Neurogami

Code & Coffee @ Open Source Project Tempe is now a weekly thing.

It’s every Wednesday from 1pm-4:00pm at:

Open Source Project

1415 E University Dr, Tempe, Arizona, US

Map.

Free wi-fi, plenty of power, great coffee, and great hacking.

I just updated Ruby-doc.org with the current set of Ruby API docs. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, James, that was fast!”

Actually, I let things slip way too long. I’ve a million really good reasons, but I can’t imagine anyone wants to hear them. However, a few things to note:

The site now defaults to showing the core and standard-lib docs for Ruby 1.9.2. There are additional links to core and standard-lib docs for 1.8.7 and 1.8.6. I expect that the new default version will disturb some people. I had earlier changed the default to 1.8.7, and there was much noise, because while it was arguably the current Ruby 1.8, it was by no means commonly used. And at that time 1.9 has not gained much adoption. I think the situation is better now. Making either 1.9.7 or 1.9 the default would be a sensible choice. I picked 1.9, though, because that’s where it’s all headed anyway. (One thing that occurred to me as I was checking the new links, though, is that the doc pages do not tell you the Ruby version. I need to go see how I can best set that in the rdoc template someplace to reduce confusion.)

More details here.

I've released a new version of Rawr, version 1.4.5

I ran into trouble creating a Monkeybars project; seems Rawr was assuming that the install command would be invoked when the working directory was the top project folder.  However, since rawr became the live-in lover of Monkeybars, the project generator ended up calling rawr install from the parent of the project folder, though it was passing in the name of the project folder to use. 

So I changed the rawr code to be a more observant about where it is running and what arguments it is passed, and so far seems fine.

I hadn't used it to do any app bundling, and learned that rawr was placing the resulting exe in the wrong folder.

When I tried to create an exe (on Windows 7) it just plain failed, as it was constructing the wrong output path for the launch4j configuration file.

I've fixed that and all seems good again.

The gem is up on http://gems.neurogami.com/gems/

(I've had a number of issues using gemcutter.org so I've been avoiding it.)

Please try this version out and let me know if anything breaks.

Back in 2007 I wrote an article for DevX giving a quick intro to Ruby goodness.  I've now found that you need to sign up or register or something to read it.

Since my contract says I get the rights to the article after 120 days, I've re-posted it.

10 Minutes to Your First Ruby Application

The video from my Ignite Phoenix 7 talk, "Fashioning Technology: Wearable computers and a network of things", is up on the Neurogami YouTube channel.  Watch it

The video of my MountainWest RubyConf 2010 talk on Hubris is now available.

James Britt: Hubris - The Ruby/Haskell Bridge from Neurogami on Vimeo.

You can watch it on Vimeo or grab it from the Confreaks site.

There are plenty more sweet videos up on Confreaks as well, and of course the usual goodness on the Neurogami Channel

As with Rawr, the Monkeybars project will be moving off Kenai. 

Code will move to GitHub, tickets to Pivotal Tracker, and they'll be a Google Group set up.

Once that's done, some code from Jimpanzee will be copied over.  In particular, they'll be some bult-in support for using Neurogami::SwingSet. 

SwingSet wraps some core Swing components to make it easier, and nicer, to create UI objects with simple, text-edited, Ruby.

Monkeybars could always create and manipulate Swing objects created using inline code, but you needed to fall back to Java/Swing naming.  It was useful and nice but not as clean as it should be.  Great for tossing up a simple alert box, less great for doing, say, a data input form.

This was rarely an issue because knocking out a GUI using the free WYSIWYG editor in Netbeans was easy and and convienent. And experience has shown that you really do want to use a proper GUI editor and robust layout manager when building sophisticated applications.

Nonetheless there were people who incorrectly believed that Monkeybars required Netbeans. Or some other GUI tool.  And people who just don't want to open up some extra tool unless they really really have to.  Well, Neurogami::SwingSet takes care of all that.  You can eat your cake, and have it, too.  (Makes for great "gee whiz!" demos, too.)

Rawr, the  world's greatest application packaging tool for cross-platform JRuby apps, is moving.  We're migrating away from Kenai, and over to GitHub. And Pivotal Tracker.  And Google Groups.

The new repo home is http://github.com/rawr/rawr

The plan is to next revive the Rawr-lib Google Group.

Then, move the current issues over to Pivotal Tracker.

And then plan a new release!

Thanks to Mark Wotton, Hubris-Haskell (that Haskell portion of the Hubris Ruby/Haskell bridge) now works on 64-bit Ubuntu.

When I last tried it I got some nasty errors.  Mark has fixed this, and I gave it another whirl.

I'm using Ruby Version Manager on my Kubuntu 9.10 64-bit desktop PC, and to build Hubris-Haskell I needed to tell it were to find the libruby.so.1.9 files. (BTW, if you want to play along you need to tell rvm to always build ruby with --enable-shared so that you get the required shared object file.)

I then added the libruby.so location to /etc/ld.so.conf, and ran sudo /sbin/ldconfig.

From there I was able to run the example code that comes with  hubris with no trouble.

Sweet!

A new version of Rhesus has been released.

Rhesus is a simple yet powerful code templating tool.  It uses prototype folders and files to generate code, with variable substitution.

This release has some minor changes and bug fixes.

The template options file, originally called .options.yaml is now called .rhesus-options.yaml

Importing new template folders from a git repo now works.

Rhesus was borking  automagic file and folder naming conversion, where it decides whether some file or path should be created as CamelCase or snake_case.  The current fix is the addition of a language setting in the options file. Right now it only reacts to ruby, in which case it assumes that files and folders should use snake_case.  If you omit that it looks for certain file name aspects (e.g. common Ruby file extensions) and uses that to drive the format.  But this has been unreliable, hence the new option.

This is an unsatisfying solution for assorted reasons, but mainly because it's so heavy-handed.  But the fix does make things work better.