Working with Ruby
Hi, I am Jan. This is my old Ruby blog. I still post about Ruby, but I now do it on idiosyncratic-ruby.com. You should also install Irbtools to improve your IRB.

Idiosyncratic Ruby

May 2015, one-liners · regex · golf · fun · docs · irb · thoughts · tutorial · hints · stdlib · ruby

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

Be More Productive with Better Sublime Snippets for Ruby!

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

Get your Microscope for MicroLogger: A small Logger on Top of MicroEvent.rb

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,

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Ruby and Random

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.

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6 basic cd tricks you should know and use!

And you’ll never want to miss them again!

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Connect to an oracle database using jdbc on JRuby in a jar file

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.

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RubyBuntu -6- gedit 3! wtf? set it up for ruby/web development :)

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!

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Exploring the stdlib: logger

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

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ripl: Why should you use an irb alternative?

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!

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Tutorial: Build your own password safe with Ruby!

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 ;)

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How to properly check for your Ruby interpreter, version and OS

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.

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Introducing Ruby Zucker - a new syntactical sugar gem

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

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Project Euler 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 (Ruby)

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

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Become a Proc Star!

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!

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Just another "Ruby code is beautiful" presentation ;)

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.

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RubyBuntu -4- Make gedit better than any IDE ;)

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!

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RubyBuntu -3- Be one with your command line!

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.

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RubyBuntu -1- Installing Ruby (and Rails) on ubuntu

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

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You don't need a MacBook to code Ruby and Rails ;)

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!

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Project Euler 1-5 (Ruby)

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.

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Oh, this sweet and tasty syntactic sugar!

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.

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Create an offline version of the Ruby docs

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.

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