"The call came down from on high just before the Ruby 1.9 release: replace the standard csv.rb library with faster_csv.rb. With only hours to make the change it was a little harder than I expected. The FasterCSV code base was pretty vanilla Ruby, but it required more work than I would have guessed to get running on Ruby 1.9. Let me share a few of the tips I learned while doctoring the code in the hope that it will help others get their code ready for Ruby 1.9..."

"Ruby 1.9.1-p129 has been released. This is a patch level release for Ruby 1.9.1. This fixes many bugs and two security vulnerabilities. This release contains security fix so we recommend all 1.9.1 users to upgrade your ruby..."

The developers of Rubinius, a version of the Ruby language mostly written in Ruby, have released stable version 1.0

Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed.

"Akinori MUSHA announced today that Ruby 1.8.7 has been released. The new version of Ruby includes many bug fixes, lots of feature enhancements backported from 1.9 and some performance improvements since 1.8.6 while maintaining stability and backward compatibility with the previous release to a high degree. See the bundled documentation for details about compatibility issues..."

If you're on a Unix/Linux system and you don't have Ruby installed (or you want to upgrade), your distribution's package system may make a Ruby package available. On debian GNU/LINUX, it's available as the package ruby-[version]: for instance, ruby-1.8 or ruby-1.9. Red Hat Linux calls it ruby; so does the DarwinParts system on Mac OS X.

Tomorrow sees the development freeze of the first test version of Fedora 8. Due to be released on August (Crikey we’re almost in August!!!) 2nd. Hopefully we’ll be able to see some of the features expected in the next release…

"Practical Ruby for System Administration, which was written by Andre Ben Hamou and published by Apress, is a lightning introduction to this modern scripting language and is a reasonably detailed, example based, explanation of the potential strength of Ruby for System Administrators and thus the enterprise..."

"Ruby 1.9: What To Expect is an online slideshow by Sam Ruby that covers a lot of the differences between the Ruby 1.8 that we all know and love and the currently experimental Ruby 1.9. Sam's examples are to the point, easily digestible, and span 47 slides..."