Issue 131 - February 7, 2013
Featured
A brand new Ruby implementation built upon RPython, a 'restricted' variant of Python ideally suited to implementing dynamic languages (it's also behind the super speedy PyPy implementation of Python). Don't expect to use this in production any time soon but it's an impressive start.
p374 only came out 3 weeks ago but p385 resolves a cross-site scripting exploit opportunity in RDoc, Ruby's bundled documentation tool. If you never use RDoc or deploy RDoc HTML documentation, don't panic to upgrade.
SRC always punches above its weight attracting excellent speakers and rabid hordes of Ruby fans to Scotland. Ticket sales opened a few days ago and are already going fast. It's on May 12 and 13.
We don't get paid to promote these but they just look so good. The latest t-shirt from RubyThreads, the Ruby-oriented t-shirt designers. Power to all Rubyists. In men and women's cuts.
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Reading
A rather detailed walkthrough of the recent YAML vulnerability in Rails by Richard Schneeman over at RubySource.
After last week's RubyGems drama, Tony Arcieri suggests we look at ways to improve the verification of gems' sources with digital signatures.
In which Clay Allsopp picks up and shares a nice bit of refactoring made on his code.
Another superb article from Practicing Ruby.
Watching and Listening
Brian Shirai (a.k.a. brixen, formerly Brian Ford) and the Ruby Rogues discuss their views on the issues behind Ruby's long term design process.
This is one of the paid-for 'pro' episodes of RailsCasts but with Google's AngularJS framework becoming a big deal recently, this sixteen minute introduction might be enough to convince you to give Ryan some money(!)
Libraries and Code
Fresh from his success with Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood has pulled together a team to build a modern, open source discussion system called Discourse. It's based around Rails and Ember and is ready to play with now.
JetBrains has unveiled RubyMine 5, its Ruby and Rails IDE, which now includes smart code assistance, testing and debugging features for RubyMotion, cutting-edge Ruby 2.0 support, and more.
Don't get too excited as it's only a point release, but it now allows installation with Ruby 1.9.3 and ImageMagick 6.8+.
If you've been addicted to the popular word search game 'Letterpress', you might appreciate having its engine recreated in Ruby so you can.. 'research' techniques and, perhaps, create an AI of your own.
A new all-purpose DSL for building and running ImageMagick commands to perform various graphical operations.
PartyFoul captures exceptions in your Rails app and automatically opens them as issues on GitHub.
See added, removed, and modified lines since the latest git commit more easily in Sublime Text 2. Not really a Ruby thing but as many Rubyists are using Sublime I thought this was cool.
Provides social networking features like comments, reblogs, favorites, following/followers, and timelines to use in your Rails apps.
Jobs
Last but not least..
Heroku are hosting an event that 'celebrates craft and the creative process of software development with technical sessions and interactive artistic happenings.' Some excellent Rubyists in the line up including Matz(!), Steve Klabnik and Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson.
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