Miscellaneous on SWiK

Itsartmag - Making of Lighthouse short

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:05:16 -0700

Itsartmag has posted a nice making of interview on Promotion Studio's Lighthouse film. The article is a nice look behind the scenes and into the thought process of the short. Read the article...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Ruby on Bells: The Ruby-Powered Musical Glass Playing Machine

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:15:01 -0700

Ruby on Bells is a demo of the Madrona fork of RAD (Ruby Arduino Development) itself a Ruby bridge to Arduino, an open source electronics prototyping platform. Powered by a simple Ruby script, a set of glasses are hit by small mallets on servos, resulting in a Philip Glass-esque cacophony. It's a compelling demo, and if physical computing intrigues you, the tools available to Ruby and Arduino developers are now mature enough to bring interesting results within easy reach.

A longer "behind the scenes" video explaining how it was put together and how the code looks is also available. The code used is a very simple Ruby-based DSL. Couple this with Giles Bowkett's MIDI generator and you could have a lot of fun.

RedCloth 4.0 Released: 40x Faster Textile Rendering

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:53:20 -0700

RedCloth is a popular Ruby library for converting Textile-formatted text into HTML. Initially developed by WhyTheLuckyStiff, it's now under the guardianship of Jason Garber, who has just released version 4 (RubyForge or Github). This is a significant update, following on from 3.0.4 which was released almost three years ago, and features a handful of significant improvements and changes:

New SuperRedCloth (RedCloth 4.0) is a total rewrite using Ragel for the parsing.

Markdown support has been removed.

Single newlines become <br> tags, just as in traditional RedCloth and other Textile parsers.

HTML special characters are automatically escaped inside code signatures, like Textile 2. This means you can simply write @<br />@ and the symbols are escaped whereas in RedCloth 3 you had to write @<br />@ to make the code fragment readable.

HTML embedded in the Textile input does not often need to be escaped from Textile parsing.

The parser will not wrap lines that begin with a space in paragraph tags.

Rudimentary support for LaTeX is built in.

RedCloth::VERSION on a line by itself inserts the version number into the output.

Output (less newlines and tabs) is identical to Textile 2 except a few cases where the RedCloth way was preferable.

Over 500 tests prevent regression

It's 40 times faster than the previous version.

Unless fiddling with the edge version on Github interests you, you can install or update with gem in the usual way - gem install RedCloth, etc.

RubyFringe Roundup: The Best Ruby Conference Ever?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:58:51 -0700

(Photo credit: Kieran Huggins)

RubyFringe - described as a "pricey, limited-attendance smoozefest" by Ruby documentation co-ordinator James Britt or as "an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture" by the organizers - went ahead last week and appears to have been a significant hit. A small conference with a reasonably high ticket price (though far less than RailsConf Europe!), RubyFringe was set to be a very unique sort of conference with parties, drinks and out-of-hours entertainment laid on, and a limited number of tickets made available to ensure a more intimate gathering. The gamble appears to have paid off.

Praise

I'm not quite sure exactly what went down (I had to pull out of attending) but all references I've seen have been almost over-the-top with excitement and praise:

Soleone says: "Rubyfringe was amazing! So many good talks and great people. Best talk: Giles' presentation on computer generated music. Laughed my ass off!"

Rob Sanheim says: "rubyfringe was a blast, and now i can't sleep."

Lennon Day-Reynolds says: "RubyFringe after-party unsurprisingly turned out to be awesome."

Josh Merchant described it as "an amazing - inspirational - creative- experience."

Heck, there are far too many positive mentions to read on Twitter.

Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch wrote directly to Ruby Inside:

RubyFringe was a huge win. Unspace set out to raise the bar for software conferences, and I think that they succeeded. I hope that RubyFringe does for web conferences what Rails did for web development; show others that there is a better way, that it does not require corporate sponsorship, and that it can fun, artistic, and productive all at the same time.

Content

There are over 1000 photos from the event on Flickr.

Joey deVilla has put together some handy notes for most of the presentations.

Rowan Hick has put together a list of his RubyFringe highlights.

InfoQ attended the event and, I am told, will be putting up videos of several presentations on their site soon. Until then, the content of the talks is summarized here.

The next RubyFringe?

With such success, it's inevitable another RubyFringe conference will take place within the next year. If you're interested, Pete Forde suggests joining the Google group, and keeping an eye on RubyFringe.com for more info (although it'll be here at Ruby Inside too). It remains to be seen if the success of RubyFringe will encourage "avant garde" conferences elsewhere in the world or for non Ruby communities generally, but Ruby Inside wants to hear about them if so.

libxml-ruby 0.8.0 Released: Ruby Gets Fast, Reliable XML Processing At Last

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:51:41 -0700

Ruby's is not known for its deftness with XML. On RubyFlow, I considered calling the community to arms over it, and solicited twenty responses on what the problem is, and what we could do about it. Robert Fischer was lamenting on the state of Ruby's libxml library, and didn't seem to like REXML much either. Tim Bray has also had a few complaints about REXML. It seemed there was a problem to be fixed; a gap in the market, as it were, for a decent XML parser for Ruby. Hpricot, despite really being an HTML parser, would have to get us by in the meantime.

Today, however, libxml-ruby 0.8.0 has been released, and Charlie Savage explains why this is such a big deal. libxml-ruby now runs on Windows (thanks to Charlie), doesn't segfault all the time, and the bindings have all been fixed over the past year (thanks to Dan Janowski). You can get going with it right now with a simple gem install libxml-ruby

libxml-ruby is known for its performance, the latest release doesn't disappoint. For a range of simple tasks, libxml clocks in at ten times quicker than Hpricot like-for-like and between 30 and 60 times faster than REXML. Charles adds:

In addition to performance, the libxml-ruby bindings provide impressive coverage of libxml's functionality. Goodies include:

SAX

DOM

XMLReader (streaming interface)

XPath

XPointer

XML Schema

DTDs

XSLT (split into the libxslt-ruby bindings)

Charles is planning to write a proper tutorial in the next week, covering some of the key features, but suggests referring to the API documentation in the meantime. The test suite (located in the test directory that comes with libxml-ruby) also looks like a great resource for code examples; very clean and straightforward. If you have any libxml-ruby tutorials or resources of your own, please post them in the comments here.

Congratulations to all of those involved in libxml-ruby's long history and especially to Charlie Savage for giving it the finish push to this mature state. Ruby's XML woes are tempered, for now at least.

Autumn: Easy, Feature-Rich IRC Bots in Ruby

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:52:08 -0700

Autumn is a framework by Tim Morgan that makes it easy to develop powerful IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bots with Ruby. Version 3, a significant update, was launched just a week ago. The code is available on Github, so it's ready to fork, tweak and work on to your heart's content.

An instance of an "Autumn app" is laid out in a similar way to a Rails app. There are config, doc, script, libs, tmp, and log folders, containing much what you'd expect, as well as a leaves folder (Autumn refers to "bots" as "leaves") that contains any number of folders each containing data, helpers, models, tasks, and "views" for individual bots. A default Autumn app comes with two bots pre-installed called insulter and scorekeeper that you can use to learn from.

Autumn is a pretty significant piece of work and Tim has done an excellent job at documenting it, leaving almost no stone unturned in demonstrating how to create bots / leaves of your own with the framework.

Engine Yard Gets $15m Cash Injection; Buys Enough Red Bull To Keep The Lead For 37 Years?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:56:33 -0700

Engine Yard, probably the first major Rails-focused hosting company, has today taken a second round of finance of $15m. This second round, from Benchmark Capital, Amazon.com, and New Enterprise Associates, follows on from January's $3.5m from Benchmark.

So where will the money go? Ezra Zygmuntowicz says:

We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.

This assertion is without doubt, as Engine Yard continues to fund and support the development of Rubinius and Merb, and supports several popular Ruby and Rails sites with sponsorships. A $15m round for Engine Yard also helps validates the business models surrounding Rails, in a similar way to New Relic's $3.5m funding round in May.

Personally I am convinced that a significant part of Engine Yard's strategy will involve spending the cash on Red Bull in order to keep Engine Yard operating more quickly than the competition. At $2.50 a can, and the current complement of 80 employees, this works out at 75,000 cans of the amber nectar each. At a work-inducing 8 cans each work day, we're looking at about 37 years' worth of Red Bull to keep Engine Yard ahead of the pack.

To close, Ezra has shared some initial info regarding a new Engine Yard project called Vertebra that's worth keeping a look out for:

We’ve also been delving into the cloud computing arena as I think the next 5 years are going to see huge transition from standard hosting models into the cloud. Our upcoming Vertebra project is a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP. You can expect to see the first open source release of Vertebra this summer, I think this is a truly unique and very fun project to work on.

Let's hope Engine Yard's newly acquired cashpile will be enough to get them through the recession and become highly profitable as this area takes off.

(Semi-disclaimer: Engine Yard sponsors RubyFlow, a sister site of Ruby Inside.)

Join Why The Lucky Stiff (And Others) For an Online “ShoesFest”

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:51:33 -0700

You've used Shoes, Why The Lucky Stiff's GUI-app toolkit for Ruby, right? No? You've at least heard of it? (If the answer to this is also no, seriously chastise yourself now.)

Ernest Prabhakar has announced that two online "ShoesFests" will be taking place, involving why the lucky stiff and "friends," with the hope of alluring wannabe hackers (whether on Shoes itself or Shoes-based applications):

The goal of these events is to write and share fun little applications using Shoes, a clever little cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Ruby. This will allow us to test, document, and file bugs on how the various Shoes features work on the different supported platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac), in preparation for our next major release on July 31st, 2008.

No Ruby — or programming — experience is required; we’d love to find out how easy it is for novices to learn Shoes! Of course, if you happen to know the Ruby C API, expert help is always appreciated.

There are two ShoesFests, each taking place for 24 hours, from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 11th, and from noon GMT (8am Eastern) on Friday, July 25th. The venue will be #shoes on the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

If spending a day on IRC, asking questions, talking nonsense, helping others, and otherwise hacking away on Shoes and Shoes-based applications with a bunch of exciting people sounds fun to you, make sure to put this Friday in your calendar.

Lone Star Ruby Conference 2008 - Austin, Texas - September 4-6, 2008

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:51:03 -0700

Registration for Texas's own Ruby conference, the Lone Star Ruby Conference, has opened. The overall event takes place between September 4 - 6, 2008 in the Norris Conference Center in Austin, TX. Tickets are $250 for the two-day conference portion, or $425 for one day of training / tutorials followed by the two day conference. The prices shoot up come August 10.

The schedule is bumper packed with some great sessions and tutorials. James Edward Gray II and Gregory Brown will be delivering a three hour training session on Ruby's IO functionality, Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien will be delivering a tutorial on Test Driven Development, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer (of RailsEnvy fame) will be giving an advanced ActiveRecord workshop, and lots more besides. This seems to be one of those rare events where the tutorial day will be worth its weight in gold, unless you're already a self-certified Ruby / Rails expert of course. As well as this, Yehuda Katz, Glenn Vanderburg, Evan Phoenix, Matz, Bruce Tate, Bruce Williams, and others, will be speaking on various Ruby topics at the conference generally.

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Trollop: Simple Yet Powerful Command Line Option Processor

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:50:58 -0700

Trollop is a command-line argument processing library for Ruby. Developer William Morgan says Trollop is "designed to provide the maximal amount of GNU-style argument processing in the minimum number of lines of code." It makes a refreshing change to the more popular, but generally scary, cmdparse. The homepage features some examples of its usage.

Once you've installed trollop with the usual gem install trollop, you could write:

require 'trollop'

opts = Trollop::options do
  opt :http_1_0, "Force HTTP/1.0"
  opt :http_1_1, "Force HTTP/1.1"
  opt :hide_referer, "Hide referer", :default => true
  opt :connections, "Set number of simultaneous connections", :default => 2
end

p opts

Running the script with no command line options would result in opt becoming:

{:http_1_0=>false, :http_1_1=>false, :hide_referer=>true, :connections=>2, :help=>false}

You also get a --help (or -h) option for free that describes how to use the options:

Options:
         --http-1-0, -h:   Force HTTP/1.0
         --http-1-1, -t:   Force HTTP/1.1
     --hide-referer, -i:   Hide referer (default: true)
  --connections, -c :   Set number of simultaneous connections (default: 2)
             --help, -e:   Show this message

Note that trollop takes care of assigning the short-hand individual letter options, assigning the next letter within the string if the previous ones are taken.

Another option is Optiflag, which present a more DSL-esque solution. Its official homepage features some compelling examples, though the simplicity of Trollop appeals to me more for some reason.

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RubyKaigi 2008 News: 1.9.1 In December, Ruby Heading For ISO Standardization

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:49:23 -0700

(Credit: june29 - photo under CC 2.0 Attribution license)

RubyKaigi 2008 took place a couple of weeks ago. As the main Japanese Ruby conference, RubyKaigi is the de-facto authoritative Ruby conference, and the news that came out of the conference this year did little to shake its stature.

The online enterprise news publication InfoQ has covered the conference in two parts. The first features a mini interview with Matz, where he talks about the low adoption rate of Ruby in the enterprise and the role of certifications in the Ruby world. The second InfoQ post reveals that Matz is preparing to "standardize" Ruby, with the ultimate aim to submit a Ruby standard to the ISO, and Koichi Sasada reveals that Ruby 1.9.1 (notable, as it will be the first officially stable / production-ready release of Ruby 1.9) is set to arrive this December.

A lot more seems to have gone down at RubyKaigi than this, as evidenced by the absolute snowstorm of links tagged rubykaigi on del.icio.us, though most of the evidence is in Japanese, of course.

rbiphonetest: Unit Testing iPhone Apps with Ruby

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:49:25 -0700

Dr Nic Williams has been busy playing with iPhone and Objective C development lately and, unsurprisingly, has found a way to bring Ruby into the mix. He has developed rbiphonetest, a Ruby-based testing framework for iPhone / Objective C applications that uses RubyCocoa to provide the necessary bridge. As well as producing an in-depth 20 minute demonstration screencast, he has also packed some key information into his blog post.

If you're a Rubyist with ambitions of developing native iPhone applications using Objective C (and perhaps even Ruby one day), it's certainly worth a look (as are all of Dr Nic's projects, of course).

Ruby and Rails Jobs for July 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:49:04 -0700

(Remix of an original CC 2.0 licensed work by Joichi Ito.)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

Senior Java Developer with Ruby (Vonage, New Jersey) - Vonage, the well known VoIP company, are looking for a software developer with both Java and Ruby experience. They offer a fun, casual and relaxed environment, a $100/month food credit, dry cleaning and laundry service, medical, dental and vision plans, as well as stock options. In return, you should have both strong knowledge and experience of both Java and Ruby. I suspect not a lot of people will meet the requirements for this job, but it could be extremely rewarding for someone who does!

Incredible Systems/Network Administrator Required! (San Francisco, CA) - Rapleaf, a fast growing SF-based startup in the personal information / privacy space, are looking for a systems and network administrator to manage their Linux (CentOS based, primarily) servers, backup systems, and other network requirements. You will need to be a hot-shot at systems administration and be ready to learn (or already know how) to scale Rails applications (and yes, Rails can scale!)

Atlanta-based Experience Ruby on Rails Developer / Designer (Buford, GA) - A small start-up in Atlanta is looking for an experienced software developer to help develop the next generation of their software. They seek a senior level developer with strong Ruby and Rails skills.

Rails and JavaScript Developer (Pyromedia Studios, California) - Pyromedia Studios are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer with JavaScript experience, preferably with experience with social networking and general Web design. Initially it'd start as a 4 - 6 month contract but could turn into full-time employment, if desired. It seems as if off-site might be okay, but contact them for details.

If you or your company have openings for Ruby and/or Rails developers, consider checking out the Ruby Inside job board. Your job not only gets featured in the sidebar of every Ruby Inside page, but also summarized in posts like this. You could even leave a comment on this post if you want.

Note: There are even more jobs over at RubyNow's jobs section and on the 37signals Job Board.

Tips For Hiring Ruby Developers

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:06:46 -0700

(Photo credit: slushpup - License: CC 2.0 Attribution)

Six months ago, we featured 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer here on Ruby Inside (and it got a crazy number of comments), but now Ryan Ritirisi has put together a great list of 15 Questions to Ask During a Ruby Interview. They include questioning developers in a way that can separate professional Ruby developers from the hobbyists (or those who are only familiar with Ruby through Rails templates, say).

Pete Forde of Unspace suggests, however, that asking clever questions isn't necessarily the best way:

The best way to recruit amazing talent is to approach people that you already know are at the top of their game. At this point, the most important question becomes whether their personality is a good fit for the existing team.

Really, if an awesome person who is clearly smart doesn’t know the answer to one of these questions, they can learn it quickly with a little direction. That’s the advantage of having a team - you help each other move forward.

In terms of the actual hiring, it seems there's a much larger demand than there is a supply of Ruby developers. I get e-mails every week from people looking for Ruby and Rails developers and most of my contacts now seem to be inundated with work and aren't ready to take on more!

If you are looking to hire, however, here are some tips:

Free Ruby Job Site: RubyNow is a very popular, free Ruby and Rails job site.
Browse developers: WorkingWithRails.com features profiles of thousands of Rails developers (many of whom are Ruby developers generally also). One client I am assisting with Rails recruitment has had quite a lot of success in browsing the location-based section of WorkingWithRails and e-mailing people who sound interesting. In the Ruby and Rails communities, like few others, directly e-mailing people who strike you as potential candidates can be a good tactic.
Sponsor a post: Ruby Inside has 16,000 Ruby (and many Rails) developers as subscribers. We are now offering a $40 per post "post footer" sponsorship scheme where you get up to 250 characters (plus links) embedded into a post. This means both subscribers and people using the Web site get to see your message. These could be a great way to target the general population of Ruby developers as a whole, since Ruby Inside has the most Ruby developers all in the same place. Interested? E-mail rubyinside -/at/- peterc.org.
Job board: Consider posting on the Ruby Inside Job board. It costs $99 for 60 days and as well as appearing on the Ruby Inside sidebar, we do a monthly roundup of the jobs featured so that all subscribers can learn about them. I also believe SimplyHired will cross promote your job around their network.
Mailing lists: Posting on ruby-talk and other Ruby mailing lists does not, from what my contacts tell me, tend to be very effective at all. Even posting on locale specific boards has borne little fruit. It's certainly something to try though if all else fails.
Get blogging: Rubyists tend to be quite driven by transparency, taste, and exciting, interesting work. If your company doesn't look interesting and isn't interacting online, the chances of getting someone deeply involved with the community is a lot lower. This is why some of the more interesting Ruby-based companies (such as Unspace and New Bamboo) have blogs.. they're great recruitment tools, as much as they're a way to promote their services.

Lastly, remember that there are a lot of Ruby and Rails developers who do not read Ruby Inside, have not filled out their profiles on WorkingWithRails, and do not actively browse the Ruby jobs sites. Sometimes the only way to get the perfect candidate is to actively approach them. Finding these people might require using Google Blog Search (using location names along with keywords like "ruby" and "rails") or actually going to the events they're likely to attend (many of which we post about on Ruby Inside - such as erubycon and RubyFringe - others are very location specific like LRUG Nights in London).

If you have any tips of your own, are looking to be hired, or want to do some hiring, certainly leave comments against this post.

The Best of RubyFlow - Early June 2008

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:19:12 -0700

Here’s the regular update of the most interesting stories posted on RubyFlow (a community-driven Ruby news sister site to Ruby Inside) in the past couple of weeks:

Markdown - 59 times faster: Ryan Tomayko wants to “move past BlueCloth.” The result is two significantly faster Markdown libraries for Rubyists.

Cry: Cry is a Ruby library that provides a nice object oriented way to create, transfer, and manipulate frozen parse trees.

New Ruby Social Network: Acts As Community is a new social network for Rubyists.

Building an MP3 Player with Ruby and Shoes: Satoshi Asakawa has put together a cute tutorial demonstrating how to create a GUI-based MP3 player using Ruby and _why’s Shoes library.

Capistrano 2.4.0: Deployment tool Capistrano has hit version 2.4.0. Lots of new features and tweaks.

“Run Ruby Script” Action for OS X’s Automator: Jason Foreman has put together a custom action for OS X’s Automator tool that makes it easy to run Ruby code from an Automator workflow.

Lazy evaluation for Ruby methods: Lazyeval is an interesting library that makes it possible for methods to only be executed on objects when they’re actually needed (ideal if you’re doing caching on Rails views but still need logic in the controller).

Guide to using Sphinx: Pat Allan has written a great article on installing and using Sphinx, the search library.

Bashfully Yours, Gem Shortcuts: A little Bash script that lets you gain quick access to the RDocs for your installed gems.

Phusion Passenger 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition Released: The guys at Phusion have unveiled a release candidate of Passenger 2.0 (now supporting Rack) as well as Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Sequel 2.0: A significant update to the Sequel database access abstraction library has been released.

Dave Thomas’s Object Model and Metaprogramming Screencasts

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:20:03 -0700

Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to the Pragmatic Programmers and other than through receiving these videos to review get no direct benefit from this review.

It was only a few weeks ago I announced that the Pragmatic Programmers were getting into the screencasting business. The first Ruby related videos were from the Everyday Active Record series by Ryan Bates. The reaction to these across the Ruby blogosphere has been very positive, and true to their word, the Pragmatics have been quick to release some more interesting videos. The latest addition is the Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming series by Dave Thomas (of Pickaxe fame). Three episodes are available so far, respectively “Objects and Classes,” “Sharing Behavior,” and “Dynamic Code.” They cost $5 each and clock in at around half an hour each.

With the first episode, Dave starts off at a basic level by covering the history of object-oriented development and taking a look at the core elements of what makes up the object-oriented programming style. He moves on to looking at Ruby specific concerns, metaclasses/eigenclasses, anonymous classes, singleton methods, and the like. He manages to keep things at a level that’s immediately accessible to beginners (lots of diagrams are presented to illustrate concepts and relationships between objects and classes) but isn’t afraid to introduce more complex examples straight after. This is a common pattern throughout each of the screencasts, the contents of which are covered here.

I’d recommend these videos to anyone who wants to quickly get up to speed with the concepts involving classes, objects, and metaprogramming. I don’t believe Dave Thomas has done any screencasting before, but he comes across as a natural. His voice is engaging, eager, and authoritative, which makes the videos very easy to follow without drifting off. Certainly, these screencasts are a superb alternative to the explanations of classes, objects and metaprogramming in most Ruby books. If you’re still unsure, Dave gives a quick 3 minute introduction to the series (video).

Elsewhere: Antonio Cangiano has also reviewed these videos. Check out his review for a slightly different perspective.

Post supported by Ruby Hoedown: Come on down to the south for the Ruby Hoedown, the South’s regional Ruby conference! Submit a talk now or sign up for registration at $199. The first 50 people to use the promo code IMINSIDE will get an additional $25 off the price!

RubyFringe Shaping Up; 6 Hours Left To Register!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:19:20 -0700

RubyFringe, a rather progressive and brave addition to the Ruby / Rails conference scene, taking place in Toronto, Canada in July will be closing its registration doors in just six hours. When registration initially went live, four months ago, there were many complaints of the conference being overpriced, but despite this, only a handful of tickets (certainly less than 20, I’m told) now remain and an exciting schedule is shaping up. A separate “track” for travel companions / significant others is taking place so that anyone can go to the conference without abandoning their loved ones while they geek out on Ruby all day.

As promised, RubyFringe has no sponsors and is focused not only on the cutting edge, exciting areas of Ruby, but on radical presentations and unheard-of levels of detail in the ancillary events. Live music and entertainment is being provided, a brewery and an art gallery are being rented, and parties are taking place each night, with free bar and food throughout. Some intriguing talks are already lined up from people such as Zed Shaw, Chris Wanstrath, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jeremy McAnally, Tobias Lütke, John Lam, Obie Fernandez and Geoffrey Grosenbach. Lastly, a separate FailCamp being run by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs will be taking place before the opening party. More information to come soon from those guys.

It seems like this rather brave attempt at an unusual, high adrenaline Ruby conference is going to work out quite well, but even if it doesn’t, it appears it will provide a lot of significant talking points within the Ruby community in July. If you’ve been waiting to see who’s going or whether it would even go ahead, wait no more, go and register.

Update: On a similar note, the registration for RailsConf Europe has just opened. Oh, and The Ruby Hoedown (Huntsville, Alabama in August) too.

(Note: I wanted to post about this earlier, but a family emergency has put me out of action for several days. This is why the Ruby Inside schedule has slipped. I’m getting back on top of it and wish to apologize for the gap. Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to this conference.)

PoolParty: One Ruby Gem = Easy EC2 Computing Cloud

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:04:59 -0700

Pool Party is a new tool by Ari Lerner (of ProcessorPool fame) that makes it easy to automate the deployment, monitoring (using monit), persistent storage (using S3Fuse), and load balancing (using HAProxy) of EC2 instances. While intended to be application agnostic, there’s naturally a major slant towards Ruby applications in general, with support for Rake tasks a core feature.

Ari’s announcement blog post gives more in-depth details. Development is taking place on Github (where the README is somewhat more readable than with RDoc!) along with discussions at a Google group.

Ari presented PoolParty at RailsConf last week, and his slides are available to view below (or at Scribd):

gitrb.git - Git/Ruby bindings

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:54:50 -0700

Ruby and Rails Jobs for May 2008

Fri, 30 May 2008 11:47:38 -0700

(Credit: amanito - License: CC 2.0 AO)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

Rails and JavaScript Developer (Pyromedia Studios, California) - Pyromedia Studios are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer with JavaScript experience, preferably with experience with social networking and general Web design. Initially it’d start as a 4 - 6 month contract but could turn into full-time employment, if desired. It seems as if off-site might be okay, but contact them for details.

Rails Software Engineer (Limos.com, San Francisco) - Limos.com is looking for a Rails software engineer to re-engineer the Limos.com site. They’re the #1 limo / ground travel Web site, and looking to extend their site further. A wide range of experience from Ruby to Javascript/AJAX and Web development is desired. This job is a full-time position based in San Francisco, CA.

Amazing Software Engineer Required! (Rapleaf, San Francisco) - Rapleaf (who have used the job board quite a few times now!) are a San Francisco based startup in the personal information / privacy space. They’re looking for employee #15 and want people who have the talent and passion to thrive in a startup environment using all sorts of technologies, including Rails. Rapleaf boasts impressive salaries ($70k -> $170k) and equity offerings, medical insurance, and a fast-paced startup environment. If you don’t want the job but know someone who does, Rapleaf also offers a $10,007 referral award!

But it’s not all about Ruby Inside job board users. Some other opportunities are also available:

Rails Developers (New Bamboo, London) - The guys over at New Bamboo, perhaps the UK’s most prominent Rails agency, are looking for yet more Ruby and Rails developers in London, UK. I’ve been to their offices and can confirm that they have a pretty cool work environment and they’re good guys with it.

Rails Developer (Digital Pulp, New York) - Digital Pulp is an independently owned Web development company based in New York City. They’re looking to fill two developer positions with skills in Ruby and PHP. You must be located in NYC or environs.

Superstar Rails Developer (Coolspotters, Connecticut) - Coolspotters.com is a Connecticut based startup looking to hire “superstar developers” to push their site to the next level. All experience levels are welcome to apply.

Rails Developers (New Relic, Portland or San Francisco) - New Relic is (recently mentioned on Ruby Inside) a newly-funded startup in the Rails application monitoring space. They’re looking for Rails developers in both San Francisco and Portland. If you’re at RailsConf right now, stop by booth 512 to learn more.

There are even more over at RubyNow’s jobs section!

Active Record Screencasts: The Pragmatic Programmers Get Into Screencasting

Thu, 29 May 2008 18:45:16 -0700

The Pragmatic Programmers (who brought us the “Pickaxe“) have decided to branch into screencasting with Pragmatic Screencasts. At launch, screencasts for Expression Engine, OS X Core Animation, Erlang, and Rails are available. On the Rails front, Ryan Bates (of Railscasts fame) has been brought on board to create a series called “Everyday Active Record.” So far two episodes, each focusing on a different area of Rails / Active Record, are available (at $5 each) but more are promised over time.

The first two episodes are “Designing Models with Associations” and “Finding and Scoping Models.” I’ve watched both and they do a great job of taking a chunk of Active Record / Rails functionality and demonstrating the “right” way to use it. Ryan’s vast experience makes the screencasts good demonstrations of how to use Rails “properly.”

The screencasts are certainly not for anybody who follows Rails Edge like a hawk and keeps on top of everything Rails, but for those who’d like to gain extra confidence from seeing a Rails master at work with Rails 2.1’s features, they’re a bargain. They’re well produced, go along at a nice pace, and Ryan makes a good narrator. I look forward to seeing more from this series in future. Definitely consider checking them out, especially if you want to support Ryan for the hard work he does with Railscasts.

It’s also worth noting that the Pragmatic Programmers are also looking for other people (see bottom question) who might be interested in working with them to produce more screencasts. They do the post-production and pay 50% royalties.

Post supported by Ruby Hoedown: Come on down to the south for the Ruby Hoedown, the South’s regional Ruby conference! Submit a talk now or sign up for early registration for $50 off. The first 50 people to use the promo code IMINSIDE will get an additional $25 off the price!

28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:18:03 -0700

Passenger (often known as “mod_rails“) is an Apache module developed by Phusion, a small Dutch IT consultancy, that makes it easy to deploy Rails applications on Apache-based stacks. Passenger follows on well from the popular “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web” discussion of January 2008 in that it mostly solves the Rails deployment issue (see SwitchPipe for an alternative that can deal with non-Rails frameworks).

Since its launch in April, Passenger has become quite popular and a lot of developers are already using it to rapidly deploy Rails sites. Even popular budget Web hosting company Dreamhost has got in on the action, and is offering cheap, Passenger-based Rails application hosting. The de-facto Ruby (and Rails) deployment system seems to change rapidly (remember Apache+FastCGI, then lighttpd+FastCGI, then Apache+Mongrel, then Nginx+Mongrel…?) and while Passenger may or may not be a de-facto standard in a few years’ time, it’s certainly becoming the standard for now, so jump on board!

To help with your leap on to the Passenger bandwagon, I’ve collected together some of the better resources and blog posts of recent weeks covering its use:

General

Official Passenger / mod_rails Site - The official site for the Apache module. Features testimonials, installation instructions, documentation, and information on how you can further support the project.

Passenger / mod_rails Source Repository - Passenger / mod_rails is an open-source project at heart, and the code is available on Github.

Passenger Users Guide - A very Apache-documentation-esque guide to using, configuring, and trouble shooting Passenger.

Installation

Ask Your Doctor About mod_rails - Geoffrey Grosenbach (of Peepcode fame) writes about Passenger from a user’s point of view. He walks through rolling out Passenger on his own server in a bunch of easy steps. He also covers log rotation.

Using Passenger on OS X for Rails development - Manfred Stienstra quickly walks through what’s involved in setting up Passenger on Mac OS X.

Configurating [sic] Passenger (mod_rails) on SliceHost with Ubuntu 7.10 - Ben Hughes covers the roll-out of Passenger, SQLite 3 and Rails on a SliceHost VM.

Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server Using Passenger - Ron Valente covers the installation of Passenger on Ubuntu 8.04 (a.k.a. Hardy Heron). This is a very well put together guide, cut into nice bite size pieces with well formatted code examples.

Passenger Installation in Portuguese - Fabio Akita presents a Passenger installation guide in Portuguese.

Discussion & Benchmarks

Why mod_rails is great for light-duty Rails apps - A blog post that takes a deep look into the motivation behind Passenger and where it fits in amongst other deployment solutions. It looks at Passenger’s memory use and how Passenger integrates with Apache (somewhat).

mod_rails vs thin vs ebb vs mongrel - A comparison of four different Rails serving techniques. Ebb appears to have the edge.

Interview with Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui of Phusion - Fabio Akita interviews the two masterminds behind mod_rails.

Looking at mod_rails and FiveRuns Rails Instrumentation - Oliver of FiveRuns takes a look at mod_rails and examines its usage scenarios.

A few notes on using Passenger (mod_rails) with Mac OS X - A quick examination of mod_rails on OS X.

Miscellaneous Experiences Some People Have Had With Passenger - A roundup of various impressions and experiences people have had so far.

mod_rails vs Mongrel vs Thin - Benchmarks performed by Phusion themselves with three alternative deployment solutions.

Tools and Tips

Ruby on Rails 2.x Elastic Server - A Rails /Passenger virtual machine creator of sorts. It appears to let you choose which components you want to include in the VM then give you access to download a virtual machine image for VMware, Xen, Parallels, or Amazon EC2 containing the features selected. I have not tested this, and would appreciate any feedback in comments.

mod_rails and Capistrano - Tom Copeland presents a simple Capistrano recipe for restarting mod_rails applications.

Using Capistrano with Passenger - A slightly deeper guide to using Capistrano to deploy mod_rails applications.

Installing Typo (blog engine) and mod_rails for multiple accounts - A walkthrough of creating and installing multiple instances of the Typo blogging engine using mod_rails.

Disclaimer: I don’t use and haven’t tried mod_rails yet, so any corrections to above comments are welcomed and encouraged.

This post is sponsored by KickStart Events — RubyOnRails Training at the EMCC (East Midlands Conference Centre), UK. High-quality hands-on workshops and courses for web application developers. Taught by experienced mentors using live coding sessions, slides and participatory discussion.

Rubinius On Rails: Rubinius Becomes 3rd Ruby Implementation to Run Rails

Mon, 19 May 2008 08:23:12 -0700

Evan Phoenix has announced that the Rubinius project has hit a major milestone: Rubinius can run Rails! This makes it implementation #3 (after MRI and JRuby) to join the Rails club and will help cement its reputation as a strong, key implementation to watch in the future. Chad Fowler goes as far as to assert that in a year’s time, Rubinius will be used in production deployments and quickly become the defacto standard Ruby implementation shortly thereafter.

Eyes are now on Microsoft’s implementation, IronRuby, that may also be joining the Rails club soon.

This post is sponsored by 16bugs — You know how cumbersome most bug trackers are. We know it, too! If you believe bug tracking should be an easy and unobtrusive task, you should try 16bugs right now. Use coupon code “RUBYINSIDE” and get 50% off when you upgrade your account.

Ruby Inside Meta News - May 8, 2008

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:14:32 -0700

It’s a rare occurrence, but there’s some “meta” news to give out about Ruby Inside. Regular programming follows this break!

FeedBurner Feed Ads Be Gone!

Subscribers to the Ruby Inside feed will be familiar with the graphical ads after each post. They perform horribly (think click through rates of 0.1%). I’m glad that Ruby Inside’s audience is so savvy and I’m sick of annoying you with irrelevant nonsense. Those ads are now gone.

Ruby Inside Turns 2 - So I Need To Eat My Hat

In just three weeks, Ruby Inside will be two years old. Unfortunately, two years ago I said I’d “eat my hat” if Ruby hadn’t beaten Python in the TIOBE index by May 2008. It hasn’t. I am currently sourcing a sugar hat. On the plus side, Ruby has moved from #20 to #9, while Python has moved only from #8 to #7. I’m not making any promises for next year, however.

Sponsored Post Footers - Not In A Sucky Way

I want to reassure you that Ruby Inside isn’t interested in payola. No incentives are received for writing about something here. Even the “Thank You to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors” posts are something I do out of courtesy; not a mandatory part of the deal.

In removing the FeedBurner ads (see above) I want to replace them with something useful to both you, the reader, and to those in the community who have something to promote. With that, I’m launching the concept of sponsoring the footer of a post (or multiple posts). It’s limited to a few lines of text, set off separately at the bottom of a post, with a link or two as necessary. Only things of interest to Ruby Inside readers will be allowed. The first couple will be going up soon, so keep an eye out. I

f you, your company or your project is interested in sponsoring posts, e-mail risp [/at/] peterc.org for more details. The big benefit in sponsoring posts is that the tagline will stay attached to the posts as long as Ruby Inside is around. You’ll also hit all 16,000 subscribers rather than just those who visit the site. You get the idea..

New Logo

If you haven’t seen it yet, Ruby Inside has a new logo. Blame Charles Nutter. I must say, though, I prefer this new one in any case.

For Sale?

It’s the first mention here, but followers of my Twitter stream will be aware I’ve considered selling or otherwise “changing the ownership structure” of Ruby Inside for a little while now. Investigations into this are only casual so far. One option is to farm out the advertising / commercial side to a team with the savvy to do that, and I have a very good proposal on the table for this already. The other option is to “sell up”, perhaps while still posting here, and let someone / a company with big ideas shake things up a bit.

In any case, it’s all very casual right now, but options are being explored. I still love working on Ruby Inside, I still love keeping up with the news, but I’m gradually moving into other areas with my big ideas, and am definitely not against Ruby Inside evolving to a new level under someone else’s wing. Contact me if you have any direct interest or ideas, or just comment here if you have general feedback.

Thank You!

Given that Ruby Inside’s turning two years’ old very soon, I want to thank you, the reader, for continuing to subscribe, continuing to support, and otherwise make working on Ruby Inside the amazing experience it is and has been.

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for May 2008

Fri, 02 May 2008 20:14:16 -0700

It’s time to thank Ruby Inside’s excellent sponsors once again.

I’m keen to make these posts relevant, so I’ve tried to include any news or developments the sponsors have had within this post. For example, FiveRuns has interviewed several Rubyists over the last month, and links to those interviews are provided below. Also, Peepcode has released a new e-book, similarly linked. So even if you don’t care for what the sponsors are selling or providing, it’s worth a quick check to make sure you’re not missing out on anything useful.

Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are mine and not necessarily shared by the sponsor(s)!

FiveRuns - Rails Application Monitoring Solutions

FiveRuns is a provider of Rails application (and server) monitoring services. FiveRuns works hard to be part of the community, whether by releasing a free Ruby and Rails stack or publishing a great set of interviews with Ruby developers on their blog. FiveRuns’ “TakeFive” series, where they ask Ruby developers five questions each, has continued, with Xavier Noria, Michael Slater (q.v.), Bruce Williams, Scott Diedrick, Juanjo Bazán, and Fabio Akita all being interviewed in the last month.

PeepCode - Rails Screencasts and E-Books

Who in the Ruby world doesn’t know Geoffrey Grosenbach and his PeepCode screencasts? PeepCode has been the longest sponsor of Ruby Inside. Peepcode’s latest release is the “Git Internals” e-book that delves into how Git works behind the scenes and how that affects your use of it.

Atlantic Dominion Solutions - Rails Consultancy and Development

Based in Orlando, Florida, Atlantic Dominion Solutions offer a full range of Rails consultancy and development services and were the brains behind the recent acts_as_conference Ruby and Rails conference. ADS founder Robert Dempsey is also behind the Rails For All project, a Rails advocacy group.

Job! Atlantic Dominion Solutions has an opening for a Web applications developer (using, of course, Ruby and Rails) to work in Winter Park, Florida (with Stillwater, Oklahoma as an alternative option.)

BrightBox - UK Ruby on Rails Hosting

BrightBox are a new Leeds, UK based (support the north!) hosting company specializing in high-end Ruby on Rails application deployment. There’s a pent-up demand for UK-based Rails hosting, and BrightBox offer a wide range of plans, from a basic VPS with 256MB of memory up to a 2GB-packed behemoth. The bandwidth allowances are pretty good by UK standards too, and all but the cheapest plan come with FiveRuns’ RM-Manage technology.

Building Web Apps - Rails Seminar and Podcast

BuildingWebApps has a free online Ruby on Rails course you can sign up to today. The instructors are Michael Slater and Christopher Haupt, both of who have a frankly intimidating amount of experience in the field of instruction and tuition. They also have a compelling (and free!) podcast called Learning Rails that’s worth subscribing to.

Morph eXchange - A Rails Application Hosting and Deployment Platform

Morph provides an interesting enterprise level platform for deploying Rails applications. No servers are needed and you don’t need to set anything up; the Morph platform does it all. Morph provides a fully managed service and handles load balancing, scaling and high availability issues, as well as the complete Web application stack. 24/7 monitoring services and managed backups are also provided. The CEO of Morph Labs compared a Morph “AppSpace” to a “service office for your application.” This YouTube video demonstrates how you can deploy a Rails application within 4 minutes on the Morph platform.

Two italian commercials

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:10:37 -0700

An Italian artist known as "e.perinelli" wanted to change his workflow to using open source tools. One day he got the chance of doing 2 simple 10 seconds TV spots for an Italian shoes...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

The Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Implementations

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:24:54 -0700

Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls [Implementations] is a lengthy, but interesting, essay by Charles Nutter of the JRuby team. He looks at Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby, and some minor implementations, and covers their background along with their current development state and how they might proceed in future. For those interested in the state of the many Ruby implementations, this is a must read.

For those who want a shorter version without any of the context or smart insight Charles brings: the Ruby 1.8.7 previews have thrown a spanner in the works, Ruby 1.9 still doesn’t run Rails (but will very soon), Ruby 1.9 might not prove better enough to woo developers, JRuby rocks, Rubinius is cool but improving performance will be hard, Rubinius seems to be retreating to using more and more C primitive functions and moving away from “Ruby in Ruby”, IronRuby is clever but might have trouble running Rails properly, MacRuby is a great idea, and all of the other, minor implementations seem stuck in the mud.

Trivia: Two Freudian slips when writing this post. I mis-typed “Peril” as “Perl” in both cases.