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You can get Rake from rubyforge. If you have rubygems installed, then all you need to do is

  gem -i rake

If you have a very recent version of rubygems (i.e. from CVS), then the gen-rdoc option finally produces a decent rendition of the Rake documentation locally.

QuickStartExample

Some very interesting ruby stuff:

• Artificial Neural Networks: Implemented a multilayer backpropagating artificial neural network using a momentum term and optionally a weight decay term.
• Borges mod_ruby Integration: I have managed to get Borges running using mod_ruby. I will produce a library ready version of that and check it in the Borges project.
• and much more
link

I’m still waiting for some more, so check back periodically to see updates.

Mauricio Fernandez posted this to ruby-talk: AFAIK he introduced the concept of "brain power consumption" (now renamed as "stress" in his last talk) for the first time.

That was the first time (I’m aware of) somebody stated that the main goal of a programming language isn’t expressive power (possibly by being close to natural languages, as Perl) nor ease of learning or usage, but making the programmer happier (which is a weighted mix of all other criteria).

www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/index.html

Video of the ll2 talk: ll2.ai.mit.edu/

matz called his talk: "How Ruby sucks".

The Springz library allows you to attach two objects together (in 2D space) with a spring, and simulate how they pull/push each other.

Boring when used between two objects, it becomes interesting when you attach thousands of springs with different strenghts and distances between hundreds of nodes, and let the simulation determine the best configuration of those nodes. (I wrote this library specifically to create a social network diagram from a large amount of data. I had written it first in Javascript + SVG, and it was working, but too slowly: 3 hours to render the first frame, and 12+ hours for each frame after that.)

Despite the very visual nature of this application, this library doesn't know jack about graphics; it just knows how to push/pull theoretical objects around in theoretical 2D space. Making this visible to the user is up to you. (My application reads in XML data and then outputs a few frames of SVG pre-rendered animation.)

The documentation for the Springz class lists the key features at the top of it. You can read this laboriously-written documentation, and download the file itself, from: here (click on Springz.rb under the Files listing).

If you happen to have the Adobe SVG plugin (freely avail for Win/Mac/Linux/Solaris) installed, you can see the JS version of this library in action at -- click the green rectangle to start the simulation, and then drag objects around and/or click the orange button to scatter them about.

(by Robert C. Martin; on <a href="www.artima.com">artima.com</a>) For many years we've been using statically typed languages for the safety they offer. But now, as we all gradually adopt Test Driven Development, are we going to find that safety redundant? Will we therefore decide that the flexibility of dynamically typed languages is desirable? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4639

link[http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/Euruko2003]

The First European Ruby Conference was held at the University of Karlsruhein in Germany, from the 21st to the 22th of June, 2003. It was organized by Michael Neumann, Stefan Schmiedl, Armin Roehrl and with the help from many others.

Thanks to Michael, the presentations were digitally recorded and have been made available as AVI files. Some of theses are now available for download from ruby-doc.org The videos have had the some noise filtering and volume normalization applied, and have been converted to MPEG-1 to reduce (albeit slightly) their size.

Not all of the videos are available right now. Others will go up as time permits me to do the file processing.

I initially had some FTP timeout trouble uploading the files to ruby-doc.org, so I split them into chunks. I decided to leave them this way to help avoid marathon download sessions. To combine the chunks into the complete file you basically just need to 'cat' them in sequence. I've written a Ruby script to do this, available from the video download page. If anyone thinks they can mirror any of these files it would be a tremendous help.

If you know anything about video compression, and can tell me a way to make the files smaller without serious loss of quality, please tell me.