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 Ed>

http://hivelogic.com/articles/2005/12/01/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger

This is a step-by-step tutorial on getting a full-on Rails stack up and running on your Mac. BTW, Macs are very good at doing Rails development.

<end Ed>

Finally, here's Ed on getting Ruby on Rails working on my fave distro, K/Ubuntu.

<begin Ed>

Hi, just got a new HD from the EPC sale and installed Breezy onto it. Bit tricky setting up support for Rails programming. The basic issue is getting compiler tools/libraries. I wrote up my travails in my blog: http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com.

Other than that, Ubuntu really rocks. My laptop seems over 100% faster. Not sure if the HD is the culprit or Ubuntu is just tuned better. And when I plugged my old HD into a USB drive enclosure, Ubuntu popped up various file browsers for each partition. That is seriously cool, man.

Just FYI.

<end Ed>

(Check out all of our posts on Ruby.)

Open Source Mac is a cool web site for two reasons. (1) The recommended software is excellent, top-notch stuff. The recommendations just make sense. I mean, how could you go wrong with Adium for IM, DTV for TV downloading & viewing, VLC for videos, Handbrake for ripping DVDs, and Shiira for browsing? And there's plenty more where that came from. And (2), the web pages on this site looks so darn Mac OS X-ish. Lots of white space, big, beautiful icons, and large text. Talk about a marriage of form and function! If you use Mac OS X, you owe it to yourself to go here and check out these programs. You'll discover something cool, I promise.

(Check out all of our posts on Mac OS X.)