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Italian translation of Ruby-Lang.org finally available!November 15

I am very pleased to announce that the official site of the Ruby programming language is now available in Italian:

In the beginning…

It all started in July 2007, when after a closer look at the site I discovered that apparently it was not available in Italian! How could it be? There were a lot of translations available, such as French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean… but no Italian. I immediately emailed the webmaster and within a few hours Curt Hibbs (hell yes, that Curt Hibbs!) mailed me the instructions to get me started:

“[…] Providing a translation of the Ruby web site would have two parts: 1) the initial translation of the current content, and 2) the ongoing maintenance of the Italian version as new content and news items are added. This effort will be much more sustainable over the long term if you put together a team of at least three people who would commit to translating and maintaining the site. […]”

…Why three people to translate “a few pages”? That’s what bugged me at the time: it honestly seemed just a few days work for one person at most. Later on I u

Where does your Ruby code live?November 8

Back when I wrote my 10 reasons to learn Ruby article, I mentioned RubyGems in Reason #1 as one of they key features of the Ruby programming languages. Indeed, gems make getting Ruby programs as easy as typing gem install <something> from the command line. When you want to distribute something new in Ruby, there’s no need to give people download links, zip files or setup programs, just tell them to get the gem. That’s perfectly normal, and extremely cool.

Gems are normally stored on RubyForge, so all you have to do is uploading your gem there, and it will be available to the rest of the universe. It’s a nice feeling. I remember when I first uploaded RawLine and then tried gem install rawline just for the hell of it: it downloaded and installed the gem, as expected.

Back in the day, if you wanted to find something written in Ruby, all you had to do is search through RubyForge, and you’d eventually find it, with a bit of luck.

Can we just have git, please?

RubyForge had, until recently, one major problem: it only allowed CVS and SVN repositories, and you had to make your choice when creating the proj

Rails-powered Open Source Killer Apps, Anyone?November 2

Lately I’ve been meandering around the web to find a good CMS for a family site I’d like to set up. Why a CMS? Well, for a few simple reasons:

I don’t have enough free time to fiddle with Rails and make my own (I’m an Hobbyist Programmer™: I code for fun and enlightment, not for money)
Even if I had the time, I’m sure there are plenty of CMSes out there which suits my needs.

It turns out that reason #2 is not really applicable in this case, especially if we restrict the field to Ruby + Rails/Merb/<insert cool DRY framework here>.

Rails-powered CMSes

Name a Rails-powered CMS, quick!

Easy: Radiant.

Hmm, no. As much as I do like Radiant, it really cannot be considered a general-purpose CMS, can it? When it comes to build nearly-static sites in a clean and neat way I’d pick it any day, but it lacks quite a lot of community features like comments, ability to create forums, etc. etc. It does, however, support multilingual content in a rudimentary, yet effective way: create each translated page manually and use consistent URL conventions (/en/about, /it/about, etc.).

I’m not saying that there aren’t enough CMSes built on Rails, just that there’s no “killer app” in the pack. A “killer” CMS would be something as powerful as Drupal,

Introducing H3RALD.com v7.1October 27

I finally decided to redesign my web site. About 2 years passed since last time and I think this was long overdue: a lot of people liked the black Nitefall theme, but a lot of people found a bit too dark for their liking.

I decided to go for something more boring traditional this time: white background and only black header and footer. I think the new design improves the overall readability of the site, also because this time I kept thing simple:

No more sidebars – Who needs them anyway? Who wants to see my delicious bookmarks on every single page? Who wants to see that annoying Web 2.0-ish tag cloud listing all the tags I’ve ever used from 2006 onwards? I suddently realized that the right column was nothing more than wasted space, so I removed it altogether.
No more differentiation between articles and blog posts – As a matter of fact, I’m not posting little pointless tidbits everyday, it’s more likely just once a week or even once a month. When I post though, I tend to make it worthwhile both for me and the readers by writing about something which may interest people, for a change. In short: this may not be a “traditional blog” anymore, just a publishing platform for my articles.
No more “previews” – From now on, only the title of each articles is displayed in the home page, in the archives and even when searching. If you want to read an article, all you have

Chrome: Google did it again!September 2

It looks like there’s a new open source browser in town. As usual, nearly everything about it leaked before its release. Every blog that matters is talking about it, so if you didn’t hear anything about it, you’d better take a look yourself. Don’t be fooled by the usual senseless ravings of some weird, overly-hyped blogger though: a browser just came out, nothing more and nothing less. It’s not the end of Windows, it’s not the end of the Internet, it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a new player in the Browser Wars.

I particularly recommend reading the official Google Comic Book about Chrome, however I included some of the most interesting parts of it in this article. It’s a nice 40-page comic booklet explaining how the browser works in a friendly way… I found it quite amusing and an interesting way to leak distribute info on a new project.

Getting the damn thing

You can freely download Google Ch