Posted by h3rald
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:41:00 GMT
I finally got my hands on a shiny new copy of Design Patterns in Ruby1. The book itself is not brand new and it was already widely praised by many different people online, so I wanted to take a look for myself.
To my surprise, the book is a hardcover edition, which makes it look more professional and more durable than the average programming book2. It’s also smaller and shorter than the average programming book2 (340 pages), which makes it much easier to carry around and less intimidating to read. It’s also not meant to be a reference book, so it is actually pleasant an easy to read all in one go, as you’ll soon find out.
What is it about? — well, design patters in the Ruby language of course. But it’s not the usual brainwash of programming theory you would expect by a typical book on patters, it has plenty of examples of real code. When I say real code I don’t mean the usual Dog/Cat/Horse/<insert animal here> classes or juke-box simulations which don’t work at all etc. etc., I mean actual snippets from well known Ruby applications, like RubyGems, FXRuby and, of course, Rails.
OK well, there’s an exception perhaps: Russ did include a few wild life simulations (ponds with frogs and similar), but it’s only for your own good, and for the sake of tradition.
Anyhow, let’s start from the beginning…
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Posted in Articles | Tags books, review, ruby | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:33:00 GMT
InLine RawLine 0.2.0 is out!
RawLine is the new name for InLine, in case you didn’t guess. The name was changed to avoid name collision problems with the RubyInline project.
Here’s what’s new:
- Added /examples and /test directory to gem.
- Escape codes can now be used in prompt.
- It is now possible to use bind(key, &block) with a String as key, even if the corresponding escape sequence is not defined.
- Added Editor#write_line(string) to print a any string (and “hit return”).
- Library name changed to “RawLine” to avoid name collision issues (Bug 18879).
- Provided alternative implementation for left and right arrows if terminal
supports escape sequences (on Windows, it requires the Win32Console gem).
In particular, I decided to provide an “optimized implementation” for the left and right arrows using escape sequences rather than shameful hacks. This is now possible because the Win32Console gem now enables ANSI escape sequences on Windows as well (weehee!).
So:
- If you’re on *nix all good, your terminal is smart and can understand escape sequences => the new implementation will be used.
- If you’re on Windows and you installed Win32Console, your termnal is smart and can understand escape sequences => the new implementation will be used.
- If you’re on Windows and you didn’t install Win32Console, then your terminal is stupid and it doesn’t understand escape sequences, so the old implementation will be used.
The new implementation is significantly faster than the old one, on Windows at least, and the cursor now blinks properly when left or right arrows are pressed.
I re-emplemented only cursor movement because I’m still having some problems in getting the delete/insert escapes to work properly (or better: how I want them to work!).
Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, programming, RawLine, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:30:00 GMT
I’ve been kindly asked by the lead developer of RubyInLine to change the name of my InLine project, due to potential confusion and conflicts.
This makes sense, and I’m ready to change the name of my project, although I’m not that good at choosing original and smart names, so well, any suggestion is more than welcome!
I was thinking of something like:
- RawLine
- EditLine
- RawInput
- RubyInput
- RubyLine
I personally think that RawLine is probably the best option, but please, if have any better idea just speak up!
P.S.: “RedLine” is taken, unfortunately, otherwise it would have been my first choice since the beginning.
Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, programming, RawLine, ruby | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:59:00 GMT
One of the many things I like about Ruby is its cross-platform nature: as a general rule, Ruby code runs on everything which supports Ruby, regardless of its architecture and platform (yes, there are quite a few exceptions, but let’s accept this generalization for now).
More specifically, I liked the fact that I could use the GNU Readline library with Ruby seamlessly on both Windows and Linux.
Readline offers quite a lot of features which are useful for those people like me who enjoy creating command-line scripts, in a nutshell, it provides:
- File/Word completion
- History support
- Custom key bindings which can be modified via .inputrc
- Emacs and Vi edit modes
Basically it makes your command-line interface fast and powerful, and that’s not an overstatement. Ruby’s own IRB can be enhanced by enabling readline and completion, and it works great—at least on *nix systems.
For some weird reason, some people had problems with Readline on Windows: in particular, things get nasty when you start editing long lines. Text gets garbled, the cursor goes up one or two lines and doesn’t come back, and other similar leprechaun’s tricks, which are not that funny after a while.
Apparently there’s no alternative to Readline in the Ruby world. If you wan’t tab completion that’s it, you’re stuck. Would it be difficult to implement some of Readline functionality natively in Ruby? Maybe, but the problem is that for some reason the Ruby Standard Library doesn’t have low level methods to operate on keystrokes…
…but luckily, the HighLine gem does! James Edward Gray II keeps pointing out here and here that HighLine’s own get_character method does just that: it returns the corresponding character code(s) right when a key is pressed, unlike IO#gets() which waits for the user to press ENTER.
Believe it or not, that tiny method can do wonders…
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Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, programming, RawLine, ruby | 9 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:47:00 GMT
The second shortcut from Addison-Wesley Professional series I’m going to review is called Writing Efficient Ruby Code. A very promising title, especially considering that this book is only 50 pages long.
As usual, this shortcut can be intended as a sort of programmer-friendly detailed cheatsheet: like the other ones in this series it sports a monitor-friendly landscape layout and does not go to deep into the details unless strictly necessary to understand a particular concept.
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Posted in Articles | Tags books, review, ruby | 2 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:07:00 GMT
This new beta release of RedBook introduces quite a few changes when it comes to configuration and setup. Here’s some highlights…
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Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, productivity, redbook, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:42:00 GMT
If you ever considered about developing an deploying a Rails application in the last year or so, you must have heard of Mongrel before. If you didn’t, I’d recommend you learn more about it because up to now it proved to be one of the few essential ingredients for deploying scalable Rails applications.
Mongrel is a creation of Zed Shaw who started writing a replacement for FastCGI to use with Rails, and ended up creating a brand new, HTTP web server who turned out to be one of the best things the Rails community ever saw happening.
It was created to be simple to use and configure, nevertheless it does require some skill to set it up and tune it. Documentation is there, along with plenty of blog posts, but there’s also an interesting book from Addison Wesley Professional which is definetely worth a read.
“Mongrel: Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications” – that’s the title of the book. A Digital Shortcut, 100-odd pages long, in landscape format to make it easier to read on a computer, straight to the point with no added sugar for just 15$ (PDF only). I must say Addison Wesley got it right: the book’s format is, as a matter of fact, optimized for web developers, especially those who can’t afford to read a 500-pages book covering everything about a subject just to find that one thing they don’t know about.
This shortcut can be seen, essentially, as an expanded cheatsheet which will teach you the basics about Mongrel and also give you plenty of advice on how to learn more about it.
Let’s have a closer look at it.
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Posted in Articles | Tags books, Rails, review, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:34:00 GMT
I’m pleased to announce a new release of the RedBook daily logging and time tracking script. This release introduces two new operations, four stats-related directives and a brand new Windows Installer able to setup RedBook in a blink, with (almost) no configuration at all.
Let’s have a closer look…
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Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, productivity, redbook, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:18:00 GMT
It’s time for a new beta release of RedBook. This was actually going to be a fairly modest release in terms of features, but I actually ended up implementing a lot more than expected, even things which were planned for the first production release 1.0. So, let’s see what’s new
New operation names (which break compatibility with previous versions)
I had a look at the names I choose for the operations and I noticed that they were either not intuitive enough or too verbose. So I decided to change a fair few of them (thus breaking compatibility with previous versions, but after all that’s what beta releases are for, right?):
| OLD |
NEW |
| :complete |
:finish |
| :load |
:select |
| :load_config |
:config |
| :load_log |
:refresh |
| :timecalc |
:calc |
| :stop |
:quit |
New Manual/Home Page
A while ago I discovered TiddlyWiki, but as a matter of fact I never used it for anything practical. From last week though, I started using it a work for taking notes and create short memos, and then I thought of using it to replace RedBook’s standard README file (which was made in a hurry and was kinda cryptical). Now a brand new “manual.html” ships with RedBook—308 KB (30 of actual docs and 278 of Javascript/HTML/CSS magic) with everything you need to know about it. Additionally, an online version is available at the following address:
redbook.h3rald.com
Removed Win32::Console Library
OK this is not good news for people (like me) who use RedBook on Windows, but I promise you’ll forgive me when you read about the other new features below. I discovered by chance that the Win32::Console library (which was used to get colors working on Windows) seems not to handle international characters properly and also seems to be conflicting in some way with the Readline library I decided to include (see below). I don’t know whether this is a problem of the actual library or just of the gem used to pack it.
rbconfig.yml
The config.yml file has been renamed to rbconfig.yml. Additionally, if you place a file with this name in your $HOME directory it will override the one in your RedBook folder (This was done in preparation for the RedBook RubyGem).
New operations
The following new operations are available:
- :relog—Re-logs a previously-logged message (keeping the same tags and updating the timestamp)
- :clear—Clears the screen.
- :ruby—Evaluates arbitrary Ruby code outputting the result (use with care…)
Auto-completion
Some Mac users originally complained that the backspace key wasn’t working in RedBook (and it didn’t in Linux either). Fortunately the solution to this was easy enough: include the GNU Readline library.
Readline is now being used in RedBook to:
- Provide basic (Emacs-style) bindings
- Auto-completion for keywords and tags
- Allow the user to automatically customize key bindings via an .inputrc file placed in their $HOME directory (on Windows you’ll have to define a HOME environment variable pointing to a directory of your choice). An example .inputrc file is distributed with RedBook with some specific key bindings.
Support for international characters
Finally, I decided to implement another feature which was originally planned for the 1.0 release: international characters support. This is possible using the Iconv Ruby extension (requires GNU libiconv) which can convert strings between different character sets. The character sets needs to be configured via the rbconfig.yml file.
For more information, check out the ChangeLog
Download RedBook
Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, productivity, redbook, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by h3rald
Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:05:00 GMT
“Release Early, Release Often”
—Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
In other words, time for another (early) release of RedBook. There are quite a few new features which are worth examining, in particular:
Regexp search for messages
This was actually already available before, just if you inputted a search string which was not a regexp, you’d get an unhandled exception (more or less). This exception is now handled propertly so you get a pretty message instead, if an error occurs when parsing the search string.
Log Backup
A new :backup keyword is available to quickly backup your log file. Here’s what it does:
- Loads all messages silently
- Writes them to a file in the same directory as the original log file named <log-alias>.bkp.yml.
Handy, especially if there was a similar keyword to restore the last backup, which is planned for later on.
Support for multiple log files
This is perhaps the most important feature introduced by this release. It is now possible to configure more than one log file by adding any number of :data_<alias>: settings inside your config.yml file, where alias is the name of your log file. So, for example, if your config.yml file contains the following:
:data_test: “testlog.yml”
You can load the “test” log by typing
:use test
(:use is a shorthand for :load_log). Similarly, another new keyword :dest has been introduced to be able to log a message to a different log file without loading it into memory, like this:
:log This message will be saved to testlog.yml :dest test
Finally, a :refresh keyword has been introduced as an alias to reloading the current log.
(Almost) automatic log of completed activities
Right when I was coding the :timecalc operation, I thought it would be nice to be able to log the start and end of a task without having to type it twice. Now this is possible using the :complete keyword:
:log Testing feature X in product Y
:complete
:complete will re-log the last message prepended with [COMPLETED]:
4 Mon Oct 08 2007 – 10:47:45 AM Testing feature X in product Y
5 Mon Oct 08 2007 – 10:54:31 AM [COMPLETED] Testing feature X in product Y
What if I start another task before completing the first one? No problem, it is sufficient to load the last activities using a :load command and then issuing :complete <number> where <number> is the index of the loaded activity.
This nifty little feature will become more and more important when (starting from release 0.4) I’ll implement more time tracking functions, and it will be possible to track completed tasks in a specific timeframe and/or marked with a specific tag.
Easy integration with launchers like Launchy and QuickSilver
To conclude, as someone pointed out that it would be cool to use RedBook from launchers like Launchy or Quicksilver, I made another standalone script (redbooklet.rb or redbooklet.exe) which is just able to parse a log command and write a message to the specified log file.
To use it with Launchy, for example, all you have to do is the following:
- Create a shortcut to redbooklet.exe (or to a way to execute the corresponding ruby script) named “log”.
- Copy the “log” shortcut anywhere in your start menu
- Bring up launchy (ALT+SPACE) and type in “log”
- Hit tab
- Type in your log message, optionally with the any :tags or :dest keywords.
- The message will be logged to your default log file or to the log you specified using the :dest keyword. If an error occurs, it will appear in a command line window for 15 seconds before the program is closed.
That’s all folks! As usual, if you have any comment or suggestion feel free to reply to this post or email me. For a list of the planned features and releases, check out the Milestones page.
DOWNLOAD HERE
Posted in Blog | Tags OpenSource, productivity, redbook, ruby | no comments | no trackbacks
