Slicehost or VPS users with small size slices (everything below 512MB) might have noticed lately that downloading a gem from Rubygems has been impossible since the index file has growing steady for some time and now it’s huge! You can check it out by yourself here.

The new Rubygems version (1.2) was finally released yesterday, fixing this issue and adding some nice new stuff. Two interesting bits from the Changelog:

• RubyGems no longer performs bulk updates and instead only fetches the gemspec files it needs. Alternate sources will need to upgrade to RubyGems 1.2 to allow RubyGems to take advantage of the new metadata updater. If a pre 1.2 remote source is in the sources list, RubyGems will revert to the bulk update code for compatibility.
• RubyGems now has runtime and development dependency types. Use #add_development_dependency and #addruntimedependency. All typeless dependencies are considered to be runtime dependencies.

Also, as a plus, remember you can add new sources (repositories), for example, GitHub:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

To download the gems from the new repository just use their naming scheme (user-project):

$ gem install rubyspec-mspec

Comments on Maglev by Charles Oliver Nutter

Charles Oliver Nutter (a.k.a. “headius”) is one of the main persons behind JRuby, and here he shares his thoughs on “Maglev”, a new Ruby virtual machine developed by the people at Gemstone.

You can’t actually get Maglev yet and run anything on it. It’s worse than Vaporware, it’s Presentationware. Go to Gemstone’s site and download Maglev (you can’t). Pull the source (you can’t). Build it yourself and investigate what it does (you can’t). You start to understand what I mean. And this is what the “Ruby media” is calling the most disruptive new Ruby technology. Dudes, come on. Were you born yesterday?

Ruby 1.8.7 Released

I think the changelog shows how many new stuff has been added or moved around, which makes me wonder if they really want to call it 1.8.7 instead of 1.10 or something like that. I’m not a fan of this kind of big and disruptive changes (as can be seen running Rubyspec 1.8.6 on 1.8.7) but let’s thank everyone involved in the process of making this a better language.

Some bugs are starting to show up so I’d suggest to wait a bit before upgrading.

Rails 2.1 Released

A new version of Rails has been released, and like all the other previous minor versions, it corrects a ton of bugs and adds some new nice stuff like Gem dependencies and Support for timezones.
Although both of these things were made possible before by some plugins, I think they’ve integrated them in a really simple and clean way, provided out of the box for us.

Weird note: Since the blog’s not really the medium to transmit these kind of “bulk-of-links” posts I think building a small web app to do this in a clean and fashionable way (e.g. no del.icio.us, sorry) will be a great chance to learn some of the new stuff available in Rails.

KDE4 UI Critique

I wouldn’t find a better analogy to describe it:

There’s the first problem. The new KDE launcher is a gynecologist interface: There you are, sitting in front of a 20″ screen, but the programmer has dictated that you have to do everything by poking around in a small box.

Threadless

I have a serious addiction with t-shirts, and this might be one of those websites that will be able to supply me for a while. Every shirt’s designed by a member of the community and then this design’s ranked by the visitors to the website, making sure all of their designs are really worth the money.

Also, they think I’m awesome!

WMD - A Markdown Editor

I’m not really a fan of WYSIWYM editors (a la LyX) and I prefer to use the raw languages from inside Emacs, but the people at AttackLab really deserve a mention on this Markdown editor. It works great and in the future I’d love to see it replacing all those ugly FCKEditor family of editing tools (that includes the “oh-fuck-you-for-overwriting-my-keybindings” editor that Wordpress uses).

A lot of people has asked me lately for my “read-list”. It’s not very long (~ 40 feeds a day) but maybe you’ll find something interesting in the attached .opml file (which is supposed to be an easy way to pass RSS/Atom feeds around).

Click save as to save this file as OPML

The idea of the Filter is simple: I’m reading Reddit, news.ycombinator and Twitter so you don’t have to.

Stealing the Linked List format (and even some news!) from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, here’s some cool stuff you might be interested in:

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

W. Daniel Hillis relating what was it like to work with Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize recipient in Physics in 1965:

After a hurried private discussion (”I don’t know, you hired him…”), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

“That sounds like a bunch of baloney,” he said. “Give me something real to do.”

(Via Daring Fireball).

21 Ruby Tricks You Should be Using in Your Own Code

Some really nice idiomatic Ruby tips that could serve every Ruby programmers. Has some really strange-please-don’t-use-this-shit tips such as nested ternary operators (?:) but a good it’s a good read in general:

 queue = []
 %w{hello x world}.each do |word|
     queue << word and puts "Added to queue" unless word.length <  2
 end

Projectionist Code Snippets

 25.percent.of 16
 # => 4

Ubigraph

Really nice visualization software. I think it’d be great to explain data structures and algorithms to students.

git-lighthouse by Scott Chacon

Awesome piece of software to integrate Lightouse and Git:

Date    Num Attch   Title
01/16   253 1   [PATCH] marshal primitive naming conflicts
02/02   299 1   [BUG] MRI allows space between 'a' and '[' in "a [0]".
02/17   333 2   [BUG] Method is allowed to receive...

(Actual example of the Rubinius Lighthouse account.

No, I’m not coming out of the closet, don’t let the gay title fool you.

The last two months have been great, so I think I should change a bit the sometimes pessimistic tone of this blog, and for a change, write about some nice experiences I’ve had.

During the last two months a lot of stuff has happened. To start I got my first paper accepted in an international conference, and with all expenses paid by my last employer (my University), I was able to go to Brazil, a place I had never visited before.
You can see some of the pictures I took during the trip here, but sadly, I’m not a pictures kind of person and by the second day I just stashed the camera away.

Around a month ago I also got some great news from Google, letting me know that I had been accepted in this year’s Summer of Code, under the Ruby Central organization, working on the brand new Rubyspec project.

Last week, after arriving from Brazil, I found out they had shipped a first gift for all the GSoC Students, a book that I didn’t have time to read the last time I borrowed it: Beautiful Code.
This week, after the official “coding season” started, I got a credit card by mail from them, which will be used as the way to pay us as we progress with our projects. One of the bits of information that you need to activate it is “Google” as the issuing company or something, you should’ve heard the expression of the guy on the other side of the phone when I said that.

This semester’s almost over, which means that once again I can go do whatever the fuck I want with my life, without having to wake up before 10 A.M. So cool that it’s not even funny.

Finally, I will be done with the research project I’m currently working on next Friday, and even if I have learned quite some stuff, I’ll honestly say that I’m not a researcher kind of guy, I need to create stuff that I can see and show other people, so let’s hope this is the last one of these jobs.

Oh, and I almost forgot: for the first time ever I was interviewed for a serious article about programming, be sure to check it out at InfoQ.

Mirko Stocker has written has a nice write-up about what’s Rubyspec, it’s goals and the Google Summer of Code’s projects that are supporting it this year, featuring some small tidbits by Arthur Schreiber and yours truly.

The project aims to write a complete executable specification for the Ruby programming language based on RSpec-style specs. The project started as a glimmer in the eye of an early Rubinius contributor and has since grown to over 6900 examples and 25600 expectations, with contributions from many dedicated folks.

You can find the full article here: The Official RubySpec Website and Its Google Summer of Code Students.