Wrongly used randomness can be the source of hard-to-detect bugs and security holes. This is relevant every time you use randomness, for example, when implementing an existing protocol/interface that requires random values or generating tokens for your next raffle. This article describes when to use which of Ruby’s randomness methods. […]

After releasing version 0.9 of my cli password manager, I received friendly feedback and suggestions, which encouraged me to further improve it. Here are some of my experiences implementing pws 1.0: […]

• stores your passwords in a file on your disk
• encrypts the file with a master password
• is designed for every-day-use
• is written in 234 lines of understandable Ruby code… Read it!
• is tested with 222 Cucumber steps […]

Ruby 1.8 dies in June 2012. This post shows some small examples, why this is good ;) […]

My codebrawl entry (gist) got the 5th place (out of 20). Want to use it in real life :) […]

The next pack of Project Euler solutions. […]

##              ##    ##     ##    ##    ##    ####           ###        ##    ##
 ##            ##     ##     ##     ##  ##     ##  ##        ## ##        ##  ##
  ##    ##    ##      #########      ####      ##   ##     #########       ####
   ##  ####  ##       ##     ##       ##       ##  ##      ##     ##        ##
    ####  ####        ##     ##       ##       ####       ##       ##       ##

The Zucker gem has gotten some new features. Installation is as easy as
 gem install zucker
and
 require 'zucker/all' […]

Zucker is a collection of lightweight scripts (cubes) that make Ruby even more beautiful: rubyzucker.info […]

More solutions for the projecteuler.net problems. Some of them are solved using 1.9.2 features. […]

In Ruby, dealing with Arrays and similar objects is pretty fun. And we have gotten more possibilities with Ruby 1.9.2 :) […]

A common Ruby experience on ubuntu: You get some stupid error, saying something would be missing – and you don’t know what to do… […]

Installing Ruby/Rails on ubuntu is not hard, but some little obstacles might be confusing. […]

projecteuler.net tries to get you thinking about how to solve mathematical problems by programming. Here are the first five problems, solved in Ruby, including comments. […]

This article is written for people with experience in programming in general, but who are new to Ruby.
A German version is published in the offline magazine #2, a magazine by some students of TU Dresden.

The intention is to demonstrate some features of Ruby and show, what is so great about Ruby:

A clean syntax combined with the possibility to adapt the language to given requirements flexibly. […]

About a year ago, some students at my university announced a little programming competition for students beginning studying IT, like me. The language could be chosen freely.

At this time, I had already done some C and PHP programming.. but I also had heard of Ruby and that Ruby is sooo cool. So I decided to learn the basics of Ruby by taking part… and it’s been the right decision! I fell in love with Ruby ;).

I publish my solution here. It is a good “try to understand what it does”-exercise for people new to Ruby or programming in general (or people doing Rails only all the time). […]

At my last entry, a question arose about what is the most efficient way to convert integers between the bases 2 and 10: either using built-in ruby methods (and even do lightweight string-operations) or calculating it manually. I had to find out ;). So I have written a little benchmark program, which does the conversion in three different ways:

1. using built-in to_i-magic
2. calculating it by hand
3. using sprintf

It stops the time each method needs to get the fastest. The result might be surprising. [Update: improved the custom methods] […]

Sometimes you have an array of indices. These might, for example, act as flags, whether some specific options are set or not. A nice way to store this list is, to store it in one single number. […]