The latest installment of the series of posts crammed with random Ruby links, articles, and resources to kick off your week!
Earlier this month, the videos from the GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference) conference that took place back in April went online. The talks are all available in MPEG 4 video and MP3 audio formats. Video and audio quality are really good overall (no annoying humming or reverb that often plague such undertakings).
Talks include Using Ruby to Fight AIDS, MacRuby and HotCocoa, Building Custom Web Proxies in Ruby, and Sinatra: The Framework Within, although there are 17 to check out overall.
Yesterday Phusion released version 2.2.4 of Passenger - the de facto Rails and Rack-based Web app deployment module for Apache and nginx. It's the latest in a line of security and stability releases so you might want to get up to date. Crucially, a 8KB-per-request memory leak has been fixed since 2.2.3. Upgrading is as easy as with all previous point releases.
Perhaps the most horrible Ruby project I've seen in some time but, luckily, an entirely tongue in cheek one - Enterprise by Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame). Enterprise suggests that writing Ruby in XML yields all sorts of "enterprise" benefits. I wasn't going to link to it, but it blew up on both Reddit and del.icio.us, so someone must find it entertaining. If it keeps Aaron entertained enough to keep developing awesome libraries like Nokogiri, I'm grudgingly for it..
Eventful - Improvements for Observable, Adding Events To Your ObjectsEventful is a small extension for Ruby's Observable module that adds named events, block listeners and event bubbling features. If you haven't used Observable before, it basically provides a simple mechanism for objects to inform other objects of state changes - Eventful builds upon that basic functionality. The basic Eventful page has a few simple examples to whet your appetite.
Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy has produced a new, free screencast for the New Relic RailsLab site called Rack & Metal. In about twenty minutes Gregg covers the basics of Rack and Rack middleware before moving on to showing how Rack fits into the Rails stack. It's a great primer if Rack and Rails Metal are still new to you or you want to see how they fit together in the grand scheme of things.