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A new version of Rhotoalbum, a simple but powerful photo album generator written in Ruby, has been released.

The version 0.8 contains a number of features (well, after two years) like RSS support (try with cooliris), options per album, pagination, cool thumbnail effects for photos and album covers and improved album cover managing.

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One of the most common ways how to control a command line application is to use options, e.g. almost every command line application would understand -h or --help or /? (common in the MS-DOS world) as a request to show some instruction.

Ruby (but also other programming languages such as Java) has a basic support for accessing command line arguments, so there is a space for libraries that make reading options easier such as Trollop, Optiflag or Choice.
Update: Actually not so true for Ruby – there are two standard libraries (they are built-in, so it is not necessary to install them): OptionParser and GetoptLong. Check them out. (thnx to Max)

The Choice library is an interesting choice, not only because it works smoothly, but it is a nice example of a domain specific language (DSL or see my older post about DSL in Ruby).

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Flickr is a well known site for sharing photos and it is one of the most popular sites that published their services and allow to use them freely.

It is not necessary to work on a photo uploader, photo printing site or a mashup solution to become an user of the services. Sometimes it is interesting enough to get a list of your photos URLs and show them in a favourite flash photo viewer on your own web site.

There are several libraries for Ruby, one of the most up-to-date is Flickraw. Unfortunately it is not mentioned on the official Flickr services page, although it works smoothly, has a good documentation and is actively maintained (btw. the RubyForge project page is outdated, but the github page is up-to-date).
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Recently I updated to the Snow Leopard, but I decided for a clean install (of course, again the last one).
I saved a list of all installed applications
ls -1 /Applications/ > my_apps.txt
in order not to forget what I used last week :) ..and here are the favourite ones:
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Slovak Ruby and Ruby on Rails fans will meet in Bratislava on April 25, 2009. For more details see the Slovak Ruby on Rails site or directly the post about the meeting [all in Slovak].

It is probably every developer’s dream to create a programming language. It is a complex and difficult task, so it will remain just an unfulfilled dream for many.
But there is a chance to create something simpler – a domain specific language (DSL). A language, that covers a specific (and limited) domain.
Ruby helps here a lot – to create a DSL is really simple and easy.
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A friend of mine asked me to help him to undelete music files from his iPod mini.
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I wrote down my favourite Firefox and Thunderbird add-ons (or plug-ins). Some friends of mine asked me several times.. here is it..
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I installed Ubuntu in a VirtualBox machine on OS X (pretty easy and straightforward), but to access a Mac harddrive from Ubuntu was slightly more complicated.
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One of the ways how to remotely control Firefox is to use the JSSh (JavaScript Shell) plug-in. To successfully install the plug-in, it is necessary to find a suitable version for your Firefox version (1.x, 2.x, 3.x) and platform (Linux, Mac, Win). That is sometimes not so trivial…

Additionally there is a limitation in the plug-in: its communication port number cannot be (easily) changed, so it is not possible to start more JSSh (and Firefox) instances.

First, the actual status is described, later a new version of the JSSh plug-in is provided with examples.

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