For the whole of May, I will blog about weird things in Ruby over at Idiosyncratic Ruby – Don’t miss it!

Long time readers of this blog will remember that I used to tweak GNOME’s gedit editor a lot. However, I ditched it for Sublime Text and I am not looking back. Here are some of the things I like about Sublime:

• Offers a good out-of-the-box experience, including an amazing “fuzzy search” tool (ctrl+p)
• It works on ubuntu without any problems
• Fast (enough)
• Multiple cursors!
• Once you have installed Package Control: An integrated extension repository
• Encourages you to write your own extensions
• Looks good
  …read

Being impressed by MicroEvent.js I played with the thought to use such a library not only in JavaScript, but also in Ruby. The design pattern of this kind of message passing is called observer pattern and there is also a library in Ruby’s standard library and some more on rubygems.org. However, MicroEvent.js just nails it,

My lightning talk from this year’s eurucamp:

Wrongly used randomness can be the source of hard-to-detect bugs and security holes. This is relevant every time you use randomness, for example, when implementing an existing protocol/interface that requires random values or generating tokens for your next raffle. This article describes when to use which of Ruby’s randomness methods.

The NumberHelper functionality is now available as Numeric#to_s

Ruby’s structs are one of my favorite data types in Ruby. They help you to keep some defined structure in the dynamic world of Ruby. Often, it makes sense to use them instead of hashes or arrays. Read-only structs take the idea a level further.

A little #whyday project, finished at eurucamp 2012, that displays the urls and summaries of all the gems of a Gemfile. Put the code somewhere in your $PATH (I keep little helper scripts like this one in ~/r) and run gemfile from within a the project.

After releasing version 0.9 of my cli password manager, I received friendly feedback and suggestions, which encouraged me to further improve it. Here are some of my experiences implementing pws 1.0:

• stores your passwords in a file on your disk
• encrypts the file with a master password
• is designed for every-day-use
• is written in 234 lines of understandable Ruby code… Read it!
• is tested with 222 Cucumber steps
  …read

So you’ve installed (or upgraded to) ubuntu 11.10 and everything looks great… Except – uh!, lots of gedit plugins are only compatible with gedit 2! But don’t be sad.. or angry.. This guide points out, how to, nevertheless, create a solid foundation that allows you getting prodcutive with gedit!

Ruby 1.8 dies in June 2012. This post shows some small examples, why this is good ;)

My codebrawl entry (gist) got the 5th place (out of 20). Want to use it in real life :)

Rails migrations are easy to understand and easy to write. However, you can save some unnecessary key strokes by applying these three tips :)

There are plenty terminal color gems out there. Now, there is one more. Why?

My eurucamp talk: pdf / odp / speakerrate

puts is great for a quick output, but when a script gets more complex or you want to offer a flexible executable, consider using the logger ;). Since the logger class is part of the Ruby standard library, it can be used everywhere, without installing any gems. And it’s very easy to use :D

13 Rails-specific hints for your rails 3 console.

Somehow, I stumbled upon this useful little script by _why: Update

Hirb: “A mini view framework for console/irb that’s easy to use, even while under its influence. Console goodies include a no-wrap table, auto-pager, tree and menu.” now supports unicode in two ways:

┌───────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Support for unicode full-width characters │ Unicode table characters instead of +/- chars │ └───────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Many people use irb with wirble. I also did.

I’ve been quite happy with it, but sometimes I noted that some symbols were displayed as : without the symbol name (e.g. in method name arrays) and that the representation of regexes looked quite strange.

This is why I’ve looked at the wirble tokenizer, fixed some bugs, liked it, extended it and created Wirb. These are the improvements:

This little method (now also available in zucker/debug) is useful for understanding and creating regexes:

What does it mean when the guy who blogged about irb’s details and wrote most of the successful irb gems (hirb, bond, boson) decides to implement his own irb alternative? There must be something wrong with irb!

We love Ruby. And we love the command line. So… the shell needs to be rubyfied ;).

Fresh is a new gem, trying to achieve this.

Updated for fresh version 0.2.0.

Introducing the fancy_irb gem:

• Use fancy colors! You can colorize the prompts, irb errors, stderr and stdout
• Output results as Ruby comments
• Enhance your output value using procs
  …read

Equipped with some tools discussed at the germany.rb 2010 user group meetup, I’ve played around with my ~/.irbrc and put together a little meta gem for some useful irb tools (github)

The clipboard gem allows you to access the clipboard on Liunx, MacOS and Windows.

The .gemspec file of a gem allows to specify requirements for that gem – but usually you do not get to see them. These five lines patch RubyGems, so that gem displays the requirements of a gem after it has been installed:

The next pack of Project Euler solutions.

Not everyone likes debuggers. I rather print the debug values myself – it works and I do not need to learn a debugger :P

Zucker 4 adds accessors to some environment information:

• OS: returns the current operating system
• RubyEngine: returns the current Ruby implementation
• RubyVersion: returns the current Ruby version

And here is how it works.

##              ##    ##     ##    ##    ##    ####           ###        ##    ##
 ##            ##     ##     ##     ##  ##     ##  ##        ## ##        ##  ##
  ##    ##    ##      #########      ####      ##   ##     #########       ####
   ##  ####  ##       ##     ##       ##       ##  ##      ##     ##        ##
    ####  ####        ##     ##       ##       ####       ##       ##       ##

The Zucker gem has gotten some new features. Installation is as easy as
 gem install zucker
and
 require 'zucker/all'

Zucker is a collection of lightweight scripts (cubes) that make Ruby even more beautiful: rubyzucker.info

One of my favourite ways of learning something about existing code is to load it into irb and play around with it. You are able to ask every object in irb what it can do. It is as easy as you just asking for methods or public_methods and the object will show its abilities. But often you get spammed by Object or irb methods that you rarely want to use.

More solutions for the projecteuler.net problems. Some of them are solved using 1.9.2 features.

One useful (and funny) feature of Ruby is the Symbol#to_proc method that lets you write concise code like this: %w|1 2 3 4|.map(&:to_i). Almost everyone who knows this feature loves it ;). However, the use cases are pretty limited, because in most cases you need to pass parameters!

has_many_booleans is an ActiveRecord plugin which creates virtual boolean attributes for a model. When the object gets saved, the plugin transforms all attributes into a single integer, using a bitset. So you can easily add new attributes without changing the database structure.

In Ruby, dealing with Arrays and similar objects is pretty fun. And we have gotten more possibilities with Ruby 1.9.2 :)

The 28 Bytes of Ruby Joy will notably clean up your code:

These the slides for my proseminary about the Ruby syntax. It is loosely based on an essay by Yukihiro Matsumoto which is published in the O’Reilly book Beautiful Code. It is released under a creative commons license.

Transferring an existing project to Rails 3 is not that hard, but it usually cannot be done in 5 minutes.

With the easy-to-use (and pre-installed) command line utility zenity, it is pretty simple to create useful external tools for gedit!

You can, of course, use an IDE for coding – but reconsider it: After hours of initialization, it tries to do everything for you… Somewhere in the never ending menu jungle… And you need to click all the time… Stop! Focus on the gist! You want to write code!

Most Ruby programmers know: Many things can be done in much less time on the command line. To become more productive, you should take the 10 minutes to configure some basic settings.

A common Ruby experience on ubuntu: You get some stupid error, saying something would be missing – and you don’t know what to do…

Installing Ruby/Rails on ubuntu is not hard, but some little obstacles might be confusing.

No, I am not an Apple hater. But I want to point out, that it is possible to turn an ubuntu into a sweet Ruby development environment – without TextMate!

This is a Ruby implentation of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. Truth be told: It is almost a plain copy of the Wikipedia pseudocode ;)

projecteuler.net tries to get you thinking about how to solve mathematical problems by programming. Here are the first five problems, solved in Ruby, including comments.

After editing some source files with different editors on different platforms, I had some troubles with automatically inserted tabs messing it all up.

This little script replaces all tabs with two spaces.

This is my submission for the CodeRack contest:

A middleware that removes < and > from all incoming requests.

This article is written for people with experience in programming in general, but who are new to Ruby.
A German version is published in the offline magazine #2, a magazine by some students of TU Dresden.

The intention is to demonstrate some features of Ruby and show, what is so great about Ruby:

A clean syntax combined with the possibility to adapt the language to given requirements flexibly.

Some days ago, I discovered a website – which is the most addicting one I know :) – codegolf.com. The goal is, to solve programming problems with as short code as possible.

As I said, it is addicting. You do not write better ruby code by golfing. But you can really improve the knowledge of the language. And it is fun :)

Brainfuck

After doing some of the other challenges I tried the brainfuck challenge.
Brainfuck is a Turing-complete esoteric programming language consisting only of 8 letters, operating on a 30000 cells-array. This is the hello world program:

The goal is to build a interpreter.

Some time ago, I conducted a short presentation about Ruby. And to impress the audience, I did some live coding and implemented the quicksort algorithm in 5 minutes. They were impressed :)

In my current Rails project, I use the aegis gem for rights management. And I almost got mad, wondering, why it wouldn’t work..

About a year ago, some students at my university announced a little programming competition for students beginning studying IT, like me. The language could be chosen freely.

At this time, I had already done some C and PHP programming.. but I also had heard of Ruby and that Ruby is sooo cool. So I decided to learn the basics of Ruby by taking part… and it’s been the right decision! I fell in love with Ruby ;).

I publish my solution here. It is a good “try to understand what it does”-exercise for people new to Ruby or programming in general (or people doing Rails only all the time).

When I began programming Ruby/Rails, I quickly found the online Ruby documentation at ruby-doc.org and the Rails API, which are both very useful. But unfortunately, one cannot be always online. In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate some ways to generate or get the docs offline and some hints on using them.

At my last entry, a question arose about what is the most efficient way to convert integers between the bases 2 and 10: either using built-in ruby methods (and even do lightweight string-operations) or calculating it manually. I had to find out ;). So I have written a little benchmark program, which does the conversion in three different ways:

1. using built-in to_i-magic
2. calculating it by hand
3. using sprintf

It stops the time each method needs to get the fastest. The result might be surprising. [Update: improved the custom methods]

Sometimes you have an array of indices. These might, for example, act as flags, whether some specific options are set or not. A nice way to store this list is, to store it in one single number.