the 48 hours (or 72 if you do the 'jam' version), you can post blog entries directly to the main Ludum Dare site (if you want) and submit your entry via a special link at the end. Entrants play and judge each other's entries for a period of three weeks before the winners are announced. Having more Rubyists involved would be useful since our games may be less likely to work cross platform or without Ruby installed.. (more on this shortly)

  A quick summary of the rules:

  • You have to work alone. (If you want to do a team effort, you need to enter the less restrictive 'jam' contest.)
  • All content and code must be created within the 48 hours (except for libraries, legally licensed fonts and drum/instrument samples).
  • Your game has to be based on the theme given out before the contest.
  • You must share the source code with the other participants at the end of the contest though you do not have to give it an open source license.

  The contest has a popular IRC channel (which is already quite active) at #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org. I'm petercooper on there - say hi! I'll be lurking in there a lot over the next week. Also, follow @ludumdare on IRC for more updates and info.

  To get a feel for the contest, check out this "keynote" from the last Ludum Dare. There'll be a new one for this year soon:

  Building a Game in Ruby?

  Building games in Ruby isn't popular but it's not frontier country either. Rubystein, a Wolfenstein 3D pastiche by the Phusion guys, remains a favorite of mine and it even runs on 1.9 with only a few tweaks.

  There's a great series by Andrea Wright that dates from 2007 but still has some handy pointers. We also have Ray, RubyGame, and Gosu which all have their fans (Ray is the most recent Ruby game library I'm aware of).

  Or.. JRuby!

  My choice for the contest is none of the above. Instead, it's JRuby. As part of the 'warmup process' for the contest, I've been playing with JRuby and the popular Slick2D Java library. The performance is amazing and the development process pretty straightforward.

  Being a popular library in the Java world, I can use a lot of the Java-based tutorials and code samples for Slick2D to get a feel for how it all works. And.. I'll be writing an article for Ruby Inside in the next day or two showing you how to get started with it for yourself :-)

  
• 

  Ruby News and Releases in 2011: A Retrospective

  Posted: December 6th, 2011, 8:36pm MST by Peter Cooper

  2011 is drawing to a close and I have been reminded of a post I made about a year ago: Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby. 2010 was a stunning year with the release of Ruby 1.9.2, MacRuby 0.5, Sinatra 1.0, Rubinius 1.0, and DataMapper 1.0!

  This year, MagLev, Capybara, Cucumber, RefineryCMS, OmniAuth and TorqueBox all hit their 1.0 milestones, but I've dug through the archives to see what else 2011 brought for the Ruby scene.

  January

  Rails Installer: Ruby and Rails on Windows in a Single, Easy Install - Wayne E Seguin, of RVM, released a super simple Rails, Git, SQLite, and Ruby installer for Windows. It's now an Engine Yard project and going strong.

  Clever Algorithms: Free E-book of Nature-Inspired AI Recipes for Ruby

  February

  Ruby Turns 18 - Matz had previously said Ruby was "born" on February 24, 1993, so "she" turned 18 years old in February. Yes, I'm sad enough to have had that in my calendar ever since I read about it ;-)

  Netbeans Drops Ruby Support (And JRuby Picks It Up) - The Netbeans IDE team announced they were dropping support for the Ruby and Rails specific features in their popular IDE. Separately, though, Thomas Enebo of the JRuby core team said that they had spoken to the Netbeans team and they would be adopting the project.

  March

  JRuby 1.6 Released - JRuby 1.6 was released with, significantly, Ruby 1.9.2 support. JRuby has continued its role as a formidable and leading Ruby implementation throughout 2011.

  MacRuby 0.10 Released - Apple's MacRuby got XCode 4 support (although some have complained it's been a bit shaky since) and the ability to put together apps suitable for Mac App Store submission. There are now at least several MacRuby powered apps on the store.

  DHH Offended by RSpec, Says Test::Unit is Just Great - Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson inadvertently kicked off a relatively interesting discussion about testing tools.

  DataMapper 1.1 Released

  LivingSocial Acquires Ruby/Rails Consultancy InfoEther - This wasn't your typical boring acquisition. LivingSocial, a daily deals site, purchased InfoEther, the US's first significant Ruby consultancy and home to Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Tom Copeland, and others. Ruby recruitment in overdrive!

  April

  The Rails Hotline launched - The Rails Hotline is a free helpline run by volunteer Ruby and Rails developers. It was very popular early on and while I haven't heard much about it lately, there still seem to be people staffing it.

  Haml and Sass 3.1 Released (Separately)

  May

  TorqueBox 1.0.0 Released: A Java Platform for Rack Apps - Almost three years in the making, Torquebox 1.0 arrived. It's a popular JBoss-powered application server for Rack apps (including Rails apps) that provides a smorgasbord of useful backend features.

  RubyGems 1.8.0 Released - Significant because 1.8 is still the version that comes with Ruby 1.9.3 in late 2011. After a raft of slightly temperamental releases, 1.8 has been a champ.

  The Ruby Rogues Podcast Launches - A new discussion based podcast made it into the Ruby world in May. It's still going and has frequent episodes with great discussions on all sorts of Ruby related topics. Much recommended.

  Avdi Grimm's "Exceptional Ruby" Book Released - Avdi Grimm released a PDF e-book about error and exception handling in Ruby, based on his 'Exceptional Ruby' talk at Magic Ruby 2011. It has proven to be quite a talking point since.

  June

  The Story Behind Ruby 1.9.3 Getting 36% Faster Loading Times - Perhaps the story I spent the most time on in 2011. Two different solutions to speeding up Ruby 1.9.2's notoriously slow requires were tabled, only one made the cut. Ruby 1.9.3 has since proven to be somewhat swifter.

  Refinery CMS 1.0 Released - Version 1.0 of Refinery CMS arrived 2 years after it first became an open source project. Refinery is one of the most popular Rails-based content management systems and the 1.0 release boasts full Rails 3 support and a solid stable base built up by over 100 contributors.

  Capybara 1.0 Released - It was certainly the year for Capybara. The acceptance test framework for webapps is now perhaps the most popular tool in its field.

  Cucumber 1.0.0 Released - Continuing with the testing theme, Cucumber also hit a significant milestone in 2011.

  July

  Ruby's Creator, Matz, Joins Heroku - Surprise in the Ruby community as Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto took up a Chief Architect position with Heroku, the Salesforce-owned Ruby application hosting company.

  August

  Rails 3.1.0 Released - A full year after Rails 3.0, Rails 3.1 was released to much fanfare, adding key features like the asset pipeline, roles, reversible migrations, jQuery as the new default JavaScript library, and a new focus on CoffeeScript. I explained the controversy behind some of the changes when they were announced back in April.

  rbenv: A Simple, New Ruby Version Management Tool - Sam Stephenson of 37signals unveiled his new lightweight Ruby version management tool and.. well, there was quite a bit of drama around it. Now, though, it seems people have fallen into sticking with the tool they like best and both RVM and rbenv seem to be going from strength to strength.

  September

  RailsInstaller 2.0 Shipped - The Windows-based RailsInstaller hit its 2.0 milestone and became a great way to get Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.1 on Windows in a single install.

  The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough Released - I released my epic 3 hour Ruby 1.9 screencast guide in September. It's been a fun ride!

  TrollScript Released - A significant new entrant to the world of programming languages arrived in the shape of a Ruby-based interpreter for a new Brainf**k dialect by Tom Bell.

  October

  Ruby 1.9.3p0 Released - The official production release of Ruby 1.9.3 finally hit in October and brought faster Rails app loading times to millions. Hurrah! I made a more detailed roundup of the changes.

  Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule Announced - It was announced that Ruby 2.0 would be coming along in 2013, but I also put together some info about what Ruby 2.0 is and what it might contain.

  Ruby-doc.org Got A Facelift - James Britt gave Ruby-doc.org a significant facelift this year and unveiled his work in October. It's certainly been a major improvement so far.

  Ryan Bates Unveils RailsCasts Pro - Ruby's most popular screencasting legend (other than Geoffrey Grosenbach, of course!) 'went pro' and started to charge for extra episodes of his popular weekly screencast series.

  Sinatra 1.3 Released - Sinatra, the popular webapp DSL / microframework, reached version 1.3.0. The significant addition this time around was a 'streaming API' for streaming data to clients instead of delivering it all in one big package.

  Spree (Open Source Rails E-commerce System) Raises $1.5 Million - Spree is a popular open source Rails e-commerce system and its creator raised $1.5m in venture capital to take it even further (as well as offer Spree-based consulting). Tom Preston Werner (GitHub) and James Lindenbaum (Heroku) also joined as advisors.

  DataMapper 1.2.0 Released - DataMapper is a popular ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and a powerful alternative to ActiveRecord for many developers. Version 1.2 brought all-important support for Rails 3.1 amongst other things.

  November

  MagLev 1.0 Released - Two years after its alpha released, one of the most intriguing alternative Ruby implementations made to its big 1.0.

  OmniAuth 1.0: Authentication APIs Reach A New Level - OmniAuth is a popular library for performing authentication against numerous external authentication systems (like OAuth, OpenID, Facebook, and Twitter). Version 1.0 brought massive structural changes (for the better) and introduced capabilities to do local/internal authentication too.

  DHH Got Married - Dashing the dreams of women everywhere.

  
• 

  This Week’s Ruby News: awesome_print 1.0, a new Sinatra book, and more

  Posted: December 2nd, 2011, 5:36pm MST by Peter Cooper

  Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly - it's bumper sized this week. And a big congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, as he got married recently!

  Headlines

  Sinatra: Up and Running (New Book from O'Reilly)
  A new book from O'Reilly, written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse, that takes a look at the popular Sinatra Ruby webapp library. It's available in e-book and print formats.

  awesome_print 1.0 Released
  OK, it's already at 1.0.1, but Michael Dvorkin's awesome 'pretty printer' for Ruby objects has reached its 1.0 milestone. This is definitely one of my favorite Ruby projects.

  Articles and Tutorials

  Method Chaining and Lazy Evaluation in Ruby
  Ever wondered how that ActiveRecord query style method chaining works? Jeff Kreeftmeijer shows you one way to go about implementing your own method chaining mechanism.

  Implementing Autocomplete with Redis in Rails 3.1
  Pat Shaughnessy demonstrates how to set up a Rails 3.1 app to do Redis-backed autocompletion using the Soulmate library. Very detailed and a lot to learn here.

  Ruby Blocks as Dynamic Callbacks
  A callback is a block of code passed as an argument to a method which can be run under certain conditions later on. Matt Sears shows off a clever technique to have multiple types of callback within a single code block which can be triggered independently.

  Writing Simple Ruby Client/Servers using Protobufs

  Rails 3.2 Gets 'pluck' Method, Returns Array of Table Column Values
  ActiveRecord::Relation#pluck is used to get values from a single column of a table. It accepts a column name as its argument and returns an array of values. It'll be in the forthcoming Rails 3.2 or, if you're brave, is in head now.

  Acceptance Testing with Responsive Layouts

  The State of Ruby ORMs
  Piotr Solnica presents a roundup of the popular Ruby ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) ActiveRecord, DataMapper, and Sequel.

  Xavier Shay's DataMapper Retrospective
  Xavier used DataMapper, rather than ActiveRecord, on his last two major projects and in this post he shares what he sees as the pros and cons of the DataMapper approach.

  Screencasts

  In-Place Editing - RailsCasts
  Ryan Bates's weekly screencast outing shows us how to edit an on-page attribute in-place using the 'Best In Place' gem. He also shows how to add validations and support for different field types.

  Pat Shaughnessy on Bundler 1.1
  I've recently linked to a couple of great articles by Pat about Bundler 1.1's new features and performance improvements but if you want it in 20 minute video form.. here you go :-)

  Heroku and Rails 3.1

  The Ruby Rogues on Software Craftsmanship
  The latest episode of the always awesome Ruby Rogues podcast looks at 'software craftsmanship', code retreats, and developer apprentice programs.

  Building a Rails Plugin with Tested Assets (Screencast)
  An hour long screencast by Dmytrii Nagirniak working in real time on a Rails plugin, along with using Sass, Jasmine, and CSS assets. Be warned, however, it's not a particularly easy watching experience, even at fullscreen.

  Cut and Polish: A Guide to Crafting Gems
  At the RubyC conference in Ukraine, Pat Allan gave a talk about building gems, some of the tools you can use, and some best practices. All 47 minutes of it is now available to watch here too.

  Libraries and code

  Jbuilder: DHH's JSON Production Library
  Despite getting married this week, DHH has still been busy coding. Jbuilder gives you a simple DSL for declaring JSON structures that beats massaging giant hash structures. This is particularly helpful when the generation process is fraught with conditionals and loops.

  Wash Out: A Simple Rails 3 SOAP Server Library
  Wash Out is a gem that greatly simplifies creation of SOAP service providers within Rails 3 applications.

  Methadone - Build Better Ruby-based CLIs with Logging and Cucumber Support
  Methadone (gotta love these project names..) is a collection of tools 'to make your command-line apps easily awesome'. It includes a DSL that wraps OptionParser, logging utility classes, and Cucumber steps.

  Command Line Reporter: Nicer Formatting for Ruby Script Output
  Command Line Reporter offers RSpec-like formatting of the output of your Ruby scripts. Rather than using "puts" statements everywhere, you can lean on CLR's extensible methods and formatters.

  Moxy: A Programamble Mock HTTP Proxy
  Moxy (or moxy) is a programmable mock proxy. It is an HTTP proxy exposing web hooks that you can use in order to tell it what to do, and when to do it.

  faye-websocket: A Standards-Compliant WebSocket Library

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Rails Developer at New Relic [Portland, Oregon]

  Senior Rails Engineer at RevenueMed [Norcross, Georgia]

  Want your job featured? Learn more here.

  Last but not least..

  Ruby Command-Line One-Liners (Working, This Time)
  Due to a Tumblr bug, this link didn't work properly in last week's Ruby Weekly so it's in again.. a bumper collection of Ruby one-liners you can use from the command line, mostly to perform various functions on files and other streaming data.

  
• 

  Last Week’s Top Ruby News: Rails 3.1.3, autoload deprecated, and conferences

  Posted: November 28th, 2011, 5:02pm MST by Peter Cooper

  It's a couple of days late but here are the main headlines from the last week of Ruby news. We have a couple of Rails releases, some event news, and the usual gaggle of great articles and jobs.

  Headlines

  Rails 3.1.3 Released (Very Quickly After 3.1.2)
  This release mainly contains fixes for regressions that popped up in 3.1.2, including a downgrade to Sprockets. 3.1.2 itself was primarily a bug and security fix release and cleared up a XSS vulnerability in the translate helper.

  Rails 3.0.11 Released (clears up aforementioned security vuln too)

  Matz says 'Autoload will be dead' (in Ruby 3.0)
  Matz says he should have removed 'autoload' from Ruby when he added threads to the language but he has now deprecated them. Due to Ruby 2.0's backwards compatibility demands, though, they won't be fully gone until Ruby 3.0 but Matz now discourages using autoload.

  MountainWest RubyConf 2012 Call For Proposals Open
  Want to talk at a popular Ruby conference in 2012? MWRC's call for proposals is now open until January 7, 2012. The conference itself takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 15-16, 2012.

  Scottish Ruby Conference 2012 Registration Open
  You can now buy tickets for June 2012's Scottish Ruby Conference. It's been very popular in the last couple of years so if you fancy going, check it out soon.

  Railsclub: A Russian Rails Conference, Moscow, December 17

  Heroku Launches Postgres as a SQL Database-as-a-Service

  Articles and Tutorials

  Configuration for Rails, the Right Way
  Mike Perham notes that he still sees people promoting various gems and plugins to handle configuration elements in Rails apps, but that one little known secret is that Rails 3 allows you to define your own configuration elements trivially.

  Rails 3.1 Subdomains and Devise Example App and Tutorial
  Daniel Kehoe has been working on some interesting Rails demo apps recently and now he presents a detailed Rails subdomains tutorial showing how to create an example Rails 3.1 application with subdomains and authentication using Devise.

  Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: A Bumper Set of Ruby 1.9 Notes
  Martin Carel recently bought and watched my Ruby 1.9 video and has put together a bumper set of notes with the main Ruby 1.9 changes outlined.

  Unobtrusive Object Deletion in Rails, The Easy Way
  Using RESTful routes, the HTTP DELETE verb is necessary to delete resources. But what if your users aren't running JavaScript and want to delete items? Ryan Townsend shows a way to get everything running smoothly.

  Using Amazon's CloudFront CDN with Rails

  The Rails 3 Asset Pipeline in (about) 5 Minutes
  Michael Erasmus was feeling unsure about how the asset pipeline in Rails 3.1 worked but after digging around for a while, he's put together a simple high level overview.

  How to Make Gem Patches with Gem Edit

  Installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on OS X Lion
  My Ruby Show co-host Jason Seifer has written a guide to setting up a basic Ruby development environment on Mac OS X Lion over at Think Vitamin.

  Admin Interfaces for Rails Apps: RailsAdmin vs ActiveAdmin

  Screencasts

  Contributing to Open Source (RailsCasts)
  In the 300th Railscasts episode, Ryan Bates shows how to submit a pull request to an open source Ruby project on GitHub.

  Aaron 'Tenderlove' Patterson's Emoji Test Output Gem

  Libraries and code

  Faye 0.7: New Event APIs and an Open WebSocket Stack
  The latest release of Faye adds a few new event hooks and ships with a stand-alone WebSocket client/server implementation that makes adding WebSockets to any Rack app dead simple.

  Ruby Command-Line One-Liners
  A large collection of Ruby 'one liners', all set up to run from the command line, to perform various functions, mostly involving processing text files.

  Snowday: A Snow Themed RSpec Formatter

  rack_mailer: Rack End Point for a Contact Form
  rack_mailer is a simple piece of Rack middleware that takes passed parameters and sends an e-mail to a preconfigured address.

  An OAuth2 Tutorial Project

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Junior Rails Developer at Harvest [New York, New York]

  Ruby/Rails developer - Remote at 12 Spokes [Salt Lake City, Utah]

  Ruby and Front-End Web Developers at BenchPrep.com [Chicago, Illinois]

  Last but not least..

  Ruby Reloaded: Boost Your Ruby-Fu in December with Peter Cooper
  My live, online Ruby Reloaded course has its 4th outing on December 5/6 (next week) and only 7 6 seats remain. Learn more about what it's about by following the link and use the code 'INSIDE' to get $50 off.

  

Slashdot

• 

  Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 2:27pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  fergus07 writes "Toyota is to show an autonomous Prius at Tokyo Motor Show. Dubbed the Toyota AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), the car will be available for members of the public to take 'back seat' rides at the show, demonstrating first hand how the Prius can avoid obstacles, be summoned from a parking garage and park itself."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Bradley Manning's Court Date Finally Set

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 1:45pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  bs0d3 writes "Bradley Manning has finally been scheduled for a day in court. On December 16, he will have an Article 32 hearing (military pre-trial). Private Manning has been in jail for one and half years. The Article 32 hearing will begin at Fort Meade, Maryland. The primary purpose of the hearing is to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government's case, as well as to provide the defense with an opportunity to obtain pretrial discovery. Further trial dates and locations are still unknown."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Are Maker Spaces the Future of Public Libraries?

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 1:02pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  misterbarnacles writes "Shareable has an interview with librarian Lauren Britton Smedley from the Fayetteville Free Library, which is adding a Fab Lab to its community offerings. She said, 'I think that libraries are really centers for knowledge exchange, and a Fab Lab fits perfectly into something like that. This idea that libraries are a place where the books live, and you go to find a book, and that’s all it is, I think is really starting to shift. Libraries are a place for social transformation. They’re a place that you can go to get computer access, or access to technology that you can’t get anywhere else, and access to people. ... At the Fab Lab, the impetus behind the whole thing was to create a center for knowledge exchange where we’re not just offering Intro to Word or Intro to Excel — that we can offer Intro to Computer Programming, or Digital Fabrication — these skills that are really important in the STEM fields, and we can push that information out for free. And how do we do that? By getting people in the community who know that stuff to come in and share what they know.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  How Technology Is Shaping Language

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 12:18pm MST by Soulskill

  
  

  An anonymous reader writes "This is an interesting article about how technology is shaping the English language, which touches on the fate of the current crop of (sometimes silly) tech-inspired words, and anticipates an increased blurring of the line between the written and spoken word. Professor David Crystal, honorary professor at the School of Linguistics and English Studies at the University of Bangor, says, 'This kind of ludicity [linguistic playfulness] is very attractive for a while. People keep it going and then it sort of falls out of use. Exactly how long it will go on for is unclear but it's like any game, any novelty, any linguistic novelty — I can't see it lasting. If you look back 10 years ago to the kind of clever-clever things that were going on in the 1990s — MUDs and MOOs — all the early game strategies and lots of very interesting language features coming up as people tried to develop a style of language that would suit the technology. Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  MS To Build Antivirus Into Win8: Boon Or Monopoly?

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 11:36am MST by Soulskill

  
  

  jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft has quietly announced that it's planning on baking anti-virus protection right into the Windows 8 OS. Users have been criticizing Windows' insecurity for years — but of course this move is raising howls of protest from anti-virus vendors, who have built a nice business out of Windows' security holes. Is this a good move by Microsoft, or a leveraging of their monopoly as bad as bundling Internet Explorer?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  11 Amazing Things NASA's Huge Mars Rover Can Do

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 10:53am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  TheNextCorner writes "NASA is getting set to launch its next Mars rover this week. The car-size Curiosity rover is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, slated to blast off Saturday (Nov. 26) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rover will employ 10 different science instruments to help it answer questions once it touches down on the Red Planet in August 2012."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Amazon Denies Reports That Airport Scanners Ruin Kindle's e-Ink

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 10:12am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  judgecorp writes "Amazon has poured cold water on the story, but reports insist that Kindles are sometimes rendered useless by airport baggage handling and security checks. Many people report no problems at all but if something is going wrong, the culprit may not be the X-ray scanner, but a static shock."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  How To Get Into an Elite Comp-Sci Program

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 9:32am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  alphadogg writes "With early applications to elite colleges at an all-time high, the nation's highest-rated undergraduate computer science programs are bracing for an uptick in applications between now and January. High school seniors are facing stiffer-than-ever competition when applying to the nation's top computer science programs this fall. But admissions officers and professors at elite tech schools can offer tips aimed at helping your child get accepted come spring."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  DARPA Requests Replacement To Antibiotics

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 8:53am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  eldavojohn writes "In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear and DARPA's 'Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics' solicitation reveals they're interested in a more permanent solution as modifying the genes of harmless bacteria can result in powerful bioweapons. Like siRNA, DARPA is hoping for more nanomolecules that can specifically target cells and deliver medicine to them anywhere in the body. Most amazing about this proposal is that it's aimed at small businesses and hopes to turn a process that takes decades to study a new antibiotic into a few weeks to manufacture nanomedicine to specifically target bacteria."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Recycled Medical Records Used As Scrap Paper At Elementary School

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 8:32am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  Parents with students at Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis have found something interesting on the back of their children's pictures hanging on the fridge, detailed medical information. From the article: "Jennifer Kane was tidying her dining room when she found the drawing by her daughter, Keely, who goes to Hale Elementary School. On the back of the paper was the name, birth date and detailed medical information for a 24-year-old St. Paul woman named Paula White. 'The more I read it, the more alarmed I became about the amount of information I had about this person,' said Kane." The security lapse has been blamed on a paralegal donating the paper to the school.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  SCADA Hacker: Water District Used 3-Character Password

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 8:12am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  Trailrunner7 writes "In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, a hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long. The hacker, using the handle 'pr0f' took credit for a remote compromise of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Communicating from an e-mail address tied to a Romanian domain, the hacker told Threatpost that he discovered the vulnerable system using a scanner that looks for the online fingerprints of SCADA systems. 'This was barely a hack. A child who knows how the HMI that comes with Simatic works could have accomplished this,' he wrote in an e-mail."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Afghanistan Biometric Data Given To US

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 7:30am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  wisebabo writes "I just noticed that not only are all Afghans going to have their biometric data (fingerprints and iris scans) recorded but the government plans to share it with the U.S. From the article: 'Gathering the data does not stop at Afghanistan's borders, however, since the military shares all of the biometrics it collects with the United States Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security through interconnected databases.' Talk about 'know thine enemy' (or I guess, for now, friend). Does this foretell the near future when the U.S. govt. (and by extension, Chinese hackers) have the biometrics of almost everyone alive?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Petition Calls For Making Net Access Inalienable Right

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 6:48am MST by samzenpus

  
  

  CelticWhisper writes "Targeted at stopping SOPA, a petition has been started at the White House's 'We The People' page calling for a Constitutional amendment that would render internet access an inalienable right. Other countries have already adopted such classification for internet access. An excerpt from petition text reads: 'The United States Government is actively attempting to pass legislation to censor Internet. There are numerous campaigns against this Act, but we need to do more than just prevent SOPA from passing. Otherwise, future Acts of similar nature will oppress our rights.' Is calling for a Constitutional amendment to guarantee this too extreme, or is the Internet sufficiently entrenched in modern life that access to it should be guaranteed by the Constitution?"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  Plate Readers Abound in DC Area, With Little Regard For Privacy

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 6:08am MST by timothy

  
  

  schwit1 writes "More than 250 cameras in Washington D.C. and its suburbs scan license plates in real time. It's a program that's quietly expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago. Some jurisdictions store the information in a large networked database; others retain it only in the memory of each individual reader's computer, then delete it after several weeks as new data overwrite it. A George Mason University study last year found that 37 percent of large police agencies in the United States now use license plate reader technology and that a significant number of other agencies planned to have it by the end of 2011. But the survey found that fewer than 30 percent of the agencies using the tool had researched any legal implications. With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
• 

  A Drone Helicopter That Can Land On a Moving Truck

  Posted: November 21st, 2011, 4:12am MST by timothy

  
  

  garymortimer writes with a story (the accompanying video is worth watching) of an unmanned helicopter than can automatically land on a moving surface. Though it's shown landing on a bed of a moving truck, the real purpose is for sea-based use: "This automatic system for take-off, landing and deck-landing of UAVs is the fruit of the joint expertise of Thales and DCNS. Thales is responsible for the positioning system and its interface with the UAV system, the supply of a UAV demonstrator system and slaving of the flight path along a trajectory. DCNS is responsible for predicting the vessel motions, the harpoon system as well as the interface and integration with the vessel."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

Ruby Inside

• 

  This Week’s Ruby News: RSpec 2.8.0 RC1, Minitest 2.8.0, and What’s New in Bundler 1.1?

  Posted: November 12th, 2011, 9:11pm MST by Peter Cooper

  After last week's bumper set of releases the Ruby world seems a lot quieter this week :-) (Even here. I've been hidden away teaching my Ruby Reloaded course!)

  Headlines

  RSpec 2.8.0 RC1 Released
  The next significant release of RSpec is afoot and its first release candidate is now out. Key improvements come to configuration (and being able to override it from the command line) and running examples in random (and pseudo-random) order.

  Ruby 1.9.3-p0 RubyInstaller for Windows Available
  RubyInstaller is a popular route to installing Ruby for Windows users, and a new version based on the all-new Ruby 1.9.3-p0 is now out.

  Ruby Webapp Performance Management Service New Relic Adds Free Server Monitoring

  Minitest 2.8.0 Released

  Articles and Tutorials

  Besides Being Faster, What Else is New in Bundler 1.1?
  Recently, Pat Shaughnessy did a great post explaining why the forthcoming Bundler 1.1 will be faster than 1.0. This time around, he looks at some new features, including bundle outdated, bundle clean, specifying install paths, and creating bundles that will work on machines that don't have Bundler installed.

  The Current and Future Ruby Platform
  Adam Keys shares his thoughts on the long-term future potential of Ruby as a platform and where it's likely and unlikely to go.

  A Self Guided Rails 3.1 Tutorial in an App
  An interesting app built by Peter Jones that aims to be a self guided Rails 3.1 tutorial. The README is extensive and explains how to get started. There are also some reader exercises designed to stretch your coding muscles.

  Screencasts

  Be a Minecraft Modman with Purugin
  At RubyConf 2011, Thomas Enebo (of JRuby core team) gave a talk about Purugin, a plugin framework for building Minecraft modifications using Ruby.

  RailsCasts on the Mercury Editor
  Mercury allows you to edit a section of HTML directly in the browser with a WISYIWYG editor. In this week's Railscasts, Ryan Bates shows how to integrate Mercury into a Rails app.

  Libraries and code

  Likeable: Storing 'Liked' Objects with Redis
  Likeable is a new open-source Ruby library built by Gowalla to store 'likes' on items. It works with ActiveRecord objects but can be used with any Ruby object that implements an #id method. If you have Redis ready and waiting, it looks pretty easy to get going.

  X11Client: Manage X11 Windows/Events from Ruby (including Mouse Control)

  Example Rails 3.1.1 App using Mongoid and OmniAuth 1.0
  With OmniAuth 1.0 out just last week, it's great to see Daniel Kehoe has updated his popular Rails 3.1 example app to the latest and greatest. If you want to see how to bring Mongoid and OmniAuth together with Rails 3.1, this is a great place to start.

  RBzip2: A Pure Ruby Implementation of the bzip2 (De)Compression Algorithm

  Sinatra-Static: Turn a Sinatra App into a Static Site

  ZK: A High Level Ruby Interface to Apache ZooKeeper

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Ruby Developer [Cambridge, Massachusetts]
  Every programmer at Litmus remembers the first time they searched for an answer to their programming problem, only to realize they were the first to try to take it on. These days, it's an almost daily occurrence around here. If that sounds exciting to you, then we'd like to talk to you.

  Rails Developer at EquipRent.com [Scottsdale, Arizona]

  Rails Developer (or Rails Enthusiast) Wanted at Legitscript [Portland, Oregon]

  Last but not least..

  Gemnasium: Keep Up to Date With New Versions of Gems
  Gemnasium is a new commercial service (yep, it costs money) that parses your Ruby projects' gem dependencies and notifies you when new versions are released. There's a 2 week trial if you want to get a feel for how it works.

  
• 

  Ruby’s Unary Operators and How to Define Their Functionality

  Posted: November 8th, 2011, 10:27am MST by Peter Cooper

  In math, a unary operation is an operation with a single input. In Ruby, a unary operator is an operator which only takes a single 'argument' in the form of a receiver. For example, the - on -5 or ! on !true.

  In contrast, a binary operator, such as in 2 + 3, deals with two arguments. Here, 2 and 3 (which become one receiver and one argument in a method call to +).

  Ruby only has a handful of unary operators, and while it's common to redefine binary operators like + or [] to give your objects some added syntactic sugar, unary operators are less commonly redefined. In my experience, many Rubyists aren't aware that unary operators can be redefined, so this article demonstrates how.

  A Quick Example with -@

  Let's ease into things with the - unary operator. The - unary operator is not the same thing as the - binary operator (where a binary operator has two operants). By default, the - unary operator is used as notation for a negative number, as in -25, whereas the - binary operator performs subtraction, as in 50 - 25. While they look similar, these are different concepts, different operators, and resolve to different methods in Ruby.

  Using the - unary operator on a string in irb:

  ruby-1.9.3-p0 :001 > -"this is a test"
  NoMethodError: undefined method `-@' for "this is a test":String

  The String class doesn't have unary - defined but irb gives us a clue on where to go. Due to the conflict between the unary and binary versions of -, the unary version has a suffix of @. This helps us come up with a solution:

  str = "This is my STRING!"
  
  def str.-@
    downcase
  end
  
  p str     # => "This is my STRING!"
  p -str    # => "this is my string!"

  We've defined the unary - operator by defining its associated -@ method to translate its receiving object to lower case.

  Some Other Operators: +@, ~, ! (and not)

  Let's try a larger example where we subclass String and add our own versions of several other easily overridden unary operators:

  class MagicString < String
    def +@
      upcase
    end
  
    def -@
      downcase
    end
  
    def !
      swapcase
    end
  
    def ~
      # Do a ROT13 transformation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
      tr 'A-Za-z', 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'
    end
  end
  
  str = MagicString.new("This is my string!")
  p +str         # => "THIS IS MY STRING!"
  p !str         # => "tHIS IS MY STRING!"
  p (not str)    # => "tHIS IS MY STRING!"
  p ~str         # => "Guvf vf zl fgevat!"
  p +~str        # => "GUVF VF ZL FGEVAT!"
  p !(~str)      # => "gUVF VF ZL FGEVAT!"
  

  This time we've not only redefined -/-@, but the + unary operator (using the +@ method), ! and not (using the ! method), and ~.

  I'm not going to explain the example in full because it's as simple as I could get it while still being more illustrative than reams of text. Note what operation each unary operator is performing and see how that relates to what is called and what results in the output.

  Note: You cannot redefine ! in Ruby 1.8. This code performs as-is in Ruby 1.9 only. If you remove the ! method and examples, the code otherwise works in Ruby 1.8. There's a longer 1.8 and 1.9 example later in this post.

  Special Cases: & and *

  & and * are also unary operators in Ruby, but they're special cases, bordering on 'mysterious syntax magic.' What do they do?

  & and to_proc

  Reg Braithwaite's The unary ampersand in Ruby post gives a great explanation of &, but in short & can turn objects into procs/blocks by calling the to_proc method upon the object. For example:

  p ['hello', 'world'].map(&:reverse)  # => ["olleh", "dlrow"]

  Enumerable#map usually takes a block instead of an argument, but & calls Symbol#to_proc and generates a special proc object for the reverse method. This proc becomes the block for the map and thereby reverses the strings in the array.

  You could, therefore, 'override' the & unary operator (not to be confused by the equivalent binary operator!) by defining to_proc on an object, with the only restriction being that you must return a Proc object for things to behave. You'll see an example of this later on.

  * and splatting

  There's a lot of magic to splatting but in short, * can be considered to be a unary operator that will 'explode' an array or an object that implements to_a and returns an array.

  To override the unary * (and not the binary * - as in 20 * 32), then, you can define a to_a method and return an array. The array you return, however, will face further consequences thanks to *'s typical behavior!

  A Full Example for Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9

  We've reached the end of our quick tour through Ruby's unary operators, so I wanted to provide an example that shows how to override (or partially override) them that should stand as its own documentation:

  class MagicString < String
    def +@
      upcase
    end
  
    def -@
      downcase
    end
  
    def ~
      # Do a ROT13 transformation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
      tr 'A-Za-z', 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'
    end
  
    def to_proc
      Proc.new { self }
    end
  
    def to_a
      [self.reverse]
    end
  
    if RUBY_VERSION > "1.9.0"
      eval %{def !
        swapcase
      end}
    end
  end
  
  str = MagicString.new("This is my string!")
  p +str                   # => "THIS IS MY STRING!"
  p ~str                   # => "Guvf vf zl fgevat!"
  p +~str                  # => "GUVF VF ZL FGEVAT!"
  p %w{a b}.map &str       # => ["This is my string!", "This is my string!"]
  p *str                   # => "!gnirts ym si sihT"
  
  if RUBY_VERSION > "1.9.0"
    p !str                   # => "tHIS IS MY STRING!"
    p (not str)              # => "tHIS IS MY STRING!"
    p !(~str)                # => "gUVF VF ZL FGEVAT!"
  end
  

  It's almost a cheat sheet of unary operators :-)

  A Further Example: The TestRocket

  TestRocket is a tiny testing library I built for fun a few months ago. It leans heavily on unary operators. For example, you can write tests like this:

  +-> { Die.new(2) }
  --> { raise }
  +-> { 2 + 2 == 4 }
  
  # These two tests will deliberately fail
  +-> { raise }
  --> { true }
  
  # A 'pending' test
  ~-> { "this is a pending test" }
  
  # A description
  !-> { "use this for descriptive output and to separate your test parts" }

  The -> { } sections are just Ruby 1.9 style 'stabby lambdas' but I've (with assistance from Christoph Grabo) added unary methods to them so that you can prefix +, -, ~, or ! to get different behaviors.

  Hopefully you can come up with some more useful application for unary methods on your own objects, of course!

  
• 

  The Ruby Standard Library To Be Converted to Gems for Ruby 2.0?

  Posted: November 7th, 2011, 6:28am MST by Peter Cooper

  The Ruby standard library (a.k.a. stdlib) is a collection of Ruby libraries that, at one time or another, have been considered useful enough to include with the MRI Ruby implementation by standard. Due to the popularity of these libraries, other Ruby implementations have then tended to re-implement or include the standard library too.

  As part of the march toward Ruby 2.0, the state of Ruby's 'standard library' has come up for discussion. A popular line of thinking (and IMHO, very likely to actually happen) is that the standard library should be 'gemified' for Ruby 2.0.

  Why Gemify the Standard Library?

  The standard library approach has a significant flaw. Due to being a large and critical piece of software, MRI's release cycle is slow, yet some libraries require faster updates, perhaps for security or API updates. It would be better, therefore, to have the standard libraries maintained and distributed separately while still being included 'by default' with Ruby implementations.

  We have already seen this sort of approach with RubyGems itself. For example, RubyGems is (at the time of writing) at version 1.8.11, yet the barely 2 week old Ruby 1.9.3p0 comes with RubyGems 1.8.10. While RubyGems is not itself distributed as a gem, it demonstrates the value of having something included with Ruby and still updateable separately.

  Aaron Patterson (of the MRI Ruby Core Team) Explains

  In his talk at RubyKaigi, Aaron tenderlove Patterson spoke about working out which parts of Ruby are 'third party libraries' and how to extract them. After such extraction, Ruby core should be able to commit to or change anything within MRI, but also reference third party gems that are included and installed by default on new installations. Aaron noted that being able to 'iterate faster' was a significant benefit of this approach.

  Aaron also explained that with less coupling between Ruby implementations and the libraries they depend upon, it could be possible in future to upgrade your Ruby interpreter while still maintaining existing versions of the libraries you depend upon. This could help you migrate more gradually or merely help you maintain existing compatibility.

  Further Reading

  The process of gemifying the Ruby standard library is explained on the Ruby implementation wiki with the proposal, implementation, and a list of to do items already laid out. A more extensive discussion (which you can join) is also taking place on the official MRI Ruby issue tracker.

  This process is still in its early stages and there are likely to be opportunities to help maintain or even become the maintainer for certain standard libraries, if you want to get involved.

  
• 

  This Week’s Ruby News: Ruby 1.9.3p0, OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0 and More

  Posted: November 5th, 2011, 4:54pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week's releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

  Headlines

  Ruby 1.9.3-p0 Released
  The first production-ready release of Ruby 1.9.3 is finally here with patchlevel 0's release this week. I've already covered what's new on Ruby Inside (see the link below) but this is a nice step forward for MRI and worth checking out, especially if you want faster Rails loading times.

  MagLev 1.0.0 Released
  It's been a couple of years in the making but MagLev 1.0.0 has released. MagLev is an interesting Ruby implementation and virtual machine built by VMware's GemStone Systems division that orients itself around a novel object persistence layer. The best part? It's open source and MIT licensed. Expect to see more about this soon.

  Ruby 1.9.1 is Dying (Support Ends Jan 31, 2012)
  In a post to the ruby-core mailing list, Ruby 1.9 release manager Yuki Sonoda explains that Ruby 1.9.1 will get no official security fixes or releases after January 31, 2012.

  Articles and Tutorials

  Ruby 1.9.3: What's New and What's Different

  A Guide to HTML5 Boilerplate for Rails Developers
  The 'HTML5 Boilerplate' serves as a useful reference for Rails developers who want to provide structure and convention for the HTML, CSS, and Javascript of an app's front-end. But not all of HTML5 Boilerplate is useful for Rails developers, so with this guide, by Daniel Kehoe, you can pick and choose the components that are useful for your Rails apps.

  Programming With Nothing: Computation with Nothing but Procs
  The striking slidedeck from 'Programming With Nothing', a talk given by Tom Stuart at last week's Ruby Manor unconference. It demonstrates how to implement FizzBuzz solely by creating and calling Proc objects, all thanks to the lambda calculus.

  Thinking Functionally in Ruby (a slidedeck)

  How Do I Create And Publish My First Ruby Gem?

  Advanced Server Definitions in Capistrano

  Screencasts

  Playing with PJAX (from RailsCasts)
  PJAX allows you to quickly update a section of a page using AJAX with automatic pushState support (for URL changes). In the latest episode of RailsCasts, Ryan Bates demonstrates how to use the pjax_rails and rack-pjax gems.

  

  14 Talks from the ArrrrCamp 2011 Conference
  ArrrrCamp was held in Ghent, Belgium a month ago and now videos of the talks are available. Enjoy Corey Haines demonstrating fast Rails tests, Andrew Nesbitt on A/B split testing, Elise Huard on 'data driven development' and more.

  

  The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: Go Deep on Ruby 1.9
  The most comprehensive and up to date walkthrough of Ruby 1.9 for existing Rubyists. It's a commercial screencast by me, Peter Cooper. Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II even said he picked up plenty of stuff from it. There's a 5 minute sample available if you want to see how it works.

  Pik Screencast: A Ruby Version Manager for Windows
  Glenn Goodrich presents a 15 minute screencast taking a look at the Pik Ruby version manager for Microsoft Windows.

  Libraries and code

  OmniAuth 1.0: Authentication APIs Reach A New Level
  OmniAuth is a popular library for performing authentication against numerous external authentication systems (like OAuth, OpenID, Facebook, and Twitter). Version 1.0 brings massive structural changes (for the better) and even includes capabilities to do your local/internal authentication with OmniAuth too. This is a big deal.

  hash_syntax: Converts Ruby Files to and From Ruby 1.9 Hash Syntax
  hash_syntax is an interesting little tool that can go through a Ruby project and convert the source either to or from using the new Ruby 1.9 hash literal syntax. It requires Ruby 1.9 to run.

  ratelimit: A Redis-backed Rate Limiter for Rubyists

  An Introduction to Logging, A New Flexible Logging Library for Ruby

  Appraisal: Test Your Libraries Against Dependencies Far and Wide
  Appraisal is a testing tool that integrates with Bundler to test your library against different versions of dependencies in repeatable scenarios called 'appraisals.'

  capybara-screenshot: Automatic Screenshot when a Cucumber Capybara Scenario Fails

  Gaga: A Git-Backed Key/Value Store in Ruby

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Senior Rails Engineers [San Francisco, California]
  Sharethrough is looking for senior application engineers to help build out their reporting and trafficking platform. You will play a significant role in designing and architecting the core pieces underlying the entirety of Sharethrough's platform. They're located in SF's Financial District.

  Ruby Software Engineer at Square [San Francisco, California]

  Senior Rails Engineer at Scribd (World's #2 Rails Site) [San Francisco, California]

  Last but not least..

  Spree Conference 2012 (Feb 15-16, New York City)
  Spree is probably the most popular open source e-commerce solution built on Rails and there's a conference covering both it and Rails generally in NYC next year. There's already an impressive speaker line up, a GitHub sponsored after party, and an evening hackathon.

  [ad]Gauges is a real time traffic analytics system so you can analyze all your traffic in seconds. Collect and analyze your web traffic for all your sites in real-time using their fast, reliable, hosted system and see overview data for all your sites on a single page. Click here to learn more.

  
• 

  Screencast: Coding Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby the TDD Way with RSpec

  Posted: November 1st, 2011, 6:25pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway's Game of Life from scratch by reading through the 'rules' and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality.

  Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technical writer best known for being co-author of the recently released Rails 3 in Action (along with Yehuda Katz) which I'll be reviewing soon for Ruby Inside. But Ryan's also been getting into doing a little screencasting:

  If you can't see the video above, view it directly on Vimeo here.

  Ryan's technique is just one of many legitimate approaches but many of you will find something to pick up from this, especially if you're not familiar with test driven development or, perhaps, RSpec. If you're already working on koans non-stop and consider yourself well versed in the ways of TDD, you might want to skip it.

  The only downside is that Ryan focuses entirely on the logic without doing a live render of the game board to see his work in action, though this was the right rational choice given the time limit. That would make a good separate project to follow on with, though, if you fancy a little challenge, but be careful to not couple the game logic tightly to any interface you choose to try.

  
• 

  This Week’s Top Ruby News: JRuby 1.6.5, A New Prag Prog Book, Fast Specs, Rails Style Guide and More

  Posted: October 27th, 2011, 10:28am MDT by Peter Cooper

  This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I'm following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you're curious, definitely check it out now.

  Without further ado, here's a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly:

  Headlines and Releases

  JRuby 1.6.5 Released: Rounding out Ruby 1.9 Support
  The primary goal of JRuby's 1.6.x series is to round out the Ruby 1.9 support by fixing any reported incompatibilities. This continues with JRuby 1.6.5 and all JRuby users are encouraged to upgrade. 1.6.5 brings updates to RubyGems, fixes to 1.9 encoding and improved fiber performance.

  Prag Prog Book 'Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby' in Beta
  I haven't checked it out yet but the Pragmatic Programmers have announced the first beta release of a book by David Copeland about building well-formed command line applications in Ruby.

  

  @CodeWisdom: Inspirational Programming Quotes via Twitter
  I've started a new account on Twitter called @CodeWisdom, that's dedicated to sage programming related wisdom and quotes, as well as links to discussions on best practices and techniques. If you're on Twitter, follow along.

  Minitest 2.7.0 Released

  

  Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What's New?
  Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation. What's it about and what might it include? Ruby Inside takes a look.

  Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule Announced: Roll on February 2013!

  Articles and Tutorials

  Connection Management in ActiveRecord (and How To Improve It)
  Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson talks about database connection management in ActiveRecord, how he's not pleased with it, and how he wants to step towards fixing it to be more like File's API.

  Fast Specs!
  Continuing the popular and recent string of posts about making your test or spec runs faster, Les Hill brings us more fast speccing goodness (RSpec specific, in this case) and shares a Rails app that implements his techniques.

  Rails is Not Your Application
  Speaking from the Uncle Bob bible, Nicholas Henry argues that Rails applications are better structured with a 'service layer' to better separate key application functionality from the restrictions of a framework. He presents a good case.

  A Modern Guide to Threads (in Ruby)
  Mike Perham recently spoke at RubyConf 2011 on some advanced threading-related topics. In this article, he explains, from a Ruby perspective, some gotchas with threads and why he thinks you should simply try and avoid them.

  The Rails Style Guide: Rails 3 Advice in a Single README
  The Rails Style Guide is a Rails 3-focused style guide presented in a single README file on GitHub. It covers a lot and is rather opinionated technology wise but is an easy read and you should pick up a few tips nonetheless.

  A Quick Introduction to Rack
  Satish Talim of RubyLearning presents a thorough introduction to Rack, the popular library that abstracts HTTP servers and requests in most common Ruby frameworks and webapp libraries.

  Screencasts

  Generating Spine Scaffolding with Rails
  A super quick introduction to integrating Rails and Spine. Want to build a Rich Internet App in less than 8 minutes? Alex MacCaw shows you how to do it with Rails and the Spine JavaScript library.

  Rails 3: Beginner to Builder - An 8 Part Rails Course Shared Online
  Rails 3: Beginner to Builder was a course given by Richard Schneeman at the University of Texas over eight weeks and he's now shared the videos, slides, and other materials on his blog.

  Libraries and code

  Spinach: A New BDD Framework (Alternative to Cucumber)
  Spinach is a new BDD framework that aims to resolve a number of perceived pain points with the popular Cucumber system. This blog post sums up the differences, pros and cons. Maybe it's the ideal way forward for you too?

  Simple Real-time WebSocket Powered Chat App in a Gist

  GCC Installer for OS X (Without Xcode)
  Gotten sick of needing to install Xcode when setting up RVM or just compiling Ruby on a new Mac? The osx-gcc-installer project can help you skip the pain by just giving you gcc in one hit.

  High Voltage! Using Rails 3.1 for Static Sites
  Nick Quaranto of Thoughtbot wanted to use Rails 3.1 in deploying a static site to take advantage of Rails' features and asset packaging. In this post, he demonstrates using the 'High Voltage' Rails engine to do just that.

  PBKDF2-Ruby: Password Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2) for Ruby

  Watch Tower: Track How Much Time You Spent at the Directory and File Level
  WatchTower helps you track how much time you spend on all of your projects, at the project, directory, and file level. It's built in Ruby and supports TextMate and Xcode on Mac OS X.

  Jobs of the Week

  Junior and Senior Rails Developers at Wimdu GmbH [Berlin, Germany]

  Ruby on Rails Developer (or Enthusiast) Wanted! [Portland, Oregon]

  UI Developer (Contract) at Opower [Arlington, Virginia]

  Last but not least..

  Turbocharge Your Ruby Skillset With My Online Ruby Reloaded Course
  Are you an intermediate Rubyist looking to boost your Ruby skillset with things like test driven development, OO design, building libraries and learning some of the lesser known nooks and crannies of Ruby? My Ruby Reloaded course runs in November and December and is now just over half sold out. If you want to join, check out this page for more info soon and use the code "SHOW" for $80 off the usual rate.

  
• 

  Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule Announced: Roll on 2013!

  Posted: October 24th, 2011, 12:01pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 "release manager" and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0's release. You can read the full post here.

  I've been admitted as a 2.0 release manager by matz. I'll do my
  best. As my first work, I'd like to announce a rough plan for 2.0
  release. Anyone who is interested in 2.0, especially who is thinking
  about feature proposal, should check it out.

  Yusuke Endoh

  The short version of the timeline?

  • August 2012: 'Big feature' freeze. Any proposals and specs for 'major features' should be wrapped up for late August 2012 otherwise they will be deferred.
  • October 2012: Feature freeze. A more conventional feature freeze.
  • February 2013: 2.0 Release. The final version of 2.0 would, hopefully, be released.

  A release in February 2013 would have historical significance by being the 20th anniversary of Ruby's creation. Note that Yusuke corrected the date to February 24, 2013 in a later posting.

  Another note, confirming what Yugui had already said, is that Ruby 2.0 is to be "100% compatible" with Ruby 1.9.3.

  If you want to learn more about Ruby 2.0, I recommend Ruby Inside's last post, Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What’s New? where I summarized the anticipated new features in Ruby 2.0.

  Thanks to Ruby guru Steve Klabnik for the heads up on this news. Follow him on Twitter, it's worth it.

  
• 

  Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What’s New?

  Posted: October 20th, 2011, 9:00am MDT by Peter Cooper

  Yesterday, Matz made a commit to the MRI Ruby repository bumping the trunk version from 1.9.4 to 2.0.0, marking the start of the work of implementing the long-discussed ideas for Ruby 2.0.

  What is Ruby 2.0?

  Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation.

  Ruby 1.9.3 is due out any time soon and Ruby 1.9.4 is under active development (it has moved to a separate branch now that trunk is 2.0.0). We recently learned that Ruby 2.0 would then follow Ruby 1.9.4.

  Will Ruby 2.0 be a huge leap forward?

  No. While 2.0 will include a number of syntax changes, new features and general improvements, mentioned below, it is anticipated to remain backward compatible with code written for 1.9.3 and Matz has stated that the changes are less significant than those made in the 1.8 to 1.9 jump.

  The version number goes up to 2.0 but the changes are rather small. Smaller than the ones we made in 1.9.

  Matz

  The discussion surrounding Ruby 2.0's feature set spans back several years (mostly on the ruby-talk and ruby-core mailing lists) and 2.0 was initially expected to introduce significant syntax changes and not be backwards compatible. Things have changed with Ruby 1.9 moving into production (it was originally a development only version) and 2.0 being an evolution rather than a revolution.

  What will (probably) be new in Ruby 2.0?

  Ruby 2.0 is still not well defined. At the moment, ideas and features are being actively suggested and discussed, but a number have been tipped to make it into Ruby 2.0 at this early stage:

  Keyword Arguments

  In Ruby 2.0: What We Want to Accomplish in the Near Future (recorded in 2010), Matz showed off an example where 1.step(20, 2) could become 1.step(by: 2, to: 20) with the method definition of def step(by: step, to: limit).

  An implementation of keyword arguments by Yusuke Endoh actually triggered the discussion to move trunk to 2.0.0 so this is actively being discussed and implemented.

  Bytecode export/import

  Ruby 1.9 runs on the YARV virtual machine and so will Ruby 2.0, but Ruby 2.0 is expected to make it simple to save pre-compiled Ruby scripts to bytecode representations and to then run these directly. Running pre-compiled bytecode will skip the parsing stage of the standard interpretation process. If you use Rubinius or JRuby you may be familiar with this concept.

  Refinements

  "Refinements" are a construction to make monkey patching safer. Essentially you could "refine" a global class within the context of a specific module so that the monkey patches would only apply in a certain context. Yehuda Katz wrote an excellent writeup about refinements last year.

  Refinements are.. controversial. The performance hit they'd introduce has recently made them less likely to arrive in Ruby 2.0 but I don't believe they're entirely off the table yet. Some form of namespacing of class modifications will probably eventually make it in, however. Another implementation has been called 'traits' and is shown off in the Matz video (linked above).

  Standard libraries becoming gems

  On Twitter today, Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson of the Ruby core team said that the Ruby standard library would be 'moved to gems' in Ruby 2.0 although many of these would still be included with the implementation (rather than being an optional extra download).

  And more..

  As I said before, things are a bit up in the air, but the ideas surrounding Ruby 2.0 should begin to settle over the next year.

  A couple of weeks ago, Koichi Sasada posted the results of a Ruby 2.0 feature questionnaire to the ruby-core mailing list and encouraged people to extend it. It's not a list of features that will make it into Ruby 2.0, but an attempt to see what people would like.

  Koichi's initial list was:

  • Cleanup syntax
  • Bytecode export
  • Symbol GC
  • Remove Proc binding
  • Macros
  • Getting parse tree
  • Getting source code
  • Cross thread Fiber migration
  • Standard Gem
  • Review all standard libraries
  • Remove obsolete one standard libraries
  • Improve Proc#curry
  • Non-blocking I/O
  • Dtrace
  • GC API (replaceable GC)

  As Ruby 2.0 development continues, I'm going to regularly summarize what's going on and show off new features here on Ruby Inside, so keep your eyes peeled :-)

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• 

  What Ruby’s ||= (Double Pipe / Or Equals) Really Does

  Posted: October 17th, 2011, 7:37pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable's value if its value were 'Nothing' (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||='s true meaning which isn't as obvious as many Rubyists think. This spread to Freenode's awesome #ruby-lang IRC channel where I picked it up.

  Abstract (or the TLDR Version)

  A common misconception is that a ||= b is equivalent to a = a || b, but it behaves like a || a = b

  In a = a || b, a is set to something by the statement on every run, whereas with a || a = b, a is only set if a is logically false (i.e. if it's nil or false) because || is 'short circuiting'. That is, if the left hand side of the || comparison is true, there's no need to check the right hand side.

  The Common Misconception

  a ||= b being equivalent to a = a || b is a popular interpretation for two reasons:

  1. If a and b are both local variables, a = a || b is a short and natural reflection of the outcome.
  2. Other operators like += and -= do operate this way (and this standard dates back to C), e.g.: a += b is equivalent to a = a + b

  Do not confuse [op]= with anything related to ||= or &&=. They're entirely different ideas and are implemented entirely different[ly].

  Evan Phoenix (of Rubinius fame)

  What's happening then, if not a = a || b?

  A Starter for One

  Here's a simple example of using a ||= b:

  a = nil
  b = 20
  a ||= b
  a        # => 20
  

  In this case, a ||= b seems to behave like a = a || b. As mentioned earlier, this is entirely due to a and b both being local variables.

  Full Demonstration for Hashes and Arrays

  Let's try something more complicated:

  h = {}
  
  def h.[]=(k, v)
    puts "Setting hash key #{k} with #{v.inspect}"
    super
  end
  
  # 1. The standard ||= approach
  h[:x] ||= 10
  h[:x] ||= 20
  
  # 2. The a = a || b approach
  h[:y] = h[:y] || 10
  h[:y] = h[:y] || 20
  
  # 3. The a || a = b approach
  h[:z] || h[:z] = 10
  h[:z] || h[:z] = 20
  

  The output:

  Setting hash key x with 10
  Setting hash key y with 10
  Setting hash key y with 10
  Setting hash key z with 10

  Note that in the first case, using ||=, the hash key's value is only set once. Once it becomes logically truthful (i.e. anything other than nil or false), h[:x] is no longer assigned any new values, not even itself.

  The second case, using the a = a || b approach, does result in two assignments (of the same value). The value remains 10 but the syntax forces h[:y] to assign itself as a value again.

  In the last case, the behavior is the same as in the first case, demonstrating that a || a = b is a more realistic notation.

  Note: Exactly the same result occurs if we switch the hash for an array and the keys for integers.

  Full Demonstration for Getter/Setter Methods

  A similar outcome occurs if we're referring to objects with getter/setter methods (which you may call accessors):

  class MyClass
    attr_reader :val
  
    def val=(val)
      puts "Setting val to #{val.inspect}"
      @val = val
    end
  end
  
  # 1. The standard ||= approach
  obj = MyClass.new
  obj.val ||= 'a'
  obj.val ||= 'b'
  
  # 2. The a = a || b approach
  obj = MyClass.new
  obj.val = obj.val || 'c'
  obj.val = obj.val || 'd'
  
  # 3. The a || a = b approach
  obj = MyClass.new
  obj.val || obj.val = 'e'
  obj.val || obj.val = 'f'
  

  And the output shows off similar behavior to the hash and array example:

  Setting val to "a"
  Setting val to "c"
  Setting val to "c"
  Setting val to "e"

  Default Hash Values: A Sneaky Edge Case?

  Our travels don't end there though. Back in 2008, David Black noticed an edge case with hashes that have default values. If you follow the logic above to the letter, this case will not surprise you, although from a pragmatic point of view, it's curious.

  Let's take a look:

  hsh = Hash.new('default')
  
  hsh[:x]         # => 'default'
  
  # 1. The standard ||= approach
  hsh[:x] ||= 10
  p hsh           # => {}
  
  # 2. The a = a || b approach
  hsh[:y] = hsh[:y] || 10
  p hsh           # {:y=>"default"}
  
  # 3. The a || a = b approach
  hsh[:z] || hsh[:z] = 10
  p hsh           # {:y=>"default"}
  

  Hashes with default values act in an.. interesting way, depending on your point of view. Merely accessing a value doesn't mean that the value is reified (made concrete) in the hash itself. The reason for this is that you can assign Procs to a hash's default_proc in order to perform calculations (or even to set values) when an unset key is accessed. It would be undesirable to avoid this behavior merely because a key was accessed earlier on.

  Again, we note that the a || a = b-style approach gives the result closest to the reality of ||=.

  describe "Conditional operator assignment 'obj.meth op= expr'" do
  it "is equivalent to 'obj.meth op obj.meth = expr'" do

  RubySpec's variables_spec file

  Undefined Variables: Another Tricky Case

  In the comments for this post, Vikrant Chaudhary brought up another interesting case:

  If a is not defined, a || a = 42 raises NameError, while a ||= 42 returns 42. So, they don't seem to be equivalent expressions.

  Vikrant Chaudhary

  It's lucky I said "behaves like" earlier - phew! But joking aside, Vikrant makes a good point.

  This tricky case is a little like the hash case. Something intriguing about how Ruby operates behind the scenes throws a spanner into the works again. That is, a variable assignment, even if not run, immediately summons that variable into being. For example:

  x = 10 if 2 == 5
  puts x
  

  Even though the first line won't be run, x will exist on the second line and no exception will be raised. Another nasty one:

  x = x
  puts x
  

  Whoa! Well, a ||= 42 is working in a similar way. Ruby sees the assignment at the parsing stage and creates the variable in a way that it wouldn't with a || a = 42, even though it ends up behaving like the latter once actual execution occurs.

  Further Reading

  This appears to have been a popular discussion point in Rubyland over the years, so I would be remiss not to include links to some of the best references:

  • x ||= y, Redux by Rick DeNatale.
  • The Reddit discussion about Dave Fayram's post
  • comp.lang.ruby: Please explain nuances of ||=
  • comp.lang.ruby: The definitive list of ||= (OR Equal) threads and pages
  • rubyonrails-talk: What does "||=" mean?
  • A short-circuit (||=) edge case

  And if this tickled your fancy..

  Today I've opened up tickets for the 3rd and 4th runs of my Ruby Reloaded online Ruby course. It's aimed at intermediate developers who want to dig deeper, boost their confidence, and bolster their Ruby skill set. We dig into test driven development (TDD), object oriented design, building a library from scratch, code style, and more. It takes place in November and December.

  

  Check out RubyReloaded.com to learn more about the course, what it involves, and when it runs. There are 24 places on each and about half have gone to waiting list folks so far.

  P.S. The coupon code INSIDE will give you a $50 discount to thank you for being a Ruby Inside reader!

  
• 

  The Last Week in Ruby: Rails 3.1.1, Sinatra Recipes, Spree Gets Funded and more

  Posted: October 17th, 2011, 4:10pm MDT by Peter Cooper

  Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts" posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I've shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.

  There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I'm going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. The longer articles will then slot in nicely in between :-)

  So here we go, starting off from Ruby Weekly issue 63. You can check out the full 63 issue archive, if you like, or even sign up for Ruby Weekly here if you weren't familiar with it. Or, of course, stay here on Ruby Inside and get the same (or more) each week - it's your choice!

  Without further ado..

  Headlines

  Rails Recipes: Rails 3 Edition (in Beta)
  Chad Fowler has been updating the Pragmatic Programmers' Rails Recipes book to Rails 3.1 standards. It's in beta now (as an e-book) with the full print release expected in December 2011.

  Rails 3.1.1 Released: A Touch Up and Fixes Release

  RDoc 3.10 Released

  Spree (Open Source Rails E-commerce System) Raises $1.5 Million
  Spree is a popular open source Rails e-commerce system and its creator has raised $1.5m in venture capital to take it even further (as well as offer Spree-based consulting). Tom Preston Werner (GitHub) and James Lindenbaum (Heroku) have joined as advisors.

  Articles and Tutorials

  Sinatra Recipes - Handy Recipes for Working with Sinatra
  Sinatra Recipes is a community contributed set of recipes and techniques for working with the popular Sinatra webapp library. There are examples of using many different libraries with Sinatra that are bound to prove useful, if only to learn from.

  Give It A Pry
  Pry is a powerful REPL environment for Ruby and an ideal alternative to IRB. Jon Jackson shows off his top 5 reasons for switching to Pry - maybe they'll convince you too.

  Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns
  Monadic programming is a pattern that comes up in a lot of code, just like most patterns. While associated with pure functional language like Haskell, Dave Fayram demonstrates how many patterns used by Ruby developers are monadic too.

  Creating Your First Gem

  The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: Go Deep on Ruby 1.9
  The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough is a thorough, up-to-date video walkthrough of Ruby 1.9 - perfect for 1.8 developers who are unsure about the leap. Even Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II said he picked up plenty of stuff from it.. but beware, it's long :-)

  Using rbenv to Manage Rubies

  Presentations and Videos

  Gregory Moeck: Why You Don't Get Mock Objects
  Not a big fan of mock objects in testing? Don't even know what mocks are? Get up to speed with Gregory Moeck who makes a convincing case for mocks in this RubyConf 2011 replay. In essence, if you're doing object orientation properly, you need mocks (ooh, controversial!)

  Your Data, Your Search: ElasticSearch
  A wonderful Ruby-focused slide-deck by Karel Minarik (that was presented at EURUKO 2011) all about the concept of 'searching', the flaws in naive solutions, and a tour of the ElasticSearch system and using it from a Rails app.

  Complex Ruby Concepts Simplified (Presentation)
  At RubyConf 2011, Matt Aimonetti gave a presentation that dug into Ruby's garbage collection, C interface, global interpreter lock, and more, and the slides are definitely easy (and worthwhile) to follow.

  The Intro to Rails Screencast I Wish I Had
  Over at NetTuts+, Jeffrey Way has put together an interesting 40 minute 'introduction to Rails' screencast that takes the high road and covers topics like TDD, auto testing, RSpec, and Capybara. It's an introduction for people who want to get it right first try.

  Libraries and code

  Tire: A Rich Ruby API for the ElasticSearch Search Engine/Database System
  Tire is a Ruby client for ElasticSearch, written by Karel Minarik. ElasticSearch is a scalable, distributed, cloud-ready, highly-available, full-text search engine and database with powerfull aggregation features, communicating by JSON over RESTful HTTP, based on Lucene, written in Java.

  Queue Classic: A Powerful PostgreSQL-Backed Queueing Library
  Queue Classic is a PostgreSQL-backed queueing library built by Ryan Smith of Heroku that focuses on concurrent job locking, minimizing database load and providing a simple, intuitive user experience.

  Ruby Jobs of the Week

  Sr (Agile) Software Engineer at Apple [Cupertino, CA]
  Apple is seeking the very best engineers to be part of a continuously tested and integrated development process in its Developer Publications team. The systems they build are used for all Apple developer documentation for Mac OS X and iOS. You need deep knowledge of Ruby including Rails, RSpec, Bundler and Devise.

  Ruby on Rails Developer at ENP Network [North Palm Beach, Florida]

  Ohloh Sr. Software Engineer at Black Duck Software [Waltham, Massachusetts]

  Last but not least..

  

  The Ruby Toolbox Gets A Makeover
  The Ruby Toolbox is a popular site that categorizes and rates gems by their popularity and functionality. If you're looking for a gem and you can't quite figure out which ones are out there, it's worth a look. A recent redesign has really kicked things up a notch.

  

Slashdot

• 

  The Nine Circles of IT Hell

  Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 11:23am MDT by Soulskill

  snydeq writes "Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul,' Tynan writes. From IT limbo, to tech lust, to stakeholder gluttony, to tech-pro treachery, the IT inferno is not buried deep within the earth, it's just down the hall. 'Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pros beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it. Shall we descend?'"

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  Why Linux Is Good For Low-End Smartphones

  Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 10:41am MDT by samzenpus

  jfruhlinger writes "Nokia's announcement that it was developing a Linux distro for low-end smartphones, shortly after abandoning the Linux-based Meego OS for Windows Phone 7, was a little puzzling. But it actually makes good business sense in the smartphone world. While WP7 aims for the high end, there's a market for cheaper and less complex phones that still beat boring old feature phones, especially in emerging economies. And, unlike Symbian and the heavily tweaked Meego, Linux can be quickly and cheaply brought to market as a low-end smartphone OS."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
• 

  UK To Get £50m Graphene Research Hub

  Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 9:58am MDT by samzenpus

  twoheadedboy writes "The UK Government has made a big commitment to the development of the 'wonder material' graphene, the most likely candidate to replace silicon in computing chips in the future. A £50 million Graphene Global Research and Technology Hub was announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. It is hoped the facility will help commercialize graphene. The University of Manchester, where the material was discovered, welcomed the announcement and will be one of the possible locations of the hub. Right now, universities will be getting ready to apply for their chance to host the graphene hub."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.