Jul 21 2008
Testing the new One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows
Fabio Akita
Leitores brasileiros: cliquem aqui If you read my recent interview with Luis Lavena you’re aware that he shifted the efforts from Visual Studio 6 project style to MingW (think of it as gcc for Windows). Read the interview for the details. So I decided to give it a run and I will say right now that I am really impressed and I will show you why. ...
Jul 02 2008
Chatting with Luis Lavena
Fabio Akita
This time I interviewed Luis Lavena. If you’re a Ruby developer working on Windows, you owe him a lot! After all he is the maintainer of One-Click Ruby Installer, the main Windows Ruby distribution. It is a lot of work to maintain such a distro and Luis explains all the hoops necessary to achieve this. The main message: we need more collaborators! Anyone can rant, but there are a few that actually step down from the pedestal and get their hands dirty. 
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Jun 25 2008
“Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s New?” – Chinese Version
Carlos Brando
Graç ao formato open-source do livro “Ruby on Rails 2.1 – O que háe novo?” e ao fato de ele ser codificado ao invéde escrito em um editor de texto, muita gente aceitou o desafio de traduzir o livro para suas líuas. Acabei de receber um e-mail de Libin Pan me avisando que a [...] ...
Jun 24 2008
RailsConf 2008 – Video Interview with Phusion
Fabio Akita
Phusion Passenger 2.0 and Ruby Enterprise Edition from Carl Youngblood on Vimeo. We are a little bit late but this is a video interview conducted at RailsConf 2008 by myself and Carl Youngblood (Surgeworks, Confreaks) with Hongli Lai, Ninh Bui and Tinko Andringa of Phusion, creators of Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition, which is fast becoming the deployment method of choice for Rails developers. Português: Estamos um pouco atrasados mas esta é a entrevista em vídeo feita na RailsConf 2008 por mim e pelo Carl Youngblood (Surgewor…...
Jun 21 2008
Ruby on Rails 2.1 – の変更点
Carlos Brando
Photo by bananagranola PortuguêAcabou de sair uma versãalpha da traduç do livro “Ruby on Rails – O que háe novo?” em japonê O livro foi traduzido por Hirobumi Hama, que fez o trabalho praticamente sozinho. Como nãentendo nada de japonê nãsei dizer se tem muita coisa para ser corrigida atéma versãfinal, [...] ...
Jun 17 2008
Autotest Notification – Doom Edition
Carlos Brando
Inspirado pelo úo screencast do Fáo Akita (totalmente recomendado), resolvi incluir uma leve brincadeira no meu gem Autotest Notification. Nãvou estragar a surpresa… mas para quem quiser conferir, basta instalar a nova versãdo gem. Rode no terminal: sudo gem install carlosbrando-autotest-notification -s http://gems.github.com No Windows nãprecisa do sudo no começ#8230; Ok, e depois de instalado entre [...] ...
Jun 15 2008
Ruby on Rails 2.1 What’s New – Second Edition
Carlos Brando
In English Bruno Miranda revised the English version of the book, fixing some typos. So I’m publishing a second edition of the book with all adjustments. This doesn’t mean that the first version contained errors, but the translation was done very quickly. Then imagine this version as a version made with more time. To download the updated version, [...] ...
Jun 10 2008
New Free Book: “Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s new”
Carlos Brando
Less than one week after the release of Rails 2.1, was launched in Brazil the first book describing all the new features of this release. After the launch of the book in Portuguese, the Brazilian community united to translate the book into English. Done! A gift from all Brazilian Railers to the international community. To download click here. Credits The [...] ...
Jun 07 2008
Rails 2.1 Free Book being translated at Github
Fabio Akita
Update 06/09: Carlos just reported that they already have ready the First Rails 2.1 PDF Book thanks to the contributors from the Brazilian community that translated from the original Portuguese to English. This is a first! Carlos Brando and Marcos Tapajós are two of the best Railers in Brazil and long time collaborators of our community and they just released a very high quality material today. Carlos has been tracking down every new addition to the Edge Rails since 2.0 for the brazilian audience and since 2.1 was released, he decided to pu…...
Jun 04 2008
Jun 03 2008
Rails 2.1: Bug in method end_of_quarter
Carlos Brando
Neither came out the Rails 2.1 and was already found a serious error. Access the irb and try to run this: Date.new(2008, 5, 31).end_of_quarter ERROR! Why? The implementation of the method end_of_quarter was made of the wrong way, it moves until the last month of the quarter and then picks last day. The problem is that it only [...] ...
Jun 01 2008
Phusion Passenger 2.0 debuts at Railsconf
Carl Youngblood
The Phusion Passenger guys really dropped a bomb at their Railsconf presentation today, which unfortunately was poorly attended. Their successful copy-on-write improvements to Ruby (released as Ruby Enterprise Edition) and their improved queueing mechanisms in the Passenger Apache module make it currently the Rails deployment option with the fastest execution times and the lowest memory footprint, even when compared with nginx and thin servers in front of mongrel clusters. On top of this, they announced that the mod_rails moniker has been a…...
May 31 2008
Another great keynote by David Hansson
Carl Youngblood
I really enjoyed David Hansson’s keynote at RailsConf this year. He started out by discussing the surplus, or competitive advantage that Rails created, and how this surplus will eventually disappear, probably for one of three reasons: Other frameworks/languages will achieve what Rails has (unlikely) Another breakthrough technology will arrive Rails will become mainstream (good and bad) My favorite part was near the end, where he admonished Rails developers to become better programmers by being more well-rounded. Among his suggestions for do…...
May 26 2008
Rolling with Rails 2.1 – The First Full Tutorial – Part 2
Fabio Akita
So, here it goes, Part 2 of my Rails 2.1 Tutorial. Start from Part 1 if you didn’t read it already. Disclaimer: If you like this tutorial and you’d like to translate to your own local language, ask me for the original Textile files through my e-mail. ...
May 25 2008
Rolling with Rails 2.1 – The First Full Tutorial – Part 1
Fabio Akita
Rails 2.1 is right around the corner and now comes my update for “The First Full Rails 2.1 Tutorial”. I will take exactly from where we left off in the last tutorial, so if you still didn’t follow that tutorial I suggest you do it now or download the source code available now at Github. I have added a ‘for_2.0’ tag to denote the last tutorial and a new ‘for_2.1’ tag for the updates I am going to show you now at this new tutorial. You can either follow my previous tutorial to have everything running or you can skip it and just download the e…...
May 21 2008
My Career – Level 3
Fabio Akita
That’s for all my friends who don’t speak portuguese. I’ve met outstanding people from all over the world who’ve been very supportive and believed in my goals since the very beginning. People like Satish Talim, Geoffrey Grosenbach and many many other visionaries. Thanks to you all and I hope you keep appreciating the efforts we’re doing here in Brazil. So, this week I’ve had the worst/best weekend I can remember of. First …...
May 14 2008
The Autotest Notification Gem
Carlos Brando
This gem set the autotest (ZenTest) to send messages to software as Growl, LibNotify, and Snarl, displaying a window with the results. http://github.com/carlosbrando/autotest-notification/ Requirements Independent of operating system you are using, you must install the ZenTest. gem install ZenTest If you’re using a Mac You need to have Growl and growlnotify installed on your machine. Download the Growl and install it like [...] ...
Apr 29 2008
Advice for Young Ruby Programmers
Fabio Akita
Satish Talim, from RubyLearning fame forwarded me 2 question from one of his students. So I went to to write a few advices for him. Without knowing his level of expertise I tried to encompass tips for young programmers in general. I hope it makes sense. Feel free to comment and ask questions. ...
Apr 28 2008
Goruco 2008 – more Confreaks videos
Fabio Akita
Confreaks just released a new batch of awesome videotaped keynotes from the Goruco 2008 conference held in New York City. If you were not able to attend, that’s our second chance to take a look on what the community is doing. I am particularly interested in Bryan Helmkamp’s keynote on Story Driven Development with RSpec, as I am myself trying to learn the user stories feature. I can bet Chris Wanstrath’s keynote on ParseTree is a lot of fun as well. And if you also missed MountainWest RubyConf 2008 as well, don’t miss the videos there! It i…...
Apr 28 2008
mod_rails 1.0.2 to be released today!
Fabio Akita
I was just told by the Phusion guys that mod_rails 1.0.2 is going to be released today! Keep an eye on it. And if you didn’t do so, donate for the Ruby Enterprise Edition program (I am in the second batch already!) Update 04/30: As I have said, Phusion released 1.0.2 with lots of features explained in their new corporate blog. New features include support for OS X’s built-in Apache, support for Rails below 2.0, more stability, a new tool to measure real memory usage (‘ps’ doesn’t convey the true memory), improved documentation, improved SSL…...
Apr 14 2008
New feature in Custom Resource Name Plugin
Carlos Brando
Added one more feature to plugin. Imagine the following case: ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| map.aliases :resources, :houses => ‘casas’ map.aliases :actions, :new => ‘novo’ map.resources :houses end See that all actions :new will be replaced by ‘novo’, but this does not fit properly in resource :casas, which would correct be ‘nova’ and not ‘novo’ (is just [...] ...
Apr 04 2008
Interviewed by FiveRuns
Fabio Akita
Monday, Apr 1st, I was invited to participate in a series of interviews being published at FiveRun’s blog, called TakeFive. It was just published. Thanks a lot for FiveRuns for choosing me, I am flattered as I don’t yet consider myself in the same luminary league as Chad Fowler, Peter Cooper, Pat Eyler, Satish Talim and all the others in the series. I hope to get up there, though :-) This series revolves around 5 questions out of 15 that I could choose. Being prolific – as you well …...
Mar 25 2008
ActiveResource incomplete
Fabio Akita
Last week I presented ActiveResource’s capabilities to some friends. In summary, it’s a great library, but not perfect just yet, and should improve in the next versions. On the other hand, the majority of ‘REST’ APIs available – as they say – are not actually RESTful. Flickr and YouTube come to mind. Check out this link to learn on how to talk to Twitter. This other link to learn how to extend ActiveResource for non-REST APIs and this link to understand how to consume YouTube feeds. But besides that I found out a small surprise: ActiveResou…...
Feb 12 2008
FreeImage on Leopard. Problems Installing 3.10.0
Fabio Akita
If anyone is trying to install the ImageScience gem (sudo gem install image_science) for your Rails projects, and used MacPorts, you might be having strange problems. The usual command: sudo port install freeimage Will fail miserably. That’s because the newest FreeImage port, version 3.10.0, is broken. If you check it out at /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/freeimage/FreeImage3100.zip, the checksums are invalid as the port command states. I tried to download directly from sourceforge.net. But this zip is corrupted. Can’t unzip it manually…....
Dec 28 2007
A RSpec matcher for ActiveRecord validation
Rodrigo Kochenburger
One thing that i don’t like about ActiveRecord is the way that it deals with validation messages. I don’t like the fact that it actually push a complete message into the errors stack. Just to explain it a little better let me illustrate the situation with some code. The current behavior is the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :username end @user = User.new @user.valid? # => false @user.errors.on(:username) # => ["can’t be blank"] I really think it would be better to store the …...
Dec 27 2007
Why Ruby on Rails?
Fabio Akita
For the last 3 years a lot of people have been asking “Why should one use Ruby on Rails when my framework X is clearly superior?” or something like this. That’s a good question, raises a lot of good points but the way those discussions end are a real shame for the whole community to say the very least. I can’t praise myself too much either because I was part of some flame wars as well and I don’t like what I said in some occasions as well. Yes, I acted like a troll myself and for that I apologize. ...
Dec 21 2007
A good REST presentation by RailsEnvy
Rodrigo Kochenburger
I just watched a really great presentation by Greg Pollack from RailsEnvy about REST, RESTful and why it is a good architecture for both webservices and applications. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to Rails or REST, or if you are already a expert, you should watch it. Direct link to movie …
Dec 15 2007
Tests, behavior and verification
Rodrigo Kochenburger
Test vs. Behavior Test-Driven-Development (TDD) is an approach to software development where developers write tests before actually write code. There are many good reasons for doing that but certainly there are a few more important: Writing tests first allows the developer to focus only on the code that he needs to write to accomplish the involved task/feature, reducing the amount of unnecessary code. Tests are also a documentation of the application. It contains verifications of how the application should behave in specific cases, and si…...
Dec 10 2007
The First Rails 2.0 Screencast
Fabio Akita
Page down for brazilian portuguese article Disclaimer: This video is hosted at Veoh and can be re-linked to any website without modifying either the video or audio. I am uploading it to Google Video and Vimeo (recommended). Update 12/12: For those of you that think I was too fast in the video, I just posted a Tutorial with most of the content you can see in the screencast plus a few bonuses. I’ve split it into Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy! The First Screencast Rails 2.0 was released officially last friday and it was a coincidence because I wo…...
Sep 19 2007
Economics ensures continuity of Moore’s Law
Carl Youngblood
There is an interesting discussion on Slashdot about Moore’s Law. The gist of it is that even though Moore’s predictions were originally based on a specific technology with physical limitations, companies have become so dependent on the revenues that come from the sale of faster systems and other add-ons that are based on these faster systems that they have a strong economic incentive to do the research and development necessary to maintain Moore’s Law, even if the underlying technology on which it is based changes. ...
Sep 06 2007
Personal finance meets web 2.0
Carl Youngblood
This really seems to be the year of personal finance apps. Wesabe was the first out of the gates but it looks like it will shortly gain additional competition from a number of interesting startups, including Mint, Jwaala and Geezeo—admittedly weird product names (except Mint, which I like for its elegance and simplicity), but potentially breakthrough applications. Back in 2000 I was working on a personal PHP application that connected to my online bank accounts and automatically categorized my transactions, alerting me of any potential bud…...
Aug 23 2007
Hoedown rough cuts finished—next stop, RubyConf!
Carl Youngblood
I’m really excited to announce that Confreaks will be recording RubyConf this year. We also have a number of enhancements we are planning for our work on the Hoedown, including searchable transcripts of every presentation. ...
Aug 14 2007
Confreaks records Ruby Hoedown
Carl Youngblood
Coby Randquist and I, as part of our Confreaks side business, went to the Ruby Hoedown in Raleigh, NC. We were contracted to record the entire conference and place the content online. The first video has been posted and can be found here. It was quite an adventure, and we hope to do a lot more of this in the coming months. ...
Jul 28 2007
Interview with Fabio Akita
Carl Youngblood
I recently spent a few enjoyable hours chatting with Fabio Akita about my involvement in the Ruby community and my thoughts about software development. Fabio is one of the developers I manage as part of my job at Surgeworks. He is a very skilled programmer and a great guy to work with. ...
Jun 05 2007
MWRC Videos Now Available
Carl Youngblood
It has been a long haul, but we finally finished our post-production work on the 2007 MountainWest Ruby Conference. During this process we developed a lot of scripts to make our future work easier and also learned which processes could benefit the most from better equipment. Hopefully we’ll be able to use these skills in the future. Chad Fowler would like us to record this year’s RubyConf and is seeking corporate sponsorship to help defray the costs. If your company is interested in supporting this effort, please contact me or Chad. Confrea…...
May 24 2007
Making migrations easier
Carl Youngblood
One of my most common problems when developing migrations for a rails project happens when I make a mistake in my migration code that causes the migration to fail to complete successfully. When this happens, it is often the case that some of the commands in your migration executed successfully. This means that when you fix your bug and try to run the migration again, it will fail because it will attempt to run the previously successful commands but will complain that the changes they refer to are already there. There are some workarounds fo…...
