Take this survey and win a free ticket for the Professional Ruby Conference

Addison Wesley will hold their first Professional Ruby Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between November 17 and 20, 2008. This conference, for which Obie Fernandez is the Technical Chair, is highly educational and boasts some of the best speakers from the Ruby and Rails communities. The organizers were kind enough to invite me, offering me a complimentary pass for the Professional Ruby Conference. I won’t...

Pygments TextMate Bundle

Following my last post, a few people asked me to create a Pygments TextMate bundle. Ask and ye shall receive (on GitHub). Prerequisites Install Pygments following these instructions. Installation First method: sudo mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles git clone git://github.com/acangiano/pygments-textmate-bundle.git...

Integrating TextMate and Pygments

Like many, I don’t use TextMate just for coding. All of my posts are first drafted in my trusty editor before being published. One of the problems that I had, and that others probably face too, is the less than smooth process of publishing properly highlighted code in posts and HTML pages. A few solutions exist, including embedding gist snippets, using “Create HTML from Document” in TextMate, or...

Django turns 1.0

A couple of weeks ago Django 1.0 was finally released. In the software world version numbers can be rather arbitrary, but this announcement electrified the usually quiet community. Hiding behind the 1.0 label there are thousands of bug fixes, code refactoring of crucial components, compatibility with Jython 2.5, and the addition of impressive features such as GeoDjango which adds GIS capabilities to the...

Announcing Ruby on Crack

After several months of keeping it under wraps, I’m happy to officially announce my own web framework to the world. It’s called Ruby on Crack and will be released by RailsConf 2008. The name of the framework was chosen because I wanted to push the idea of a complete break from the existing Ruby frameworks, a clear cut, if you will. Rails is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s very...

Django’s tipping point

Django seems to have reached its tipping point, that critical mass which will enable its momentum to skyrocket. Getting here took a while though; partially because of a lack of hype and partially due to Rails’ very prominent presence in the market. Now this well deserving framework has finally begun to be widely adopted and considered as a valid alternative to Rails, for agile web development. Why do I care...

Using Python to detect the most frequent words in a file

Working with Python is nice. Just like Ruby, it usually doesn’t get in the way of my thought process and it comes “with batteries included”. Let’s consider the small task of printing a list of the N most frequent words within a given file: from string import punctuation from operator import itemgetter N = 10 words = {} words_gen = (word.strip(punctuation).lower() for line in...

Losing my blog title (oh no, I’ve said too much…)

Keen observers amongst my readers may have noticed that I’ve subtly renamed my blog. It used to be “Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming” and now it just reads “Zen and the Art of Programming”. Perhaps you also noticed that my Ruby logo has been replaced with a cuter one created for the Snakes and Rubies conference, which was held about two years ago at DePaul University (by the way, I...

Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python

Rails has been a blessing and a curse for the Ruby community. It brought sudden popularity to the language with all the consequences, good and bad, that usually result from exponential growth. On one hand, it gave many developers the chance to appreciate the design of the Ruby language based on its own merit. On the other hand though, it’s been a cash cow that’s changed the community forever by...

IBM releases DB2 adapter for SQLAlchemy

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! A while ago I informally announced IBM’s intention to develop an SQLAlchemy adapter for DB2 and Informix IDS. Today, I’m happy to inform you that we have a first working release for DB2 on Linux, Unix and Windows (LUW). Support for Informix IDS is next...

Installing Django with PostgreSQL on Ubuntu

This how-to is essentially the same as my previous one, only this time I’ve provided step-by-step instructions for installing Django with PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 7.10. First and foremost, we are going to install Django from its svn repository, as opposed to obtaining the 0.96 release archive. The reason for this is that the trunk version implements a few new features. The development code is also rather stable...

How to install Django with MySQL on Mac OS X

Installing Django on Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to be very straightforward, but if you are new to it, you may encounter a few puzzling questions and, in the case of MySQL, even a couple of headaches. I’m writing about this for the benefit of those of you who may attempt and struggle with this feat. MacPorts is not required for this how-to. First and foremost, we are going to install Django from its svn...

Programmers Ad Community: 50 invites for Adroll’s private beta

For a month or so I’ve been running (or should I say rolling?) my ads with Adroll.com. I want to briefly introduce this cool niche network ad service to other programmers, so that we stop receiving travel ads whenever we talk about Rails. Traditionally website and blog owners put Google Ads up on their sites. In most cases, unless you are uber-popular, Google gives you peanuts. This is particularly true for...

Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. A few hours ago Rails 2.0 was finally (quietly) released. Unfortunately if you try ‘gem update’ or ‘gem install rails’ you will get the following error: ERROR: Error installing rails: rails requires activeresource (= 2.0.0) To...

More on Fibonacci. Oops, Sorry Lisp… Haskell runs it 5 times faster

My post about Ruby 1.9′s impressive improvement over Ruby 1.8.6 created quite an echo within the developer community. Sure, the headline was an attention grabber, just like this one is , but in a matter of a few hours, there were all sorts of blog entries with variants in many languages, more than 200 comments on Reddit, and fifty comments on my own blog. There were however, also a few misconceptions. It was...

Holy Shmoly, Ruby 1.9 smokes Python away!

Alright the title of this post is a tad sensational sounding, I know, and it’s in part aimed at messing with my many Pythonista friends. We Rubyists have been teased for a long time, due to the slowness of the main Ruby interpreter. Well, it looks like with Ruby 1.9, it’ll be payback time. Just out of curiosity I decided to run a single benchmark (you can hardly call it that) to see how Ruby 1.9 had...

Guide to setting up the IBM Ruby and Python drivers for DB2 on Linux (32 or 64 bit)

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! IBM provides the community with, among others, Ruby and Python open source drivers for DB2 (more exactly IBM databases). Ruby has a gem that packages the Rails adapter for DB2 and its prerequisite driver. As a result, the easiest way to get the Ruby driver for DB2 is...

IBM’s Python and DB2 drivers released

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! I’m glad to inform you that the beta version of the Python and DB2 (IBM databases to be more exact) driver and DBI wrapper have been released in the Python Package Index. You can download the source for version 0.1.0 from here. This includes two components: An...

Python, Django and DB2 Status Update

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! Python 3000′s first alpha release was made available last week, and as to be expected, it gathered a lot of interest from the development community. With Python on everyone’s lips, let’s talk about Python in this post as well. Python and DB2 Back in March we...