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,

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.

And you’ll never want to miss them again!

This is how you can use JRuby to connect to an oracle database without requiring Ruby to be installed on the system, but only Java.

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!

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

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!

There are many implementations of password managers/safes out there. But lots of them are black boxes, either because they are not open source, or because they have to much features and it gets complicated to understand the source (which is most likely not written in a happy programming language). You don’t know, what really happens with your passwords. So…

Do it yourself!
Do it with Ruby!
Do it in less than 250 lines ;)

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.