Articles

Speaker Proposals Deadline approaching!

There's more to come this week, but here is a quick reminder that the deadline for speaker proposals is 18th May - Next Monday! Many thanks for the excellent proposals that have already been submitted :)   

Class and Instance Methods in Ruby

In which I show the difference between a class method and an instance method.

The other day I was explaining the difference between class and instance methods to a friend and I realized that I should probably write up a post. I figured since I’m on a plane headed back home, now was as good of time as ever. If you want a little history, you can read about the difference between class and instance variables.

RubyNation Mini-Interview: Gray Herter

For my third RubyNation interview, I talked with Gray Herter, one of the organizers. (I've also interviewed Hal Fulton and Russ Olsen about this upcoming regional Ruby conference.)Don't forget RubyNation will be held in Reston, VA on June 11-13, so you don't have to much time left to register.Why did you decide to put RubyNation together?Gray It started with a conversation that I had with Xandy

Rubystein: Ruby meets Wolfenstein

At Railsconf 2009 the guys over at Phusion released Rubystein, a Wolfenstein clone written in Ruby. I managed to track down Ninh Bui to give us a video walk through, and the following video was played at Railsconf before the Wednesday Keynote.

View on Blip.tv

Get the source on Github, and play it yourself.

Rubystein: Ruby meets Wolfenstein

At Railsconf 2009 the guys over at Phusion released Rubystein, a Wolfenstein clone written in Ruby. I managed to track down Ninh Bui to give us a video walk through, and the following video was played at Railsconf before the Wednesday Keynote.

View on Blip.tv

Bookmarklets 101

Last week I showed you a bookmarklet that lets you edit your CSS live in any browser. Today, I want to dive into the details of how to create a bookmarklet. But first, the basics:

Ruby & Excel: Extracting Cell Comments

Someone recently asked how to get the comment text from a particular cell in an Excel worksheet.

You could call the cell's Comment property to obtain a reference to the Comment object, then use the Comment object's Text property to get---or set---the text of the comment.

We need both engineers and artists in programming

Uncle Bob delivered a compelling keynote at RailsConf last week that put forth the argument that what we need most in programming is more professionalism. I loved the delivery, but I disagree with the conclusion.

I originally never wanted to be a programmer exactly because I thought the only type of programmers that existed where the kind that Bob talked about: The engineers with the proud professional practices that never wavered under pressure.

Demystifying Irb's Commands

Irb is one of the most commonly used standard ruby libraries, yet most don’t seem to know much about it. I’ve lost count of the number of blog posts that explain some irb “tricks” or “secret” config options. This is the first in a series that aims to make irb less magical and more accessible.

Original Author Name: 
Gabriel Horner

Optimistic Sci-Fi

I had forgotten how much I missed optimistic Science Fiction. When we look back at the history of science fiction, the first decade of the 21st century will be remembered for an adventure into grittiness, pessimism, and exploration of the devils, rather than angels of our nature. Perhaps it was a needed excursion, but it has been an exhausting decade.

Articles | Rails Fire

Articles

RTeX 2.0 Released

I’m happy to finally release RTeX v2.0.

RTeX is a Ruby library for generating PDFs via the LaTeX typesetting system, and can be used as a standalone executable or Rails plugin for pdf.rtex files. If you need to generate complex (and well- typeset) documents dynamically, this might be the ticket.

Ask Your Doctor About mod_rails

We need new inventions that reveal people’s true intentions, a portable pride protector, affordable lie detector…—Buck65

UPDATE: You can learn all about Phusion Passenger with the new PeepCode Screencast on the topic.

Half A Dream


Living on the Edge (of Rails) in Spanish

Juan Lupión wrote in to inform me that he’s also translating my Living on the Edge (of Rails) series of blog posts to Español. Thanks Juan!




Living on the edge (of Rails) #21

It’s another slow week (just 2 changes of note imho) after the release of the 1st Release Candidate (RC1) of Rails 2.1. Follow that link for installation instructions – though if you’re reading this blog post you probably don’t care! (because you’re, you know, “living on the edge”).

72. Integrating Rails app with Campaign Monitor API

In this episode you will learn how to use campaign monitor gem to integrate your Rails app to Campaign Monitor Web Service API.

Rubinius runs Rails

Congratulations to the rubinius guys on getting our little web framework that could to start up and serve requests. It’s great to see so much experimentation and progress happening in one large and bazaar-like community!

71. How to create a SEO sitemap for Rails Apps

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling.

RTeX on Lighthouse

I’ve just opened up a Lighthouse project for RTeX here. This fills out the RTeX family of pages to be:

* Documentation

* Development

* Issue tracking

The Two Kinds of Programmers


Photo courtesy of Roby72

In my time as a developer, and now managing a team of developers, I have come to realize that there are two kinds of programmers: the Journeyman and the Craftsman. These terms aren’t mine – I’ve seen them used other places – but they describe the developers I’ve worked with pretty well.

mobile phones | Rails Fire

mobile phones

In-depth JRuby Q&A: What Makes JRuby Tick in 2010?

JRuby is undoubtedly the most mature of the alternative Ruby implementations. Supporting Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (mostly!) and JIT compilation, JRuby is already in use in mission critical Ruby apps and runs scarily fast on the JVM. In this interview with JRuby core member, Charles Nutter, we dig deep into what makes JRuby tick.

Helping with Texting

UNICEF is using SMS to help those in need. And they’re doing it with open source.

You can read all about RapidSMS, their Mobile and SMS platform, but here’s a snippet:

Receiving Email with Rails

This article originally appeared in the first issue of Rails Magazine. It is reproduced here not quite verbatim with a couple of corrections and additions.

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