Monthly Archives: October 2006

RubyConf: Radiant – Content Management Simplified

John Long, lead developer of Radiant CMS gave an in-depth overview of this Ruby on Rails driven Content Management System. Radiant is a lightweight CMS with a ‘pristine interface’ and basic elements such as pages, layout, and snippets. According to John, the design philosophy of Radiant is ‘simplicity over features.’ Basically, Radiant is ‘a little [...]

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RubyConf: Iron Mongrel – Fuzzing

Zed Shaw, author of Mongrel, got an applause when introduced for this talk at RubyConf 2006. During this presentation, Zed talked about fuzzing. I am new to the ideas of fuzzing and I found this talk extremely interesting. One quick definition of fuzzing is to break a software system by handing it nasty maliciously crafted [...]

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RubyConf: Life After mkmf

Continuing with my coverage at RubyConf 2006, Kevin Clark presented on his Google Summer of Code project, mkrf. The intent of mkrf is to provide a rake replacement to mkmf. For those that don’t know, mkmf is the current “defacto standard for building C extensions to Ruby.” At the design level adheres to the kiss [...]

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RubyConf: Dynamic Graphics with Ruby

This RubyConf 2006 session provided a quick overview of a few libraries available to create and manipulate images in Ruby. Geoffrey Grosenbach, from the Rails Podcast, provided brief introduction to Scruffy, Gnuplot, MRPlot, PNG library, and Gruff Scene. Scruffy is a pure Ruby library that produces attractive and powerful SVG graphs. MRPlot is a pure [...]

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RubyConf: Rubinius – Hardcore Ruby

This was the second session of RubyConf 2006. I have to be honest, this session went a bit above my head, and from the ‘glaze’ of the audience, it went above a few of the other attendants. Well, it wasn’t so much that it went above my head as it had no code and no [...]

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The History of Ruby

For this RubyConf2006 session, the history of Ruby was broken down into five periods which include pre-history, ancient age, middle age, modern age, and contemporary. The pre-history of Ruby was dated circa 1993 and it is an age of myth and epic legends which only Matz and his friends know. According to the speaker, Masayoshi [...]

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