Angry Ruby

Ruby stands or falls with JRuby?

2009-08-04T05:29:00.001-07:00

I believe that JRuby is the most crucial technology for Ruby's future right now. Regardless of how fast or how solid the C or C++ based Ruby implementations get, the vast majority of large organizations are *never* going to run them. That's the truth. If we can leverage JRuby to grab 1-2% of the Java market, we'll *double* the size of the Ruby community. If we completely lose the Java platform to alternatives, Rubyists may not have the luxury of remaining Rubyists in the future. It's that big a deal.

Headius on FFI

2008-10-31T16:53:00.000-07:00

As usual Headius is the shit

FFI stands for Foreign Function Interface. FFI has been implemented in various libraries; one of them, libffi, actually serves as the core of JNA, allowing Java code to load and call arbitrary C libraries. libffi allows code to load a library by name, retrieve a pointer to a function within that library, and invoke it, all without static bindings, header files, or any compile phase.

Take that SWIG! Although IIRC, .NET (including Mono) had some this sort of coolness as well.

To break it down


A simple FFI script calling the C "getpid" function:

require 'ffi'

module GetPid
  extend FFI::Library

  attach_function :getpid, [], :uint
end

Nanite: Ruby Cloud Computing

2008-10-12T17:12:00.000-07:00

Over on Ruby Inside Peter blogs on Nanite which really looks interesting -- not that I'll have any time to play around with it anytime soon.

Ruby HTTP Client Performance

2008-10-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Ruby Inside there is a pretty interesting analysis of Ruby 1.8.x client performance

Ruby’s Net::HTTP implementation blows. It’s a bit better in 1.8.7 with the new 16K buffer size, but the timeout implementation has got to go. Even with timeout eliminated, Net::HTTP is trounced by the pure-Ruby rfuzz and the native/Ruby blend curb, suggesting that timeout notwithstanding, there are other inefficiencies in Net::HTTP. Looking at the protocol.rb code, I’m struck by how painfully inefficient the implementation is with buffers. rfuzz and curb minimize buffer copies and my rfuzz streaming HTTP extension reuses the same buffer for multiple calls, while Net::HTTP is happily appending and sliceing away at arrays.

Headius and the Elephant

2008-09-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

At Cisco we used to have the phrase "No Technology Religion" on our badges and although this is easier said than done, it is the thought that counts (to double up on cliches).

It is the religious fervor (intolerance of diversity and the belief in one path to enlightenment vs. many ways to climb the mountain) that seems to be one of the differences. between between the Python & Ruby communities:

The is illustrated in the The Elephant from earlier this month:

I don't see this in the Python community, for example, which might surprise some Rubyists. Pythonistas seem to have positively embraced both IronPython and Jython. There's no side-chatter at the conferences about the evils of anything with a J in it. There's no mocking slides, no jokes at Jython or IronPython developers' expense. No "Python elite" cliques actively working to shut Jython or IronPython out, or to discourage others from considering them. The community as a whole--Guido included--seems to be genuinely thankful for implementation diversity. Even if one of them does have a J in it.

Matasano on Ruby Vuln Handling

2008-07-01T17:20:00.000-07:00

A must read if you need something to be angry about.

Developers relying on any of these frameworks are then faced with a difficult choice: wait an indeterminate amount of time for a good release from the official maintainers (and remain vulnerable in the meantime), or apply a patch from a third-party which may not plug all the security holes, or may include unforeseen bugs. This is clearly a problem. In the meantime maintainers have to scramble to get ruby back to a good state that actually plugs the holes while people complain. Everyone loses.

21 Ruby Tricks

2008-05-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged here forever (mostly using Python these days, although I did break into some JRuby a couple of weeks back to avoid Java coding) but definitely check out 21 Ruby Tricks from Peter Cooper.

Regex, Array Joins, file operations, and more
Good stuff..

Headius on the Peril

2008-04-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Promise and Peril of Alternative Implementations is a must read, if only for his detailed summary of the Ruby implementations out there, but on the peril's:

JRuby

Compatibility is *hard*. I'm not talking a little hard, I'm talking monumentally hard. Ruby is a very flexible, complicated language to implement, and it ships with a number of very flexible, complicated core class implementations. Very little exists in the way of specifications and test kits, so what we've done with JRuby we've done by stitching together every suite we could find. And after all this time, we still have known bugs and weekly reports of minor incompatibilities. I don't think an alternative implementation can ever truly become "compatible" as much as "more compatible". We're certainly the most compatible alternative impl, and even now we've got our hands full fixing bugs. Then there's Ruby 1.9 support, coming up probably in JRuby 1.2ish. Another adventure.

IronRuby

But there's some peril here too. IronRuby is largely still being developed in a vacuum. Perhaps in order to have secrets to announce at "the next big conference" or perhaps because Microsoft's own policies require it, IronRuby's development process proceeds largely from all-internal commits, all-internal discussions, and all-internal emails that periodically result in a blob of code tossed over the fence to external contributors. The OSS story has improved, since those of us on the outside can actually get access to the code, but the necessary two-way street still isn't there. That's going to slow progress, and eventually could make it impossible for IronRuby to keep up as resources are moved to other projects at Microsoft. JRuby has managed to sustain for as long as it has with only two fulltime developers entirely because of our community and openness, and indeed JRuby would never have been possible without a fully OSS process.

Say I wonder if anyone has written a Ruby implementation in Python, hehe

Have you started working on your Ruby implementation yet? All the cool kids are doing it. It's remarkable how many implementations of Ruby are in the works right now. It remains to be seen whether the ecosystem can support such diversity in the long term, but at the very least they're introducing splendid variation. And there's a lot more to do with Ruby in terms of performance, scaling, and "getting things done". Ruby's future is looking bright, in no small part due to the many implementations. How's your favorite language looking?

Sad to Say It But I miss Ruby

2008-04-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm writing a quick CRUD app for work and I decided to go with Django mainly because of the power of the built in Admin interface. This is not a real app. I just wanted to get some data in a database and maybe generate some simple reports, so Rails didn't make sense. It would take too long. Plus, following the Django tutorial for the umteenth time during the last couple of years gave me 80% of the functionality I needed in just a few hours. Yeah Django migrations are non-existent and there is not Model inheritance, but since this isn't a real app (basically something quick where a wiki or Excel wouldn't do) I was left with no choice.

But I definitely miss the density of Ruby.

Yeah, I'd Give Greg Brown Sixty Bucks

2008-03-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

And I'm not being sarcastic, either. Maybe it would just be a vicarious pleasure because with 3 kids, a year oold Honda Minivan and overpriced Skokie house there is no way in hell I could live on $2000/month. Or maybe because there's a bunch of cool Python (non-web) libraries that should be ported to Ruby. If I'm willing to give Obama $50 I'm certainly willing to give Greg Brown $60 To work on Open Source

I find myself in a rather unique situation: Single, living alone in a small studio apartment, only taking a class or two here and there, and basically living off of small contracts. It’s not that I’m not offered big gigs, or that I couldn’t go back to school full time if I really wanted to, I just find I enjoy living a simple lifestyle that lets me spend a lot of time on community oriented projects, especially Ruby stuff.

RUSH is On To Something

2008-02-23T17:34:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Ruby Inside I ran across Rush: The Ruby Shell

What we really want - the modern way - is to query the unix system (filesystem, processes, network, services) as if they were a database. This avoids the fragility of text pipes, the complexities of firing up a complete new environment on each system call, and would allow unit tests of system-level code.

This is why I've created rush. It's a replacement for bash and ssh which uses Ruby syntax. More than that: it IS ruby. Imagine an irb shell in which you can do everything you can do at the unix command line, but without any backticks. That's the vision; what I've got so far is a good start in that direction.

RubyCHeatSheetPalooza

2008-02-08T05:25:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Ruby Inside

Now this guy is really angry (and also switching back to Python)

2008-01-01T12:37:00.000-08:00

Rails is a Ghetto is even harsher than anything I've written here:

This is that rant. It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community. I don’t want to be a “Ruby guy” anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months. I’ve got about three or four more projects in the works that will use all of those and not much Ruby planned.

This rant is full of stories about companies and people who’ve either pissed in my cheerios somehow or screwed over friends. I can back all of them up from emails, IRC chat logs, or with witnesses. Nothing in here is a lie unless it’s really obviously a lie through exaggeration, and there’s a lot of my opinion as well.

Hat Tip: Mr. Brown and response to Zed.

Hey wasn't Zed in Pulp Fiction?

Where is the PSI for Ruby?

2007-11-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

About every 6 months a Google recruiter will run across my LinkedIn page and try to trick me into starting the grueling 2-3 month interview process. Why anyone with a job already would put themselves through this is beyond me, but it did get me thinking about Python again and to catch up on my Python Package Index Feed (which kicks RubyForge's ass, BTW) and I ran across the Python System Information. I had to write this sort of stuff (and more) in Ruby about 6 months ago. That is the different between Python (and grudgingly Perl, gag) and Ruby. Some sort of mainstream task is probably already done (and relatively)

Not that I'm complaining


  >>> import psi

  >>> a = psi.arch.arch_type()
  >>> a
  
  >>> isinstance(a, psi.arch.ArchMacOSX)
  True
  >>> isinstance(a, psi.arch.ArchDarwin)
  True
  >>> a.sysname
  'Darwin'
  >>> a.nodename
  'laptop'
  >>> a.release
  '8.9.1'
  >>> a.version
  'Darwin Kernel Version 8.9.1: Thu Feb 22 20:55:00 PST 2007; root:xnu-792.18.15~1/RELEASE_I386'
  >>> a.machine
  'i386'

  >>> psi.loadavg()
  (0.705078125, 0.73046875, 0.7626953125)

  >>> import os
  >>> mypid = os.getpid()
  >>> mypid
  13903
  >>> p = psi.process.Process(mypid)
  >>> p.command

Cool Ruby Logfile Visualization Tool

2007-10-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

Check out glTail.rb (there is even a movie) that I stumbled across courtesy of Peter Cooper over on Ruby Inside:

glTail is a great little Ruby script by Erlend Simonsen (aka Fudgie) that uses OpenGL and Ruby to visualize the events taking place in log files in real time. An example video on the official site shows requests coming into an HTTP server, each represented by a "ball" which is thrown across the screen. The script uses net-ssh to connect to a server and then libopengl-ruby to output the graphics. Parsers are included for processing Apache, Rails, IIS and Postfix log files. Nice work! The code is merely a couple hundred lines of Ruby, so if you've fancied putting together a basic OpenGL app, it's worth looking at it for that reason too.

I can't wait to try it on a few gigs of firewall logs.

Trying out jrubyc

2007-09-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

Following up the good news, I pulled down trunk, and compiled a stupid 2 line script. This obviously is no test of the compiler, but the first time I've used jrubyc. Above and beyond the normal JRUBY environment stuff, to execute classes you have to add jna.jar and jruby.jar to your CLASSPATH.


franz-g4:~/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/bin mdfranz$ java bobo
1.1
java
franz-g4:~/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/bin mdfranz$ ls -al bobo.class 
-rw-r--r--   1 mdfranz  mdfranz  2866 Sep 28 09:43 bobo.class
franz-g4:~/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/bin mdfranz$ cat bobo.rb 
puts JRUBY_VERSION
puts RUBY_PLATFORM
franz-g4:~/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/bin mdfranz$ echo $CLASSPATH
:/Users/mdfranz/java/lib/hsqldb.jar:/Users/mdfranz/java/db-derby-10.3.1.4-bin/lib/derby.jar:/Users/mdfranz/java/db-derby-10.3.1.4-bin/lib/derbytools.jar:.:/Users/mdfranz/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/lib/jruby.jar:/Users/mdfranz/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/lib/jruby.jar:/Users/mdfranz/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/lib/jna.jar
franz-g4:~/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby/bin mdfranz$ echo $JRUBY_HOME
/Users/mdfranz/jruby/jruby/trunk/jruby

If you are angry enough you might get a book!

2007-09-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

So I was pleased to learn that I will be receiving a review copy of Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects: Bringing Ruby on Rails to Java. Thanks Ola if you had anything to do with it!

No time (and probably not qualified) right now to do a real review, but I will say that Chapter 6 (Java Integration) and the Appendix B (JRuby Reference) are probably worth the 21 bucks for the e-version of the book, even if you don't plan on doing any JRoR work right now.

JRuby Enum Constants and my irrational fear of ::'s

2007-09-25T17:58:00.000-07:00

So development on PeerTAB is rolling along. Sort of. I am continuing to play with JXTA via JRuby.

So in Java
manager = new NetworkManager(NetworkManager.ConfigMode.EDGE, "HelloWorld");

But of course in JRuby
include_class "net.jxta.platform.NetworkManager"
m = NetworkManager.new(NetworkManager.ConfigMode.EDGE, "HelloWorld")

fails with

irb(main):010:0> NetworkManager.ConfigMode
NoMethodError: undefined method `ConfigMode' for Java::NetJxtaPlatform::NetworkManager:Class
from (irb):10:in `binding'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:150:in `eval_input'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:70:in `signal_status'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:147:in `eval_input'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:70:in `each_top_level_statement'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:146:in `loop'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:146:in `catch'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:146:in `eval_input'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:70:in `start'
from :1:in `catch'
from /home/jxta/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:69:in `start'
from :1

So the question then I how do I get these enum constants?

So interestingly enough

irb(main):020:0> NetworkManager.constants
=> ["ConfigMode"]
irb(main):021:0>

But that did get me anywhere and it was only until I ran across this blog post that I figured it out.

irb(main):011:0> NetworkManager::ConfigMode
=> Java::NetJxtaPlatform::NetworkManager::ConfigMode
irb(main):012:0> NetworkManager.constants
=> ["ConfigMode"]
irb(main):013:0> NetworkManager.constants.class
=> Array
irb(main):014:0> NetworkManager::ConfigMode::EDGE
=> #
irb(main):015:0>

And I know part of the problem is I refuse to use :: unless I'm forced to because it seems way too Perl-ish and ugly. And yeah, I've heard there is something called C++.

Interesting Bruce Tate Podcast

2007-09-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

I listened to Robert Stephenson's interview with Bruce Tate while washing dishes tonight and it was certainly a treat and certainly kept my mind occupied while cleaning up the minestrone remnants:

Among the highlights:

How development in Rails (and I would add comparable frameworks such as Django) allows smaller teams to communicate more effectively (and frequently) with clients than would be possible with "traditional" languages such a Java.
The high correlation between offshoring/outsourcing and traditional (waterfall) development models (if you outsource something you have to be more rigorous in the your specification, your unit testing, integration, etc.)
Lots of talk about JRuby and positing that much of the work we do is essentially scripting. Use of JRuby with Business Rules Engines/DSLs (such as Drools) which is something I've wanted to play around with yet. As well as using a Java scripting languages to access cool APIs.

Check it out...

I didn't want indentation to break my code?

2007-09-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't done an "angry" post for a while and since I don't want to close down this blog, so I'll posit there is something unique about the Ruby community which compels folks to write lame defenses of their favorite language the way that doesn't seem to occur for other languages. I never saw this with Python or Perl, but it mostly seems to ooze from converts from Java/C++ or God-forbid PHP.

There, done, filled my quota!

P.S. - for "h3rald" or anyone else, you won't have any problem with Python if you use a decent editor like Vim and have it configured properly.

The Future of Ruby is JRuby?

2007-09-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

While fighting with ActiveRecord-JDBC (I thought Derby was built in JDK 1.6, but I still have to copy the derby .jar's into jruby/lib ???) this morning I ran across Ola Bini'a Blog and an a great prezo on JRuby. If you read between the lines (I obviously didn't see/hear the prezo) but Ola seems to be suggesting the future of Ruby is indeed JRuby. Slide after slide there are aspects of C-Ruby that are broken (and will not be fixed in 1.9) but where Java is superior : GC, performance (maybe), multi-core, internationalization, etc.

Ruby Only Netbeans Builds: Nothing to Be Angry About

2007-09-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

I've never used IDEs that much (with the exception of Visual C# a while back} but I downloaded the latest build of the the Netbeans Ruby IDE. and it was amazing how fast it loaded without all that useless Java crap that causes the progress bar to take soooo long on the full-featured Netbeans 6.0 preview releases.

Absolutely Worthless JRoR Benchmark: Tomcat 5.5 vs. Glassfish v3

2007-09-02T17:47:00.000-07:00

So for grins (not worth much else, was looking for something to pass the time before my kids went to sleep) I decided to compare initial page load times for the hello world between Tomcat and Glassfishv3 using the Arun Gupta's tutorial app

Tomcat 5.5.23
Initial Load: 3.229s
Subsequent Loads: 0.115 0.323 0.323s

Glassfish v3
Inital Load: 9.671s
Subsequent Loads: 3.005 0.554 0.594s

Webrick
Initial Load: 1.278s
Subsequent Loads: 0.559s 0.623

For Webrick is the time to boot it was about 3-4 times as long as it took to start Tomcat and deploy app through the manager (no more than 10 seconds) but for Glassfish, deployments took anywhere from 29-52 seconds.

Not like it really matters, but the hardware/software: VMWare Debian 4.0 JRE1.6 running on aging AMD K7-1.5 with 1.2GB RAM.


franz-g4:~ mdfranz$ time wget  http://192.168.100.91:8080/hello/say/hello
--19:30:56--  http://192.168.100.91:8080/hello/say/hello
         => `hello.4'
Connecting to 192.168.100.91:8080... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 86 [text/html]

19:30:59 (1.61 MB/s) - `hello.4' saved [86/86]


real    0m3.229s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.009s

JRuby and Embedded Derby: First Steps

2007-09-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

Before tackling ActiveRecord-JDBC I thought I'd play around with the embedded version of Apache Derby with JRuby. This actually took me a lot longer that it should of, mostly because its been months since I've done anything with JRuby and years since I've touched JDBC. But here are the basic steps, which probably aren't that much difference from any other JDBC in JRuby:


require 'java'
include_class "java.sql.Connection"
include_class "java.sql.DriverManager"
include_class "java.sql.ResultSet"
include_class "java.sql.Statement"
driver = org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver.new()
conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:derby:derbyDB;create=true")
conn.setAutoCommit(false)
s = conn.createStatement()

Some of the things that tripped me up, as I was trying to convert the simple Java example to JRuby:

The Class.forName(driver).newInstance() nonsense, I guess I've never run across this convention before but probably not surprising since I'm not a Java developer
org.apache.derby.impl.jdbc.EmbedSQLException: Derby system shutdown - yes you should do a DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:derby:;shutdown=true") and yes it apparently always throws an exception
Getting useful results sets back is where I spent most of my time. Fortunately Derby documentation (like most Apache projects) are among of the best of any, whether commercial or Open Source APIs.

Since Blogger mangles source code so badly, see the code over on my wiki. Next I'm going to try HSQLDB because it supports a larger set of rails migrations using ActiveRecord-JDBC than Derby, but the Hypersonic gem definitely had problems on OSX due to issues with YAJB. But me sneaking suspicions is that that library is for C-Ruby and not JRuby. Doh!

JRuby/Rails on Glassfish Actually Works!

2007-09-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

So traffic was so bad on Thursday I popped open my Powerbook on the Edens spur (I swear it took me an hour to go 3 miles) and listened to Java Posse 138 which had a lengthy (but quite excellent interview with several Sun developers from Glassfish. Java Posse is an excellent podcast. I wish there was something of comparable quality on Ruby, but no time for that rant.

Besides the performance improvements (indeed the startup time is quite amazing compared to JBOSS, Geronimo, or Sun's appserver) they mentioned running JRuby apps and I ran across this blog entry on running interpreted rails apps within Glassfish v3 and the Grizzly connector.

I had to make few changes to get it working to Linux-ify the tutorial (had to create a symlink within glassfish/lib to point to the jruby directory) but it was relatively straightforward on Debian 4.0, (JRuby 1.0.1 and jdk1.6.0_02)

Here the slight differences:

I set the environment variables in .bashrc


JAVA_HOME=~/jdk6
JRUBY_HOME=~/java/jruby
GLASSFISH_HOME=~/java/glassfish
PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin/:$JRUBY_HOME/bin:$GLASSFISH_HOME/bin

Install rails (added --no-ri)


# jruby -S gem install rails -y --no-ri --no-rdoc

Modify glassfish/config/asenv.conf instead of asenv.bat


JRUBY_HOME="/root/java/jruby"

Make asadmin exectuable (chmod u+x/700)

Ruby Statistics Functions

2007-08-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

The StatArray class provides some basic statistical operations to be used on arrays:


irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require 'statarray'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> a = [1,2,3,4,6]
=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 6]
irb(main):004:0> sa = a.to_statarray
=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 6]
irb(main):005:0> sa.mean
=> 3.2
irb(main):007:0> sa.median
=> 3

Ruby and Syslog

2007-08-08T07:59:00.000-07:00

As others have also pointed out there is no ri documentation for the syslog module but there is a lot of useful stuff in the ext/syslog directory.

But here is the most basic example I can come up with:


irb(main):007:0> mdfranz@franz-t61:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'syslog'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Syslog.open('labradoodle')
=> <#Syslog: opened=true, ident="labradoodle", options=3, facility=8, mask=255>
irb(main):003:0> Syslog.crit('w00f w00f')
=> <#Syslog: opened=true, ident="labradoodle", options=3, facility=8, mask=255>
irb(main):004:0> Syslog.close
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> Syslog.crit('w00f w00f')
RuntimeError: must open syslog before write
        from (irb):5:in `crit'
        from (irb):5
        from :0

And /var/log/syslog


Aug  8 10:03:22 franz-t61 labradoodle[3688]: w00f w00f
Aug  8 10:04:24 franz-t61 kernel: [ 9700.304000] iwl4965: REPLY_ADD_STA failed
Aug  8 10:06:27 franz-t61 kernel: [ 9823.088000] iwl4965: REPLY_ADD_STA failed

Debian + FXRI + Rubygems is Englightenment!

2007-08-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

So unlike OSX FXRI on Debian (Etch) is a snap. This assumes you are running a self compiled 1.8.6 install with gems. All I had to do was apt-get install the following packages:

libfox-1.6-0

libfox-1.6-dev

All you really need is the *-dev of course. Which resulted in the following additional packages being installed:


The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libcupsys2-dev libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfox-1.6-0 libfox-1.6-dev
 libfox-1.6-doc libfreetype6-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgnutls-dev
 libgpg-error-dev libjpeg62-dev liblzo-dev libopencdk8-dev libpng12-dev
 libpopt-dev libtasn1-3-dev libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libxcursor-dev
 libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxrender-dev x11proto-fixes-dev
 x11proto-render-dev

And then


root@franz-t61:~/Desktop/Downloads/ruby-1.8.6# gem install fxri
Need to update 3 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
...
complete
Install required dependency fxruby? [Yn]  Y
Select which gem to install for your platform (i686-linux)
1. fxruby 1.6.11 (ruby)
2. fxruby 1.6.11 (mswin32)
3. fxruby 1.6.10 (mswin32)
4. fxruby 1.6.10 (ruby)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation
> 1
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed fxri-0.3.6
Successfully installed fxruby-1.6.11
Installing ri documentation for fxruby-1.6.11...
Installing RDoc documentation for fxruby-1.6.11...

And even more amazingly, all the fifteen thousand of the API docs (builtins and gems) are there! Now the only thing weird was I had to fix the path env in the fxri start script.

Finally Something Interesting from Gregory Brown

2007-06-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Continuing on a theme, Gregory Brown actually has a nice tutorial called How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord, although I confess I have no idea what his opening sentences even mean:

If you're coming into Ruby via Rails, you've probably noticed that there is a whole lot to learn within the framework itself. In fact, the integration between Rails (the framework) and Ruby (the programming language) is so tight, that it might be tough to easily see where Rails ends and Ruby begins. In terms of productivity and learning curve, this is a great feature. It means that you can learn both at once without encountering the chicken and egg problem you might find elsewhere.

So Struts (the framework) and Java (the language) is not so tightly integrated? And Django (the framework) and Python (the language) are not so tightly integrated? And this is a feature?. I'm confused.

Maybe this is like the "Red Hat Linux" phenomenon where folks thought Linux was RedHat and RedHat was Linux.

Timing out Child Processes

2007-06-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

I finally ran across a short Ruby powerpoint lecture by a CMU grad student to get me on the right track. Basically I wanted to spawn a process that me eventually killed (or disappears magically) after a certain amount of time. The answer is to use Timeout.

Here is my code. Notice I got rid of the fork.


#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'time'
require 'timeout'
require 'pp'


def time_cmd(command,timeout)
    cmd_output = []
    puts "Entering time_cmd at #{Time.now.tv_sec}"
    begin
        status = Timeout.timeout(timeout) do
            p = IO.popen(command) do |f|
                puts "pid: #{$$}"
                f.each_line do |g| 
                    cmd_output << g 
                    system("ps aux | grep netstat")                    
                end
                system("ps aux | grep netstat")
            end
        end
        pp status
    rescue Timeout::Error
        puts "\n#{command} completed at #{Time.now.tv_sec}"
        return cmd_output
    end
end

puts "pid: #{$$}"
puts time_cmd("netstat -dwh 1",3)
system("ps aux | grep netstat")

With the following output


franz-g4:~/dev/playin/ruby mdfranz$ ./angrytimeout.rb 
pid: 3658
Entering time_cmd at 1182709241
pid: 3658
root      3659   2.2  0.0    27332    368  p2  S+    1:20PM   0:00.01 netstat -d
root      3659   1.3  0.0    27332    368  p2  S+    1:20PM   0:00.01 netstat -d
root      3659   0.1  0.0    27332    368  p2  S+    1:20PM   0:00.01 netstat -d
root      3659   0.0  0.0    27332    368  p2  S+    1:20PM   0:00.01 netstat -d

netstat -dwh 1 completed at 1182709244
            input        (Total)           output
   packets  errs      bytes    packets  errs      bytes colls drops
         0     0          0          0     0          0     0     0
         0     0          0          0     0          0     0     0

What I still haven't figured out how to do is get the process id of what is spawned by the popen so that I could Process.kill it if I needed to. I know I have been able to do this but it must have been with the Python subprocess module. which of course is more full featured.

More Stupid Ruby Tricks: has_key("hell")

2007-06-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

What is missing from the title. The bloody question mark! It serves me right for trying to code when fried from various domestic chores. The "undefined method" exception (like many cryptic Ruby error messages) wasn't terribly helpful either, or at least in my reduced state of competency, but maybe blogging on it will get it through my thick skull that method names that return booleans have a question mark suffix. I really don't see the point. How many (I'm sure some smartass will say TCL or some happy-ass functional language I could care less with that starts with an H or L) other languages have this idiom that confuses idiots. This seems seems unnecessary and certainly violates the "principle of least surprise" or perhaps I'm misapplying the term.

irb(main):003:0> d = {}
=> {}
irb(main):004:0> d[0] = 1
=> 1
irb(main):005:0> d[5] = 2
=> 2
irb(main):006:0> d
=> {5=>2, 0=>1}
irb(main):008:0> d.has_key(5)
NoMethodError: undefined method `has_key' for {5=>2, 0=>1}:Hash
     from (irb):8
     from :0
irb(main):009:0> d.has_key?(5)
=> true

Ruby from A Python Perspective

2007-06-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

JJinuxLand has a nice (if meandering) blog on differences between Python & Ruby. Even better, the comments there didn't seem to insecure hissy-fits like on the OReilly Blog. Good to see some mature behavior from the Ruby crowd, for a change. Oh wait, maybe these were mostly Python folks. That explains it.

Nice Blog on JRuby + JMX

2007-06-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

While stumbling around trying to replicate a JXTA Hello world type application in JRuby, I ran across a well-written tutorial by Jeff Mesnil on how to script JMX with JRuby as well a part II.


module JMX
    require 'java'

    include_class 'java.util.HashMap'
    include_package 'java.lang.management'
    include_package 'javax.management'
    include_package 'javax.management.remote'

    url = JMXServiceURL.new "service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:3000/jmxrmi"
    connector = JMXConnectorFactory::connect url, HashMap.new
    mbsc = connector.mbean_server_connection

    memory_mbean = ManagementFactory::newPlatformMXBeanProxy mbsc, "java.lang:type=Memory",
        MemoryMXBean::java_class

    memory_mbean.verbose = !memory_mbean.verbose
    puts "verbose = #{memory_mbean.verbose}"

    memory_mbean.gc
end

Why are there no Awk Jobs?

2007-06-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

My buddy over on OReilly Ruby Blog posed the profound question why there are no Ruby jobs?.

Although I was shocked that Dice (for Chicago) just brought up 32 hits. Amazing, far more than the last time I checked. Compared to 41 for Python, 202 for Perl, 784 for Java, and 351 for C#. And don't forget awk. Five whole jobs in Chicagoland.

To quote:

I guess it could be a lot of things, any of the below or a combination might be to blame:

Lack of good marketing for non-web oriented Ruby
Assumption that Ruby is not general purpose as a side effect of the success of RoR’s marketing
Technical issues that I can’t think of that make it an inferior choice to other languages
Ruby adoption might be in nature slower than Rails adoption, but on it’s way
MRI isn’t robust enough for the ‘enterprise’, so companies are waiting on JRuby

Shitty documentation. Lack of decent built-in APIs. Rubyforge sucking big-time compared to CPAN or Cheese Shop. All the Japanese? Everything starting with R. Not coming default on Real OS's (OSX doesn't count, spare me). Being cute? Not being used in the application infrastructure of any Real OS's. (FreeBSD is an anomaly in that it doesn't require Perl, all the other distros I can think of Require at least Perl and some like Ubuntu, Python). All the crap about programming being fun? A significantly large number of Ruby-ists (or RoR-ists) that use OSX? Should I go on?

Alls of these equate to non-ENTERPRISE.

Waiting for JRuby? Please. That is so rich I almost spit my fruit bar onto the screen. And I think JRuby is cool. Maybe that nobody does any "real work" (meaning the pays $$, blogging doesn't count) in Ruby. Well, except maybe Matasano.

Running Ruby on Ancient Solaris Boxes

2007-06-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

If you think I hate Ruby, well I hate Solaris even more. It's lack of GNU. Hell, it's lack about about anything useful built-in. It's like *BSD on steroids.

But believe it or not I (sort of) even managed to get Ruby 1.8.6 built and (sort of) running on an old 2.6 and 2.8 box today. It nearly killed the 2.6 box (an Ultra-5) but here's how I did it:

Make sure you at least have gcc, GNU Make, and a version of of GNU Grep in your path somewhere. You probably need more. The latter were things that I know I tripped up on.
Rip out most of the directories in ext. All I had left in mine were: enumerator, etc, fcnctl, io, pty, racc, socket, socket, stringio, strscan, syck, thread.
If you need to use YAML, change the first require in yaml.rb to require 'yaml/stringio'

There may be a less radical (or lazy) way to solve the external library problem (like install readline and ncurses and everything else that wouldn't build) but I didn't want to bother, because I don't want to deal with any external libraries. I will admit, that given the minimal features built into Ruby (a good thing!) it was probably much easier to get Ruby built than Python on these old boxes. However, Python probably has a lot better detection of libraries. It certainly has a lot more ./configure options that are useful and that actually get used.

But be warned, all I ran was a simple hello world app and parsed a YAML file, so it will be interesting to see what works and what sends these boxes to a timely death.

Stupid Ruby Behaviors: Episode 1 (The Injury)

2007-05-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

Because only "moon faced" kids like me would ever write a script that both read from STDIN and use ARGV


franz-macbook:~ mdfranz$ ruby moonface.rb
ddddddd
ddddddd
franz-macbook:~ mdfranz$ ruby moonface.rb me
moonface.rb:2:in `gets': No such file or directory - me (Errno::ENOENT)
      from moonface.rb:2

mefranz-macbook:~ mdfranz$ cat moonface.rb
print ARGV
moonface = gets
print moonface

What gives? See gets documentation for the answer.

The solution is to use $stdin.gets

Nice Page: A Comparative Look at Some Ruby Idioms

2007-05-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

Renaud Waldura has a nice page called A Comparative Look at Some Ruby Idioms that compares Java, Perl, and Ruby versions of stuff like

Constructors & Accessors
Function Pointers
Exception handling
Iterators
Variable Argument Lists

Useful because for many of us the some Ruby Ways are rather strange if you are coming from another language.

Unlocking Dark Secrets of rdoc/ri

2007-05-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

So if you are not using the one-click installer (like anyone who compiles from source ) on Windows, ri/fxri is pretty useless. Not only don't your GEMs show, but anything else you've compiled doesn't either.

So how do you fix this?

Install it with rdoc -R from within the directory that has the .rb


# rdoc -R oniguruma.rb
    oniguruma.rb: mcc..........c....c.....
Generating RI...

Files:   1
Classes: 4
Modules: 1
Methods: 19
Elapsed: 2.334s

Make sure it is there with ri -l


franz-g4:/my/src/oniguruma-1.1.0/lib root# ri -l | grep Oni   
Oniguruma
Oniguruma::ORegexp
Oniguruma::ORegexp::escape
Oniguruma::ORegexp::last_match
Oniguruma::ORegexp::new
Oniguruma::ORegexp#==
Oniguruma::ORegexp#casefold?
Oniguruma::ORegexp#eql?
Oniguruma::ORegexp#inspect
Oniguruma::ORegexp#kcode
Oniguruma::ORegexp#options
Oniguruma::ORegexp#source
Oniguruma::ORegexp#to_s

On a related note segment7 has some nice blog entries on documentation

GSoC, RubyLand, or Finally Something Useful from Oreilly Ruby Blog

2007-05-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

Instead of the normal vapid content like this, this announcement about RubyLand was actually sort of interesting as an example of solving small tasks using EventMachine and drb.

Rubyland’s goal is to simplify writing tiny scripts for small tasks. I’m planning to build it using a mix of dRB and EventMachine. Rubyland’s core will aggregate events from desktop applications, file system updates, other computers on the network, etc.. Rubyland will then call user-written Ruby scripts in response to those events. Initially Rubyland will target the Mac OS X platform in some ways, but its core will be cross-platform, so that plugins can be written for any platform.

Bravo!

CodeIdol Ruby Sysadmin Cookbook

2007-05-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

While I'm not sure all the recipes may not be the best approaches, there is some sample code there. I would have been unlikely to find Etc module without it.

Oniguruma and Named Regexes in Ruby 1.8

2007-05-16T06:08:00.000-07:00

Unlike Python and C# (and probably others) Ruby 1.8 does not support named groups. This is available in 1.9 though. Or so I hear.

What are named groups? Basically they allow you to reference the results of the match option with the nice names you embedded in the regex object. Since Blogger hates anything with <>'s you can see an example here . Look near synopsis.

So how do you get this in 1.8.6?

Windows users have it easy, just install the win32 GEM, but OSX (and I assume other UNIX) require a bit of extra steps and it is sort of confusing because there are lots of versions of the Oniguruma C Library (do I really want to download stuff hosted on geocities Japan?) to choose from and there is a way to install it which requires recompiling your Ruby but that only works for 1.8.4 so I didn't bother.

So here is what I did to get it working on OSX (PPC) with 1.8.6

1. Download 4.6.2 of the C Library. Configure with whatever prefix you are using for Ruby (I use /my) and make install

2. Download version 1.10 of the GEM Source Tarball and do the standard ruby extconf.rb dance within ext. However

Change INFLAGS in the Makefile so it can find the oniguruma.h

Mine looks like this because ruby is installed in /my

INCFLAGS = -I. -I. -I/my/include -I/my/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0 -I.

If you don't do this you will get


gcc -I/my -I. -I. -I/my/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0 -I.  -fno-common -Wall  -c oregexp.c
oregexp.c:2:23: error: oniguruma.h: No such file or directory
oregexp.c:9: error: parse error before 'regex_t'
oregexp.c:9: warning: no semicolon at end of struct or union
oregexp.c:10: warning: type defaults to 'int' in declaration of 'ORegexp'
oregexp.c:10: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
oregexp.c:15: error: parse error before '*' token
oregexp.c: In function 'oregexp_free':
oregexp.c:16: warning: implicit declaration of function 'onig_free'
oregexp.c:16: error: 'oregexp' undeclared (first use in this function)
oregexp.c:16: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
oregexp.c:16: error: for each function it appears in.)
oregexp.c: In function 'oregexp_allocate':
oregexp.c:21: error: 'oregexp' undeclared (first use in this function)
oregexp.c: At top level:
oregexp.c:27: error: parse error before '*' token
oregexp.c:27: warning: return type defaults to 'int'
oregexp.c: In function 'int2encoding':

If you compile it successfully you'll see the library (oregexp.bundle, whatever that is) put in /my/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0 (or whatever you path is)

However require 'oniguruma.rb' will still fail until you do this:

cp oniguruma.rb /my/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/

But it if you did get it installed you can run the test suite


franz-g4:/tmp root# ruby test_oniguruma.rb
4.6.2
Loaded suite test_oniguruma
Started
..............................................
Finished in 0.046221 seconds.

46 tests, 105 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

But of course the example from the README doesn't work (either on OSX or Windows) in typical Ruby fashion.

Simple, easy, and fun!

Death, Rebirth, and yet another Ruby Blog

2007-05-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

I deinstalled (yes, FreeBSD is assimilating me) the ports version of Ruby on my 12-inch Powerbook (still the best damn laptop, ever-Intel Macs may be fast but they are flimsy, hot, and noisy!) this afternoon due to all the pain of getting trying to onigurumu installed just so I could do named group regular expressions like in Python (more on that later).

But sometimes it is good just to clean house and start a new page. So except for the Rails nonsense, I did pretty much everything here. You know, installing libreadline, a fresh new install 1.8.6 tarball, etc. Except I'm starting from scratch with everything in /my.

But enough procrastination. Why the new blog? Why another Ruby blog? Well, the manifesto (oh, yeah, and that I'm spending too much time on Ruby on BlogFranz) is below. I hope you hold me (or us, should anyone else agree to the spirit, if not necessarily the letter of this effort) to it:

Back to the Basics - I happened to look at the README during the build and the non-hyped description of Ruby (obviously back before Ruby was cool) was:

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, and extensible.

Unfortunately most of the stuff I try to do (which is simple and system-management-ish) that I could achieve with a blink of an eye in Python (because it just works and is in there) does not work (or is not built into the standard library) with Ruby. I guess everybody is doing web development in Ruby except me. Or the various OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD boxes I do work on with Ruby are so hopelessly broken. I assume others are in this boat as well.

Which leads me to #2.

Rails-free - This is a timewarp. We go back to 2001 when I first encountered Ruby and it was just weird and Japanese and the socket APIs were crappy, before Metasploit 3.0. Before BaseCamp (yes my previous company actually used it for a while, and it was "allright" if a bit sluggish). Back when my wife owned the only Mac in the family. Bottom line, if its' related to Rails you won't find it here. Period. End of story. No exceptions.

Mad as hell - The "happy-ass-ness" (yes, a psychological term) of Ruby (packaging bliss, instant enlightenment? fun programming?) is maddening to me. Vomitus negro. I loathe OReilly Ruby blogs and in particular I don't like this guy or anyone else that that does "math for fun." What you find here will be hard, critical, and hype-free. No advocacy. No fanboys. Just blogs on (or references to other blogs) on how to get shit done and solve problems. A lot of this began over on BlogFranz where I talked about sloppy documentation, insecure implementations, YAML, API comparisions, and other fare that was getting way too much attention there, where I want to focus more on security, Linux, and BSDs.

JRuby - You think Ruby is bad. Try Java? But sometimes there are Java APIs you just have to use (or abuse). Jython is obsolete and what is the point of something like Groovy?!

So there you have it. I've decided to use it with UbuntuTrinux and we're using it a work. So I have to be make the best of using Ruby. So let the fun begin. And yeah, I'm not really mad. Just a blog persona.