Ruby on Squid's Blog

Semantic Web and JRuby

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 02:30:21 +0000

I got the chance to share my enthusiasm for two of my favorite technologies at JRubyConf by giving a presentation on Semantic Web and JRuby. It was an excellent experience. I was able to connect with other people that shared my interest in the Semantic Web and some that have even worked with the technologies professionally. Most exciting, I had the opportunity to share my knowledge and hopefully inspire others to look farther into using JRuby with the Jena Semantic Web Framework.

Yellow Belt Katas for Ruby and Clojure

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 03:11:29 +0000

I have put a couple projects out on GitHub to help people get started with Clojure and Ruby. The Katas are taken more or less from the Coding Kata site http://codingkata.org/katas/. The projects both include the basic project setup for you to get started with TDD beginner katas.

The Ruby project has tests in the form of rspec-given, which is quite fun. The Clojure project has tests in the form of Midje, which has a lovely syntax.

On Thinking in Ruby and Clojure

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 02:02:09 +0000

Recently, I decided to work on a set of code Katas. I couldn’t decide whether to do them in Ruby or Clojure, so I decided to do them in both. I did the Kata in Ruby first and then immediately followed up with the same one in Clojure. It was an interesting exercise, not only for the learning of the languages, but to highlight how I thought about the problems differently depending on the language.

Zen and Zombies - Adventures in Ruby

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 04:06:07 +0000

What do Zen and Zombies have in common? You probably got the beginning with the letter “Z”, but did you also guess Ruby? This blog post is to share two awesome and fun filled ways to learn Ruby and Ruby and Rails.

First, let’s start with the Zen. Edgecase created a great way of learning Ruby. It is through Ruby Koans . Koans are a way of teaching Zen through questions. The master asks the student a question. The student then meditates on it until they come to the answer , eventually leading to enlightenment. The Ruby Koans are cleverly designed to teach bite size tidbits of the Ruby language through the completion of unfinished test cases. Each test case is a Koan. Every time you fix the test case by filling in the blanks, you are gaining a deeper understanding of the language. The main path_to_enlightment.rb file leads you through test cases that explore many areas of the languages such as Strings, Classes, Methods, and Exceptions. Enlightenment has never been so much fun.

Openssl fix for Rails 3.0 on Ubuntu

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:11:14 +0000

If you are trying to run ruby rvm and rails 3.0 on Ubuntu you might run into this problem when you start up you server.

LoadError: no such file to load
-- openssl

After much googling and researching – just installing the openssl library on your system won’t fix the problem. You need to recompile and install your rvm ruby version with the openssl. I found this fixed it for me.

Fox In Socks Blocks

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:43:34 +0000

In honor of the Ruby Why Day, I was inspired to dabble in Ruby Blocks after being reading “Fox In Socks” multiple times to my children before bed. For all of you parents out there that have read the book many, many times while your children are giggling at your pronunciation difficulties, I am sure this bit will be familiar:

def fox_in_socks_blocks
chicks_bricks = ["Chicks","bricks","blocks","clocks"]
yield chicks_bricks[0..1]
yield [chicks_bricks[0],chicks_bricks[2]]
yield chicks_bricks
end
fox_in_socks_blocks do |sillywords|
puts "#{sillywords[0]} with #{sillywords[1]} come." if sillywords.size < 3
puts "#{sillywords[0]} with #{sillywords[1]} and #{sillywords[2]} and #{sillywords[3]} come." if sillywords.size >= 3
end

That’s right - the output is: Chicks with bricks come. Chicks with blocks come. Chicks with bricks and blocks and clocks come.