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Daniel Berger

Biography

Daniel Berger is the lead developer of several Ruby projects, including the Win32Utils project. He has been an active member in the Ruby community since 2001 and is a member of the Boulder-Denver Ruby user group. Daniel currently works in the telecom industry. When he's not writing programs, Daniel enjoys hiking, biking and playing wargames

Blog

Structured. Warnings. Now.

February 20 2008

The Problem I find Ruby's current warning system, if you can call it that, lacking. Warnings are controlled by the -W flag on the command line, and are generated via the Kernel#warn method within code. There are a host of... read more

JRuby meets the Windows API

January 27 2008

With the addition of Java Native Access (JNA) to JRuby, systems programmers using JRuby now have greater flexibility in terms of interfacing with underlying operating system. Some Ruby users are familiar with the 'Win32API' library that ships as part of... read more

JRuby meets the Windows API

January 25 2008

With the addition of Java Native Access (JNA) to JRuby, systems programmers using JRuby now have greater flexibility in terms of interfacing with underlying operating system. Some Ruby users are familiar with the ‘Win32API’ library that ships as part of the Ruby standard library. That library lets you interface with… read more

Gemtacular!

November 22 2007

Got a favorite gem you want to tell the world about? Or one you want to warn other people about? You can do both with Gemtacular! Gemtacular (http://www.gemtacular.com) is a place to rate and review Ruby gems. It’s a great place to not only find opinions on various gems, but also… read more

Fun with Unicode

November 01 2007

Did you know you can do this with Ruby out of the box? # A real lambda λ { puts ‘Hello’ }.call => ‘Hello’ # Sigma - sum of all elements ∑(1,2,3) => 6 # Square root √ 49 => 7.0 How difficult was this to implement? Keep reading! # Be sure to run with the "-Ku"… read more

Fun with Unicode

October 31 2007

Did you know you can do this with Ruby out of the box? # A real lambda λ { puts ‘Hello’ }.call => ‘Hello’ # Sigma - sum of all elements ∑ [1,2,3] => 6 # Square root √ 49 => 7.0 How difficult was this to implement? Keep reading! # Be sure to run with the… read more

RubyForge vs RAA

September 26 2007

This is a short followup to my last post where I compared library RubyForge statistics against CPAN. This week I compare RubyForge against…the Ruby Application Archive! Yes, I know, the RAA is just a listing service and RubyForge is not. That’s not the point. Please read on. In the last post I… read more

RubyForge vs CPAN

September 26 2007

It’s often been said that Perl’s greatest strength is CPAN, Perl’s vast collection of free libraries contributed by developers from around the world. Recently I started to wonder about RubyForge and how RubyForge stacks up against CPAN in general.1 First, length of service. CPAN has been around for 12 years (October… read more

RubyForge vs CPAN

September 19 2007

It’s often been said that Perl’s greatest strength is CPAN, Perl’s vast collection of free libraries contributed by developers from around the world. Recently I started to wonder about RubyForge and how RubyForge stacks up against CPAN in general.1 First, length of service. CPAN has been around for 12 years (October… read more

Bind. Parameters. Now.

May 23 2007

At RailsConf 2007 DHH mentioned that Rails 2.0 would support query caching on the client side in order to speed up AR. I immediately thought to myself, “Huh? Why do it on the client side when the database server will handle that?”. The answer is that ActiveRecord (AR) doesn’t support bind… read more

Ruby code that will swallow your soul!

April 11 2007

There is Ruby code no mortal being is meant to see, let alone use, for it is pure evil. If you wish to save your immortal soul, then read no further! *SIGH* - Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Since your soul is doomed anyway, I’ll let you in on some of… read more

C extension authors: use rb_scan_args(); don't count argc

April 04 2007

If you’re writing a C extension for Ruby, and you’ve got method that has optional arguments, be sure to use rb_scan_args(). Do not count argc. Read on if you want to know why. First, let’s start with an example of bad code: /* Example 1 */ static VALUE my_func(int argc, VALUE* argv,… read more

Goodbye Document-class! (And other RDoc improvements)

March 28 2007

Over the last couple of Ruby releases I’ve made some improvements (with Eric Hodel’s help and blessing) to RDoc for C extensions that I thought I would share with you. If you write C extensions with Ruby then keep reading. If you don’t do C and/or don’t care that much… read more