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Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland.
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http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20051204.html
Ruby Weekly News 28th November - 4th December 2005
==================================================
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by
Tim Sutherland.
[Contribute to the next newsletter.]
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* RubyConf 05 Audio and Video files resurrected!
------------------------------------------------
Ezra Zygmuntowicz restored the audio/video archive of RubyConf 2005,
after the server they were stored on was broken into.
* 4 December meeting - Toronto Ruby User Group
----------------------------------------------
Mike Stok noted that the Toronto Ruby User Group were having (did
have) a meeting on December 4.
Hampton:
"I have an exam the next day, but I'm going to do my best to make it!"
That's the spirit.
* Ron Jeffries implementing Extended Sets
-----------------------------------------
Ron Jeffries is writing a series of Extreme Programming articles about
"Extended Set Theory", with implementations in Ruby.
James Edward Gray II: "This is a great series of articles and he
openly invites insights from Ruby Gurus reading along. Bring your
thinking caps!"
* Rails and Django Debate
-------------------------
John W. Long announced a "debate" between the main developers of Rails
and Django (a Python web framework), held in Chicago on December 3rd.
See [Snakes and Rubies] and [RedHanded coverage].
* December Ruby events in the SF Bay Area
-----------------------------------------
Rich Morin announced a couple of December Ruby events in the San
Francisco Bay area.
The San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group is on the 13th, followed by The
Beer & Pizza SIG on the 28th.
Threads
=======
String#to_rx ?
--------------
Alex Fenton asked if the following would be a useful addition to the
standard String class. It is intended to be used in place of
/#{Regexp.escape(a_string)}/.
class String
def to_rx
Regexp.new( Regexp.escape(self) )
end
end
Austin Ziegler said that the name to_rx is not "expressive" enough for a
core method, and suggested escape_regexp.
The thread turned to looking at the changes to regular expression syntax
and behaviour proposed for Perl 6.
Help getting around iconv on a PC
---------------------------------
Anders got an error "No such file to load-iconv" on his Windows machine,
and asked where he could find the library, compiled for Windows?
Dave Burt posted a link.
is there a way to get or list all available classes?
----------------------------------------------------
Daniel Sche asked how to write a program that lists all the classes it
knows of, and Wayne Vucenic provided the answer:
ObjectSpace.each_object(Class) { |c| p c }
need some Ruby magic
--------------------
Hammed Malik wanted a way to shuffle an array into random order.
Jeff Wood said the Facets project has some implementations, and David A.
Black noted that the most common idiom is the beautifully succint
array.sort_by { rand }
The code associates each value in the array with a random number in
[0.0, 1.0), then orders by the random numbers.
Mauricio FernáÏdez said that the method has a (small) bias, since if by
chance the same random number turns up twice then the relative order of
their elements will be preserved.
"This means that permutations preserving the relative order of one (or
more) pair of elements of the original array are a bit more probable."
He also worked out of the probability of a collision for various array
sizes (the Birthday Problem comes into play), with the "53 bits of
pseudo-randomness" you get from a call to rand:
array size P(#rand() collision)
1000 5.54558e-11
10000 5.55056e-09
1000000 5.55096e-05
10000000 5.53574e-03
"A collision implies that the associated pair of elements has got the same
ordering in the output array, instead of 50-50 chances of it being
reversed."
Quality of Ruby Implementation ?
--------------------------------
GJB:
| Much of the discussion concerning Ruby focuses on the language itself
| and on how enjoyable it is to program in. I'm still a Ruby novice but I
| agree with these sentiments. However, I have not heard much discussion
| about the quality of the Ruby VM implementation. How
| good/mature/production ready is it? So far I've used it for simple
| development tasks/utilities but not in production.
Bill Kelly said that he wasn't sure which measure of "quality" GJB was
looking for, but that he had some software that provides administration
for a Quake server, and has an uptime of hundreds of days.
| It uses TCP and UDP networking, and keeps a fairly large dynamic
| in-memory data structure (100 megs or so)... I also dynamically reload
| code modules without quitting the application on a periodic basis, when
| adding simple new features or making bug fixes.
Peter Hickman added many others use Ruby for production tasks.
Memory Leaks: How to see GC Roots?
----------------------------------
Sven C. Koehler wanted to know if there's a way to find all the garbage
collector "roots" in his program, to help find the source of a memory
leak.
As an alternative, Robert Klemme gave a one liner that shows the number of
instances of each class, e.g.
[[String, 582],
[Class, 185],
[Module, 18],
...]
Joel VanderWerf pointed out a patch to the Ruby interpreter that shows all
objects that are reachable, and the paths that can be used to reach them.
This provides the information Sven was looking for, plus a lot more.
Stephen Kellett said that his (proprietary, currently Windows-only) tool
Ruby Memory Validator can also show this information.
Weird Numbers (#57)
-------------------
Martin DeMello posted this week's Ruby Quiz.
| A weird number is defined as a number, n, such that the sum of all its
| divisors (excluding n itself) is greater than n, but no subset of its
| divisors sums up to exactly n.
|
| Write a program to find all the weird numbers less than a given input.
New Releases
============
Ruby for Postioning Device
--------------------------
kleinman introduced Ruby for Positioning Device.
"The project allows retrieval of GPSr data and conversion into GPX for use
with popular geomapping software like Google Earth and others."
langhelp-0.9.0
--------------
rubikitch: "Langhelp may be the first tool written in EmacsRuby in the
world. In other words, langhelp is an practical example of EmacsRuby
script."
It provides a quick way of getting documentation on interfaces in a
variety of programming languages, inside Emacs.
See also [langhelp-0.9.1].
Ferret 0.3.0 (port of Apache Lucene to pure ruby)
-------------------------------------------------
David Balmain released version 0.3.0 of Ferret, a searching and indexing
library based off Apache Lucene.
Performance has been improved, and bugs around locking fixed.
Rabbit 0.3.0
------------
Rabbit 0.0.3 was released, improving theme support and fixing some
rendering bugs.
Rabbit is used to make presentation slides from text files formatted as
RD.
ruby-postgres 0.8.0 (RC)
------------------------
Dave Lee posted a Release Candidate of ruby-postgres 0.8.0.
ruby-postgres is a library for connecting to PostgreSQL database systems
from Ruby.
el4r-1.0.0 - EmacsLisp for Ruby
-------------------------------
rubikitch released version 1.0.0 of el4r, which allows you to write Emacs
programs in Ruby.
Komodo 3.5.1 -- a professional Ruby IDE
---------------------------------------
ActiveState released Komodo 3.5.1, an IDE for dynamic languages.
Curt Hibbs: "This version fully supports Ruby on all platforms (the
previous version was not available on Windows)." Curt also [blogged] the
release.
KirbyBase 2.5
-------------
Jamey Cribbs announced a new release of KirbyBase, a "small, pure-Ruby
database management system that stores it's data in plain-text files."
It is now available as a gem, and has a fix for a subtle indexing bug,
plus a number of enhancements to assist Assaph Mehr's work on writing an
ActiveRecord adaptor for it.
Ruport 0.2.9: Taggable DataSets, FasterCSV integration, and Pretty Printing,
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh my!
------
Gregory Brown added a "ton" of features to Ruport, a report generating /
formatting framework and library.
He also asks if someone would write a tutorial.
See also [Ruby Reports Mailing List.]
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