My buddy Ed is a great programmer, & in the last many months he's really gotten deep into Ruby on Rails. Periodically he emails the CWE-LUG list about Ruby, & his info is always good. Here's some of those emails for your edification & enlightenment. Here's a presentation that Ed did for the Unix Users Group here in St. Louis: <begin Ed> Hello. I know its been 1.5 weeks since my tutorial on Ruby at the general SLUUG mtg, but finally the slides are up. http://www.cwelug.org/~edh/RubyForNubys.sxi An OOo Impress document. Feel free to convert it to HTML or PDF if you want. It is released under a Attribute/Non-commercial/Share-Alike Creative Commons licence. That means you can edit it and redistriute it as long as attribution is maintained and it is released under an identical license. <end Ed> Then Ed had this to say about developing Ruby on Rails for Mac OS X users (even though I'm pretty sure Ed uses Linux). <begin ...

Symfony is a PHP5 contender in the Web applications framework market, currently dominated by Ruby On Rails. Unlike other PHP attempts at Web frameworks, Symfony is promoting itself well, and even has a ten minute video demonstrating how easy it is to produce a shopping cart system using the framework. For those PHP folks who are trying to resist the urge of Ruby on Rails, this is worth a look. (Check out all of our posts on PHP.) ...

Like them or loathe them, PDFs have become a staple of the World Wide Web diet. If you're a Web developer, it's likely you've been asked if you can produce PDFs on the fly from your applications and services. It used to be hard work, but now a plethora of open source PDF libraries exist to make it an easy task: C#: SharpPDF Java: iText Python: The ReportLab Toolkit (this library is particularly mature and well documented) Ruby: PDF::Writer (in pure Ruby and available via gems) Perl: PDF::CreateSimple, PDF::Create, PDF (primarily for parsing) PHP: FPDF (unlike PDFlib, commercial usage is free) (Check out all of our posts on PDF.) ...

Well, no surprise here: Apple bitched that the "iPodder" name, used by open source software that grabs podcasts for you on Mac, Windows, & Linux, was confusing people who might think that it was supported directly by Apple, so they've had to change the name. The new name: Juice. The new web site: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/. Of course, the Linux guys, being Linux guys, went their own way slightly with their name, which is CastPodder, & which is located at http://borgforge.net/projects/castpodder/. Me, I still prefer bashpodder, a simple bash shell script, & my good buddy Ed Howland (with some aid from Robert Citek) has been coding his own version in Ruby that will see the light of day on this blog very, very soon. In the meantime, if you're looking to listen to some podcasts, check out Juice or CastPodder. They're good stuff. (Check out all of our posts on podcasting or bashpodder.) ...

Over the past year, this blog has pretty much been written by one person - me, Scott Granneman. There have been occasional forays by other folks, but I've been your open source blogger. Starting today, I'd like to welcome another blogger on this blog, Peter Cooper. I'm not going anywhere, but now Peter & I will be blogging together to make this blog even better, more relevant to you, & more fun. I'm excited to work with Peter, especially since he & I are somewhat complementary in our interests. I'm interested primarily in desktop apps, although coding & web dev also spark my interest, while Peter is the opposite: he's more interested in coding & developing, & less so much in desktop apps. Nice mix! So, who's Peter Cooper? Here ya go: Peter Cooper is a developer and serial entrepreneur with diverse interests across the worlds of technology and open source. He began to blog before the term even existed, six years ago, back when he worked for dot-com media companies ...