Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ruby

Best programming language for a web design class?

satori_movement — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:07:22 -0800

What programming language should I teach my kids? (web dev) I've got about 20 interesting and enthusiastic highschool kids in a web design class. I'm having a blast teaching them, and so far we've covered some of the basics(html, css, and trappings of JS).

We're going to be on Javascript for a while, but at some point we're going to move on to a little database stuff and I want to be ready.

My own personal background is in PHP, but I've played with ruby and done a decent amount of work in python. I've also read that lua is a good choice, and there are some interesting MVCs in that area(plus Lua's syntax is similar to JS which I like).

Really though, I want to avoid running around in circles. So what programming language should I teach my kids? Lua, python, ruby, php, something else entirely?

Does anyone know the typeface/font used in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails logos?

MediaJunkie — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:35:26 -0800

Does anyone know the typeface/font used in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails logos?

How do I use data from data.gov?

Blandanomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:50:31 -0800

I'm a journalist with not much database programming experience. However I have been fascinated by the government and other agencies making their data available for developers to play with, and I think a newspaper could do wonders with this data. How do I get in on the fun? Transit agencies are making their times available the gov't just released records at data.gov.

What languages should I learn to manipulate these datasets to make some good applications and visualizations? Example I have in mind are the Guardians treatment of PM expenses and EveryBlock.

Should I learn Django, Ruby, Pyton? All? None?

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at?

jackson5 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:15:45 -0800

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at? Long story short: I've got a web site that already does over 1 million pageviews per month. I've got a great idea to take it to the next level, but I'm looking for someone who can handle the coding and technical aspects in exchange for an equity stake.

I'm wanting to bring aboard a great programmer who doesn't necessarily need the work but will be motivated by the equity.

Which forums would you recommend I post on to find this person?

Also, if there's anyone interested here, let me know.

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site?

jackson5 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:37:41 -0800

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site? I'm no web developer, but I already have a high traffic picture gallery which I want to turn into a digg-like picture voting site.

I'm going to hire a developer and would like your recommendations on which programming language I should target for the site?

My site currently does about 2 million pageviews per month already, so I expect the traffic to go up. The programming language should easily handle a lot of traffic on 1 dedicated server.

I keep hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails. I'm familiar with PHP/MySQL, but not sure if that is the best programming language for this project.

I also keep hearing a lot about cloud hosting. This sounds like a good option as well.

Basically, to sum up my question: I want to post a "programmer wanted" ad for this project. What should I be looking for from a developer?

Running into Ruby Restriction

FuManchu — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:06:27 -0800

In Ruby, how can you get around the ~65,500 character limit when grabbing a web page? I'm new to Ruby, but have started to use it to scrape information from websites. I have been using either the Hpricot package or net:http. Unfortunately, when I've tried using these to scrape larger web pages, the streams cut off after 65,500 characters. I haven't found any information online about this. Is there a way to get around this limit? Can you separate the stream over two arrays or strings? Or will I have to manage the stream myself with new code?

Sound editing libraries?

pealco — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:41:59 -0800

I have many wav files that I need to modify in the same way. Specifically, I want to fade in from zero dB for the first 5 ms and fade out to zero db for the last 5 ms. What do I use? I'd prefer a scriptable solution that I can just point at the files. I'm a capable programmer, but I'm not sure what free tools or libraries are available for this. Most ideal would be a python or ruby library, but I'm open. I'm using OSX fwiw.

Is Why's Hackety Hack still alive?

forforf — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:33:47 -0800

Anybody know why I'd be having problems with Hackety Hack (the ruby tutorial)? Downloading works fine, but the forums and the shared programs are gone. My 12 yr old son was cranking through it, and really enjoying it, until we got to the portions that required downloading some shared code from the hacketyhack.net site. One of the tutorial lessons (the youtube one) uses a program called youtube.rb, but it seems that the program is no longer up there. Further, when I went to the hackety hack forums at talkety.hacketyhack.net, I was greeted with nothing (as in a completely blank site). Links to old forum posts now get the dreaded 404. Me and my son will be very disappointed if its gone as in gone-gone, but I can't find anything in wikipedia or google searches about it going away.
Also, if it is gone, is there anything close to it as a replacement?

PS. MeFi's RSS feed doesn't work with the tutorial anymore either.

Learning Ruby on Rails 2.0?

BoldStepDesign — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:02:51 -0800

Foreword: No ruby background aside from basic tutorials. Here's the deal. I've tired the Agile Web Dev (2nd edition) book for rails, very out of date. I need to learn something. I want to learn ruby on Rails. I've gone through the Rails guide on creating a rails blog (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started_with_rails.html). So, rather then buy it now (3rd edition of book as beta) or just wait, I want to get on the fast track to learn rails 2.2 (soon to be release 2.3) . Basically I'm looking for a online resource super cheap or free that provides quality information relating to rails and ruby. Help and suggestions welcome

Convert Autohotkey script while learning Ruby

TuxHeDoh — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:07:40 -0800

I'm trying to learn Ruby. I know more than a little bit about VB Script, and have written some scripts to automate some windows tasks, mostly by editing existing scripts, things like pinging workstations, WMI connections looking for files and such. I've read http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram and worked through the tutorials and think I understand them. Now what.... I'm pretty good at throwing together Autohotkey scripts. I'd like to convert one of my everyday scripts to Ruby as an exercise. Are there any web communities that exist that might be able to answer questions I have along the process? Anyone have any resources to point me to for just learning? A site that provides some problems to be solved begining with easy stuff and moving on in complexity?

Open-source library to decode barcodes?

Maia — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:24:17 -0800

Is there a free library that will decode/read a barcode from an image? I am looking for a library that, when given an image of a barcode (not from a barcode scanner) as an argument, will return the barcode number. I would prefer if it was in Python or Ruby, but other languages are ok too.

Rails on Ubuntu

BoldStepDesign — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:02:12 -0800

Rails on Ubuntu. I've followed this tutorial: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu Now how to do I access ror from my browser? Where do I put files for dev? Help please!!

How to fix rubygems?

Inigo Jones — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:22:07 -0800

I upgraded ruby on OS 10.5.4 from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7 and rubygems stopped working. How do I get rubygems to see where I've installed ruby? I chose not to overwrite the ruby that came with OSX and instead installed 1.8.7 in /usr/local/. I did gem environment and rubygems is still set up to use ruby 1.8.6:



  - RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]

  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8

  - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

  - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /usr/bin

The rubygems directories seem to be scattered about and I can't find a file or a command to change the configuration. Most annoyingly, the rubygems docs are down right now so I can't even access those.

So, how do I make rubygems work with my installation of ruby.

Ruby + Graph Visualization

Alterscape — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:21:13 -0800

Graph Visualization Filter: I need to generate a list of coordinates for the nodes in a large directed, weighted graph from Ruby, given a list of nodes, edges and weights. I have a list of nodes, edges, and edge weights that describe a graph. I need to generate a list of coordinates for each node, as determined by some graph layout algorithm. I'm looking for something like GraphR or ruby-graphviz but that generate just the intermediate data (coordinates of the nodes) rather than an image. Also, graphviz doesn't handle weighted edges. I know about JUNG, and I know it is possible to make Java and Ruby play nicely together, but doing so exceeds my current level of programming knowledge. One option I've considered is to write the input data to a file from Ruby, run a command-line application to process the data with JUNG from the Ruby app, and then read the JUNG output from a file back into Ruby to generate the output. This involves a lot of disk I/O, though, and I worry that it would not scale well beyond a trivial demo.

Any suggestions for other packages or approaches? I'm a grad student, so commercial tools are probably out.

Help updating Ruby (on Rails)

theRussian — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:31:55 -0800

How do I update Ruby/get RoR working? (OS X 10.4). Ok, I am generally tech savvy, so this is getting frustrating.

I have Mr. Macky here that had ruby 1.8.2 on him when I got home from work. Thinking I'd get a little web appy with some RoR, so I downloaded RubyGems as instructed here.

When I run sudo ruby setup.rb, I get the following error: Expected Ruby version > 1.8.3, was 1.8.2.
Ok, I think, so I go out to download 1.8.6, and follow the instructions as on the above page. Except that these directions install to the ruby-1.8.6 directory on my desktop.

I google, I go through the instructions to update via fink. No dice. ruby -v still gets me 1.8.2; fink complains that ruby is up to date and refuses to update. After more googling and command-lining I somehow revert to version 1.8.1. Which is where I stand at this moment.

Help! I feel like uber-fail. This should have been a 10 minute task at most. If anyone is up for a step by step help session, my email is in my profile--we can exchange IMs or something.

Thanks in advance, guys.

Email forward/reply character handling?

squishy — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:02:17 -0800

Is there a resource that lists all the different email programs' handling of forward/reply formatting? I want to write a program that receives emails, but I know some email apps add ">" characters and newlines that I'll have to strip out- I don't want to miss too many edge cases. This will be a Rails app so I was hoping there'd be a plugin for email handling, but I haven't come across one that has this particular feature. A list would be great, or a script in Ruby or another language that I can modify.

Help me pick a web dev language to learn.

the_dude — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:31:15 -0800

I am trying to decide which web language + framework to focus on for learning this summer. I am stuck between PHP, Python (with Django maybe) or Ruby (on Rails). Basically, I am asking for people's input on all languages. They all have their ups and downs and I'm pretty sure I'll have to learn all of them at some point but I have start somewhere. Here is my initial perspective on all. Correct me, add relevant info and make suggestions.

PHP
+I actually have a passing knowledge of PHP. Not enough maybe to create something big but I have added small features, worked on cleaning other people's code
+It's very common.
-It somewhat seems unprofessional, probably because I feel like everyone and their mom has done something with it.

Ruby
+It's the new cool.
-It's the new cool.
+It seems very elegant and easy to learn, especially for developing something for the web with Rails.
+For some reason, the RoR community seems very friendly and I approve of their ideas a lot.

Python
+It's a lot more serious than Ruby, I feel like. It might be more useful for other things too as a standalone language
+Similar outlook on stuff with RoR community.
-Maybe not as big community for learning as it is with PHP and RoR. Not sure about this but others definitely have a lot of stuff.

Anyway, thanks a lot for reading along.

Also, if you would care to make a suggestion, I'd appreciate some books or websites to start things off with.

What's a really good book on Ruby.

chunking express — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:07:49 -0800

If my favourite reference on C++ is The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup, what would be my favourite book on Ruby. (And my favourite book on Python.) I realize both langauges differ from C++ in that they will likely change over the next few years, but is there anything out there yet that you would call the Ruby book?

Go MetaFilter! Go!

Help me, I'm a late adopter.

Zarkonnen — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:26:43 -0800

How do I learn new programming languages and start using modern web apps without getting frustrated and angry? So I'm in my mid-twenties and work in IT. I've been watching the last couple of years of exploding creativity on the net - literally millions of blogs, new programming languages, new ideas like twitter, citizen journalism, etcetera.

But lately I've realised that despite being able to see the potential benefits and really actually exciting possibilities of all this new stuff, I grumpily dismiss it and stick to how I've been doing things for the past couple of years. I use email, Java and PHP, and HTML 4.0.1 Transitional. I occasionally write some stuff in my site's news section, but I doubt my completely random ramblings make anyone come back. I'd like to think that I might have some interesting things to say on some topics, but I can't find the time to write about it, and it feels odd to intersperse "here's some photos I took" with "here's a detailed analysis of this political situation". I don't use Ruby Twitter XML Python LISP Quicksilver GTD Podcasts RSS Lifehacks. I don't contribute to wikis, or talk on forums (with the pretty much sole exception of MeFi).

At the same time I'm getting very frustrated with the limits of the tools I do know how to use - Java's verbosity and lack of support for first-class functions is a pain, and I don't like the fact that I'm always the last to hear about everything interesting that happens on the net. I have no coherent systems for making notes or keeping track of appointments or tasks, despite the plethora of Mac programs available for doing just that.

Why is this a problem? Well, I'm not even thirty yet, but I can already feel myself falling behind the times. I don't want to end up as the kind of programmer / person in general who toils away on some legacy project in a little corner, insisting "we've always done it this way" until one day I get fired for being completely superfluous. I want to want to learn new things. I want to be more organised.

So is there a question in all of this? Yes! I want you to tell me how to break out of my rut. Tell me how I can learn about, and start to use, new stuff, despite the two big obstacles I'm about to describe.

Obstacle number one: Why do I dislike new things? To a large part, to be honest, because the people who do use these things and try to promote them really grate on my nerves. Take programming languages: many advocates of new languages (Ruby, I'm looking at you) start off their pitch by pointing out how useless language X (also known as "Java") is, and how using their language allows you to become a massively more enlightened individual. Along the way, there is a strong implication that anyone who still uses language X in 2008 is a hopeless dinosaur. Way to insult your audience.

Number two: I find learning new things really unpleasant. Faced with needing to code a small website, another programmer would say "Cool, a chance to try out this new Python framework, and this AJAX front-end library - no one's ever tried using them together before, but I have a really clever plan involving metaclasses". I say "Well, I don't really want to take too much time on it, so let's code it up in imperative-style PHP 4. It's clunky, it's incredibly verbose, the code is hideous, and errors are hard to track down, but I know how it works and can liberally reuse code from previous projects." Of course, this is a caricature, but the point remains that that other programmer will end up being more productive and motivated than me, perhaps not on this project, but on the next, where I'm still using PHP 4, but the other guy would be using said Python framework (but not the AJAX library, because it turned out to be too buggy).

So why don't I go off and do like the other programmer? Because the framework and the library will have terrible, hard-to-find inconsistent documentatio, bugs that cause the default configuration to fail silently, and creators who have the attitude described in obstacle #1. And here's the crux of the matter: where the other programmer would think "Cool, a challenge! Let's try to get this working." I fly into an impotent rage, cursing the code, its creator, and myself. I will yell at the computer when yet another promising documentation link 404s on me, I will make strangling motions at the screen when it turns out that I installed some package whose name has no vowels on the wrong path, and I will mentally tally every single problem I've had getting the whole thing working. Both the other programmer and I will take about five hours to get the framework up and running, but while that's five hours of joyful problem-solving time for the other guy/gal, it's five hours of fuming at the computer for me, and I'll have a headache at the end. And somewhere along the way I will probably give up and code the thing in PHP 4 or Java, feeling guilty for being a dinosaur.

Much the same happens when the Thing in question isn't a programming language but a website or some organizer/productivity program.

So to the end of not having to look at new things anymore, I now come up with automatic put-downs for every new thing that crosses my path: Ruby's syntax is horrible, Twitter is shallow, XML is verbose, Python is white-space-sensitive, LISP is unreadable, Quicksilver is unstable and obtuse, GTD is for obsessive-compulsives, podcasts are narcissistic, RSS is inefficent and ill-defined and life hacks are impractical. Contributing to wikis is pointless, and all forums are full of 13 year olds.

Still, I want to learn and use new things, because I find them fascinating and recognise their potential. So what techniques, states of mind, resources would you suggest that I could use to approach learning new languages, starting to use new websites, new modes of communication, etcetera, without just coming away pissed off and exhausted?

(And if you've read all of this, congratulations. You get a voucher for small prize, redeemable anywhere on the moon only.)

Fuzzy text completion algorithm?

sonofslim — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:44:26 -0800

I'm looking for a fuzzy text-matching algorithm for an autocomplete widget. I have a data set of ~4000 short strings (< 60 chars) that needs to be attached to an AJAXy autocomplete widget. I'm looking for a text completion algorithm that supports some amount of slop, to catch basic typos.

The environment is Prototype/LowPro on top of Ruby, backed by a MySQL database. I can pre-compute and store metaphones/soundex/&c. either in the database or in memory, as this list will remain mostly static throughout application lifetime.

The bad news is this feature is not mission-critical, so anything like compiling a user-defined SQL function (e.g. Levenshtein) is out of scope. The good news is this feature isn't mission-critical, so I am only solving for the quickest route to a reasonable set of suggestions for a given input string -- this doesn't need to be bulletproof.

What would you do, given these constraints?

Doing JOINs the Rails way

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:37:40 -0800

How can I do a Rails find JOIN without SQL, using the two tables' existing has_and_belongs_to_many relationships? I have two classes Sample and User, which have:

has_and_belongs_to_many :users, :uniq => true

has_and_belongs_to_many :samples, :uniq => true

relationships in their respective model files. This sets up the many-to-many relationship between the two classes.

Let's say I want to associate a Sample instance with a User instance:

Sample.find_by_id(params[:sample][:id]).users << User.find_by_id(params[:user_id])

So far so good.

But I'd like to avoid duplicates of a combination of sample_id and user_id.

Therefore, I'd like to search on samples_users to find a previously-entered record which matches those two id numbers.

I could do this with a SQL JOIN but I'd like to learn the Rails way, so that I don't have to write custom SQL that will likely break during development.

How to I use the find method on Sample to get any matches with a specified sample_id and user_id?

Off the rails...

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:09:14 -0800

Any good Rails 2.0 books for beginners? The books I have access to are for Rails 1.2. I'm running into brick wall after brick wall getting the opening chapter examples in these books to work with Rails 2.0.2, missing plug-ins, missing template files, scaffolding doesn't work, etc.

Instead of installing the Rails 1.2 gem, I'd like to bite the bullet and learn Rails 2.0. Unfortunately, the Rails Way book apparently is for established Rails coders, of which I am not one.

I'd call myself reasonably familiar with Java, PHP, etc. and don't need to learn programming, I just need to get up to speed quickly on how Rails does its magic without poring through oblique Google search results on how to cobble a 2.0 app together from a 1.2 app.

Are there other Rails 2.0 books or online documentation out now, which have working code examples of a small web application, from start to finish?

Help getting Ruby and Java to interact?

version control — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:26:47 -0800

I'm trying to compile and run a Java class from Ruby, but I'm having some problems. I'm not very experienced with Ruby- please help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. Basically what I'm trying to do is:

1. Inside a Ruby method, compile Foo.java (`javac Foo.java`)
2. Run Foo.class with arguments and save the 'console' output as a string. (result = `java Foo filename.txt`)

The command to compile Foo.java works, as Foo.class appears in the folder. However, part 2 doesn't seem to work as nothing prints when I try to print result (puts result). I'm probably doing something simple wrong but I'm not sure what it is as I'm basically picking Ruby up as I go without any actual grounding.

Help me become a better programming instructor.

stungeye — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:05:03 -0800

TeachFilter: Help me become a better programming instructor. I teach the following technologies at a college level:

- XML (basics, DTDs, schemas, XSLT, DOM)
- Mobile Programming (J2ME, Mobile Web)
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- Server Side Computing with PHP & MySQL

I am looking for two types of book recommendations for each of these subjects:

- Textbooks that students will enjoy (and will find useful enough to keep after graduation).
- Advanced or "best practice" books to enhance my knowledge of these subjects (making me a better resource for my students).

Your help is much appreciated.

Coding alone in a fog

jmnugent — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:46:00 -0800

In my quest to learn Ruby, I'm struggling to find everyday usable code examples that i can relate to. Might you suggest some ? Thanks to the helpful advice to my previous question, I went out and bought "Code" and "Ruby by Example" and am diving (or attempting to) headlong into learning Ruby.

Thats all well and good, but I'm hitting a comprehension wall. All of the examples I'm finding are not anything I can relate to. (meaning = I dont see how they apply to me or my everyday life, so as soon as I start trying to learn them, my eyes (and brain) gloss over and my knowledge absorption rate goes down to nil.)

I understand that "hello world", "rename all files in this folder", and things like "99 bottles of beer" are meant to teach me basic concepts and structure of the syntax, but because these programs don't produce any tangible result in my everyday life, I find it immensely difficult to care about learning them. ( I realize this makes me sound like a typical snotty highschool student, but hear me out)

So, my question(s):
1.) if you are a Ruby (or other language) programmer. Can you cite specific examples of code (large and small) that you've written that you use EVERY DAY ? (bonus pts for source code I can actually download and tear apart)

2.) Could you point me to online resources/repositories of code examples that are actually things I might actually use?

I realize the common advice is: "Just find some problem your interested in solving and code it!!!" (meaning = the MeFi crowd in general cant know what "everyday useful" means to ME), but I'm hoping someone has run into this same problem and found something that worked for them to relate coding to their everyday life. If it makes a difference, my everday job is working IT in a datacenter. Monitoring servers and connections, and responding to outages/alerts regarding said equipment. But that doesnt mean I want my Ruby code to simply be scripts aimed at IT Sysadmin work. I'd love to be able to (eventually) write fully fledged programs or web-apps that the public at large might find useful.

I think the frustration I'm feeling is not being able to find the "bridge" (middle ground) between "Hello World" and "Look!, a functional program/web-app". What I'm hoping for is someone can point me to medium sized Ruby programs or online apps and say "This was created entirely in Ruby, its an easy to use program that produces this tangible result."