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Ruby 1.9.2-p290 Released: The Lowdown on Ruby’s Latest Production Release

Posted: July 15th, 2011, 6:47pm MDT by Peter Cooper
Over at the always-riveting official Ruby blog, Shota Fukumori has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.2-p290, the latest 'patchlevel' release of the current production release of Ruby MRI.

Patchlevel 290 is the first production-level patchlevel release of MRI since patchlevel 180 back in February so it's worth upgrading if you're on 1.9.2. The release post duly notes:

This release doesn't include any security fixes, but many bugs are fixed in this release.

Shota Fukumori

So what changed? And how can you upgrade? Let me spill the beans.
What's Changed From p180 to p290?
Quite a lot got changed in terms of the numbers. 132 files were tweaked with a total of 3505 lines added and 788 taken away.

A selection of the fixes:
- require 'date'; Date.new === nil throws an undefined method error for coerce on p180 - this has now been fixed
- The Thread.kill segfaults when the object to be killed isn't a thread bug has been resolved.
- Tweaks to reduce segmentation faults when using zlib on x86-64 Darwin (OS X) - always good
- Modification to prevent random number sequence repetition on forked child processes in SecureRandom
- Fix to io system to resolve a Windows-only bug where characters are being read incorrectly due to ASCII not being treated as 7 bit
- A tweak to Psych (the YAML parser) to plug a memory leak
- Load paths are now always expanded by rb_et_expanded_load_path (I think this might yield a performance gain?)
- Fixes to Psych's treatment and testing of string taint
- Prevention of temporary objects being garbage collected in some cases
- Fixes to resolve compilation problems with Visual C++ 2010
- A fix so that Tk's extconf.rb would run successfully
- Lots of Tk related fixes generally - I'm guessing Tk is very popular amongst the core team, particularly in Japan, because it seems to be a common release blocker.
- A fix to string parsing to resolve an obscure symbol-containing-newlines parsing bug
How To Upgrade to Ruby 1.9.2-p290
If you're on Windows, RubyInstaller 1.9.2-p290 has been released.

If you compile your own version of Ruby, just grab one of the archive files listed in the official post and do your usual compilation shuffle. Nothing new there.

If you're an RVM user, you'll be glad to know the RVM team were on the ball and released an update within hours to support p290. Your upgrade steps are:
```
rvm get head
rvm reload
```
At this stage, you can either run rvm install ruby-1.9.2-p290 to install p290 from scratch, or if you're already running p180 and wish to upgrade your existing environment, run rvm upgrade ruby-1.9.2-p180 ruby-1.9.2-p290 and you're cooking with gas.

Some users have noticed that running rvm upgrade as above got an error where the wrong RVM executable was being run, but it seems to resolve itself if you open a fresh shell (despite running rvm reload) so try that out if you hit the "Unable to install" error.
13 New Ruby and Rails Jobs for July 2011

Posted: July 15th, 2011, 2:05pm MDT by Peter Cooper

The Ruby and Rails job scene continues to grow through 2011 and we've got *drumroll* 13 (lucky for some) jobs to share from the Ruby Jobs board from companies like Simon & Schuster, AlphaSights and CustomInk. They're all across the US with a couple in the UK for good measure.

To promote a job, see the Post A Job page. A bonus is your ad gets into the 6463 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free and our 5837-follower-strong @rubyinside Twitter account.
Braintree Seeks Internal Rails Developer - Chicago, IL
Braintree, a popular payment gateway provider and long-term user of Rails, is looking for an exceptional Rails developer. You'll need at least one year of experience with Rails, TDD/BDD and working on Unix-like platforms (e.g. Linux). Git experience would be a plus too — click here to learn more.
Test Driven Ruby and Javascript Developer - SF and LA, California
Carbon Five builds web and mobile products for startups, institutional companies and non-profit organizations using a finely tuned agile process with cutting edge tools and technology. Join a team of seasoned pros in a highly-collaborative environment and work on a new project every few months — click here to learn more.
Ruby on Rails Developer - London, United Kingdom
AlphaSights is looking for a London-based Ruby on Rails Developer with a passion for Ruby and Rails to work in a small team at their Covent Garden offices. No commercial Rails experience is necessary but you need to be highly motivated — click here to learn more.
Ruby Programmer - Nutley, New Jersey
Xquizit is looking for a full-time Ruby and Rails developer with a MySQL background. The firm is upgrading technology from .Net to Rails. A salary of $125k p.a. is on offer — click here to learn more.
Ruby on Rails Developer for Major Publisher - New York, New York
Simon & Schuster is looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer to work in their Scrum/XP team in midtown Manhattan. Experience with JavaScript is necessary and experience with Redis, Objective C and C# are plusses — click here to learn more.
Rails Software Engineer - San Mateo, California
Coupa Software is the leading provider of cloud spend management solutions and they're looking for a Rails Software Engineer to work with an agile, collaborative, and collegial team of accomplished software engineers, designers and business owners to develop and evolve the Coupa platform and applications — click here to learn more.
Ruby on Rails / Postgres Database Developer - Los Angeles, California
Oblong Industries is a tech company working on cutting edge 'spatial' interface systems (think Minority Report). They're looking for a Ruby on Rails / Postgres Database Developer to work on their main product's Web-facing SDK — click here to learn more.
Ruby on Rails Developer - Canton, Connecticut
Sports Technologies is a successful startup working on fantasy games and products for some of the biggest names in sports. They want a Ruby on Rails Developer to join their team and are offering $60-100k — click here to learn more.
Web Developer - Falls Church, Virginia
Demosphere International, Inc. is looking to fill an immediate full-time position for a Web Developer. Demosphere specializes in online solutions for youth, amateur, and professional sports organizations — click here to learn more.
Rails Developer for Consumer Web Apps - Silver Spring, Maryland
Webs is the leader in building websites for micro and small businesses, providing innovative platform, tools, and applications that members can use to easily build professional websites. They're looking for a Rails Developer — click here to learn more.
Rails Developer - Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom
Changework Now is an award-winning online recruitment solution provider looking for an enthusiastic Rails developer with over 1 year of experience of Rails, version control, and relational database design. They're based in beautiful Henley, world famous for its rowing races and regattas — click here to learn more.
Sr. Ruby on Rails Developer - Fairfax, Virginia
CustomInk is an innovative custom product company offering hundreds of t-shirt styles and colors, golf balls, towels, and more for users to customize. They're looking for a senior Ruby on Rails Developer to work on their critical customer-facing webapp — click here to learn more.
Ruby on Rails Developer - Boulder, Colorado
Foraker Labs is a Colorado-based Web and mobile app development consultancy with a serious eye for design and exciting apps. They're looking for someone with a passion for programming and beautiful code. You'll need significant Ruby, Rails, database design and TDD experience and it's a full-time, on-site position in their Boulder, Colorado office — click here to learn more.

And that's it! Want to keep up with Ruby jobs long-term? Check out the Rails Jobs Board - there are new jobs each week.
Amazon Releases aws-sdk, An Official AWS SDK for Ruby Developers

Posted: July 15th, 2011, 9:22am MDT by Peter Cooper
Amazon has unveiled an official Ruby SDK for AWS! Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services has been a rip-roaring success since its first publicly-available service, S3 (Simple Storage Storage), was released in 2006. It has since expanded to about 20 services in all, the most popular being S3 and the "elastic compute cloud" EC2.

There have previously been unofficial Ruby libraries for interfacing with Amazon's many services, including PoolParty, right_aws, and Marcel Molina's awesome aws-s3, and Amazon even released some bits and pieces of Ruby code before, but the new aws-sdk gem represents a stronger effort to have a single, official cohesive library for Rubyists using AWS.
What Does aws-sdk Support?
A quick laundry list:
- EC2
- S3
- SQS (queue service)
- SNS (notifications service)
- SES (Simple E-mail Service)
- SimpleDB (in the form of an ORM)
This covers the most used items of the AWS suite though some further investigation needs to be done to see if Elastic MapReduce and Elastic Block Store has been baked into the EC2 stuff. There's no Route 53 or Mechanical Turk support as yet, though Mark Percival's RTurk library is still being updated and supports the latter.
Getting Started With aws-sdk
Installing the new official AWS SDK gem is a piece of cake:
```
gem install aws-sdk
```
(Note: aws-sdk has the Nokogiri XML/HTML parsing library as a dependency so if you're using MRI, you'll need to be in an environment where that can be compiled. It isn't pure Ruby.)

Now, let's roll out a simple file upload system using the S3 support available in aws-sdk:
```
require 'aws-sdk'

bucket_name = 'mytestbucket'
source_filename = '/tmp/something.txt'

AWS.config(
  :access_key_id => ACCESS_KEY_ID,
  :secret_access_key => SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
)

# Create the basic S3 object
s3 = AWS::S3.new

# Load up the 'bucket' we want to store things in
bucket = s3.buckets[bucket_name]

# If the bucket doesn't exist, create it
unless bucket.exists?
  puts "Need to make bucket #{bucket_name}.."
  s3.buckets.create(bucket_name)
end

# Grab a reference to an object in the bucket with the name we require
object = bucket.objects[File.basename(source_filename)]

# Write a local file to the aforementioned object on S3
object.write(:file => source_filename)
```
Note that you'll need to set ACCESS_KEY_ID and SECRET_ACCESS_KEY somehow. You could do this with a YAML file you load in, hard code into your script (not recommended for security reasons), or perhaps use environment variables (a common approach with the Java tools, I believe). You can get your own AWS Access Key ID and the Secret Access Key from your Security Credentials page in your AWS settings.

If you are familiar with the already existing AWS::S3 library, you should note that the new aws-sdk library is not compatible with it and it cannot be loaded at the same time. You should also note that the code used to make everything work is quite different with aws-sdk and while porting a script from one to the other shouldn't be a lengthy job, it's not a straightforward search and replace either.
Further Reading
This was just a flying visit with a basic overview of using aws-sdk for S3. To learn more, hit up the aws-sdk-for-ruby repository on GitHub to see more examples and sample code, as well as the official AWS SDK for Ruby page by Amazon.

One thing I noticed is that if you open up the aws-sdk gem and snoop around the source code, you can learn a lot more than from Amazon's own articles. The code is well documented and I had to refer to it a few times already. So definitely crack open that gem and have a dig around, you'll find useful stuff in there.

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