Recently I have been testing two libraries in Ruby.
I wanted to graph stocks at different resolutions (in fact with different sampling intervals) and for this I used Scruffy. It outputs SVG charts by default but can actually output any format supported by RMagick, so that includes PNG and JPG too.
I get the stock information from Yahoo Finance and pre-process it with OpenOffice . The first outputs of the stock price were quite bad for me as Scruffy plots a thick line and thick data points too by default. Therefore, instead of having a nice thin line, I had a thicker one, made unreadable by the very numerous data points which appeared as a series of blobs.
I emailed Brasten about this to ask how these blobs and the lines could be reduced, but had no answer. He must be busy. Scruffy is Open-Source, so I had a look inside the Scruffy Ruby code and made my own changes to solve the problem. Result: nice thin lines with no blobs.
This is made possible by the fact that Scruffy is free, Open-Source, and additionally, written in Ruby. Therefore, even code which I have not written myself remains easily readable and modifiable. The downside for me is that since it is a one-man project, it is sometimes difficult to get support. But it would be much more of a problem if the project didn’t have the three above-mentioned characteristics.
The next library I stumbled upon was ScRUBYt! after reading a few texts on screen scraping. ScRUBYt! is a powerful tool and relies on both HPricot and WWW::Mechanize.
Speaking of libraries, I also started writing small one for OpenOffice automation in Ruby. I am doing it through OLE on Windows, since there are no Ruby-UNO implementations yet that would allow direct automation of OpenOffice with Ruby.
One new IDE by Vancouver-based ActiveState – Komodo Edit 4.0 beta – came in handy for my tests with the libraries. But I also relied on RDE as usual. I noticed two things with Komodo Edit 4.0 beta:
1. Sometimes, with multi-file projects, the left pane showing the project tree would just clear up.
2. Antonio Cangiano, a Ruby enthusiast who works at the IBM Toronto Software Lab pointed out that Komodo Edit 4.0 beta doesn’t know how to run your Ruby file out-of-the-box. He describes how he managed to assign a key to do just that on his blog. From there I recorded a new macro to enable automatic Save + Run and assigned it to F6, which is something I am used to within RDE (it’s F5 for RDE). Incidentally, Antonio did the same thing too.
Komodo Edit 4.0 beta’s IDE is slick and it’s a pleasure to develop with it.
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Today I received a Skype call from my good friend Thierry Sourbier, who recently came to Calgary on assignment. We were talking after 10 years. We had met at INSA de Rennes, Brittany, France while doing our Systems/Software Engineering course. We caught up with each other’s lives, and it was good to see that he is still very active within his various interest groups.
He managed to spur me on with the Montreal Tech League and shared his experience as a very successful community builder with his pet project and site OnlineTri which is about Triathlons.
He succeeds in all this while also being a husband and a father of two. Thierry is intelligent and dedicated, and it was a great pleasure to speak to him after all these years – ten precisely. I’m impressed to see how he manages all these activities – Business and Systems Engineering, Photography, Triathlons, Community Building, Married life with children. Way to go, Thierry!
And thanks for the ideas for the MTL!
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