I just saw Petr Krenzelok’s giddy announcement on the REBOL mailing list that a public alpha of REBOL 3 is available today. I’ve been waiting to see this for a while and can’t even begin to describe how excited I am.

The official announcement is here. I just need to remember that it’s an alpha. Pieces aren’t going to work. Things will be strange. But it’s out there for the bold to play with.

Of course I gotta get some work done, but you can be sure I’ll be poking at this over the next couple of days.

This blog may well be the single best resource ever created for those of use who are learning how to automate Windows with Ruby.

I’d really love to master an editor. Any editor. Vim has been my weapon of choice for years, but Emacs has always intrigued me. It’s easier to use than Vim, but the Elisp language is the real draw. Vim’s configuration / scripting language is awkward at best. Elisp is cryptically lispish, but at least it is possible to break it down without wondering what the heck <sfile> is supposed to be.

So yeah. I’m mostly a Vim guy but I’d love to get more out of my Emacs sessions. With that in mind, I’ll be taking a close look at Xah’s Emacs and Elisp tutorials.

I’m still getting everything back together after the iMac upgrade fiasco. JRuby, my favorite Ruby implementation, is still missing. I think I’ll fix that now.

• Grab the binary of 1.03 from the JRuby site.
• cd /usr/local
• sudo tar xfvz ~/jruby-bin-1.0.3.tar.gz
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/jruby-1.0.3/ /usr/local/jruby
• Add JRuby details to my (somewhat busy) bash profile

    # ~/.bash_profile
export JRUBY_HOME="/usr/local/jruby"</strong>
# OS X is normally conservative about paths, while I am generous about them.
export LOCALBINS=/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin
export APPBINS=$JRUBY_HOME/bin
export PATH=$APPBINS:$LOCALBINS:$PATH

if [ -r ~/.bashrc ]; then
    . ~/.bashrc
fi
  

    $ . ~/.bash_profile
$ which jruby
/usr/local/jruby/bin/jruby
$ which gem
/usr/local/jruby/bin/gem

  

    require "java"

include_class "java.util.TreeSet"

puts "Hello from JRuby"
set = TreeSet.new()
set.add( "foo" )
set.add( "Bar" )
set.add( "baz" )
set.each { |v| puts "value: #{v}" }
  

    $ jruby call_java.rb
  

    $ jruby call_java.rb
Hello from JRuby
value: Bar
value: baz
value: foo