It really doesn’t get any simpler than this: http://xmpp4r-simple.rubyforge.org/.

Let’s go folks, Jabber is the command line of the future.

I’ve checked out a variety of Jabber client libraries over the past couple of months. The idea of writing a Jabber-bot sort of floats up pretty frequently, but I always get bogged down in the interfaces. I admit, it’s because I’m lazy and weak. However, now I finally have a library that meets me in lazy-town and gets me chatting on Jabber. Pretty great.

Not sure if this is a bug or not, I can’t find an existing bug report. I have no idea why this would be this way.

This script:
print "hello"
sleep 5
exit true

run with sudo, breaks. The sleep call never happens.

This script:
print "hello"
sleep 5
Kernel.exit(true)

run with sudo, works like a champ.

Weird, no?

Obie Fernandez posted his slides from his JAOO presentation.

My favorite slide:

“The fascinating thing is that, in my
experience, most well-written Ruby
programs are already a DSL, just by
nature of Ruby’s syntax.”
Jamis Buck, 37signals

Part of my hangup with the DSL “movement” as of late has been, “are we really making DSL’s here, or just nice clean API’s?” Jamis’ quote, in my interpretation, sort of backs that up. I’m probably taking it totally out of context. Regardless, it’s fun to get worked up about DSL’s, it makes you feel like you’re writing a fancy language, instead of yet another interface. Whatever gets you fired up about making clean code is a good thing.

I don’t mean to sound cynical, I’ve been waging a personal war against cynicism. This isn’t a “why bother calling these DSL’s” speech, it’s a “YOU’RE SMARTER THAN YOU THINK” speech. DSL’s aren’t mystical, at least not in the Ruby world. They’re just clean code.

Edited to add: I found Jamis’ entry that the quote was taken from, I didn’t get the context of the quote wrong, as this quote, “A DSL can be thought of as (and many cases, really is) an API for your application.” sort of proves. So…that’s good.

I’ve been playing around with Hpricot for the past hour or so. It’s very fast, which is cool. I’ve tried Rubyful Soup in the past, and really liked the api, but it’s pretty slow as it’s pure Ruby. Hpricot is a Ruby wrapper around a C library, which has significant speed advantages.

I don’t really have a usage opinion of one over the other just yet, however, both are included in a work app I’m working on. A bunch of pages are stored in a table. Each page object now has a .soup method and a .hpricot method. I haven’t done anything with either, but it’s good to know they’re there. I’ll probably start parsing some of this stuff out next week.

I love _why’s libraries, perfect mix of oddness combined with genuine usefulness. Although I ended up not using it for this project, mouseHole was a big learning experience for me. _why’s code is a great learning tool.