jugad's Journal

Is Bloglines having problems?

jugad — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 08:22:20 GMT

Saw a post about it on TechCrunch that indicates Bloglines may stop functioning.

The post is here.

In case that happens, and if you don't want to lose the blog feeds you had subscribed to, here's what you can do:

Export the RSS or Atom feeds of the blogs that you subscribe to, using the Bloglines feature called Export Subscriptions. Login to your Bloglines account and look for the feature at the bottom of the left pane. Click on it and save the generated OPML file somewhere.

Then import that OPML file into some other feed reader of your choice, using that reader's appropriate option to do so. (The option should be called something like Import Subscriptions or Import Feeds.) Most good feed readers, whether desktop or web-based, should have such an option.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

UNIX one-liner to kill a hanging Firefox process

jugad — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:13:26 GMT

Here's a useful one-liner that uses awk (and grep, sort and sed too), to kill a Firefox process that has hung.

Firefox hung just now on my machine - so I ran this command:

# kill -HUP ` ps -aef | grep -i firefox | sort -k 2 -r | sed 1d | awk ' { print $2 } ' `

NOTE: That's sed space one d in the line above, i.e. the digit "one", not the letter "ell".

The command does all of the following:

- Uses the ps command to get a list of all running processes; the list is written to standard output.

- Pipes that to grep -i firefox to identify all Firefox-related processes (this is needed because, on Ubuntu Linux, there is more than one such process (even for a single running Firefox instance), because the firefox command you run is a shell script which calls another script which finally calls the real firefox binary).

- Pipes that to sort -k 2 -r to sort the output in descending order by the process-id (2nd field of the ps output).

- Pipes that to sed 1d to delete the line of output that refers to the grep in the pipeline itself - otherwise I'd end up killing the grep as well (because grep -i firefox matches the line for the grep process as well as the actual Firefox-related processes).

NOTE: This part (using sed 1d to kill the grep) is based on knowing that the grep process is the process that currently has the highest-numbered process id (due to the preceding sort command), of all the processes that match the grep pattern. So it'll be the first line of output, so sed 1d deletes it (and passes all the other lines untouched, to the next command in the pipeline).

- Pipes that to awk ' { print $2 } ' to extract only the 2nd field, the process-id, from each line.

- And, since the entire part of the command after the HUP is enclosed in backward quotes (also called backticks or grave accents), what happens is that the final output of the commands between the backticks replaces the backticks and everything between them, so what the shell finally sees before it runs the kill command, is something like this:

kill -HUP 8849 8845 8833

- which results in automagically killing all (and only) the processes related to the single instance of Firefox that was running (but hung) on my machine.

WARNING: Don't try this command (exactly as shown) if you're on a Linux system with multiple users, since it would end up deleting all their running Firefox processes as well - and don't run it even if you yourself are running multiple instances of Firefox and only want to kill one of them.

NOTE: The sort command uses the -r option to list the processes in reverse numeric order by process-id, so that we kill each child before its parent, to avoid creating orphan processes.

Vasudev Ram.

IGNORE THIS - Testing longer (40 line) post on LiveJournal again

jugad — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:35:25 GMT

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Is LiveJournal blocking blog posts?

jugad — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:49:04 GMT

Testing that again ...

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

TESTING IF LiveJournal problem

jugad — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:53:57 GMT

Ths is a test.
Creating a small sized post to see if LJ is blocking it.
Creating a small sized post to see if LJ is blocking it.
Creating a small sized post to see if LJ is blocking it.
Creating a small sized post to see if LJ is blocking it.
Creating a small sized post to see if LJ is blocking it.

IGNORE THIS - Test post

jugad — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:23:07 GMT

Test post.

Intel acquires OpenedHand

jugad — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:09:29 GMT

OpenedHand Ltd, based in London, UK, is a software company with products related to handheld computing devices. Interestingly, all their products seem to be open source.

About OpenedHand.

Intel has acquired OpenedHand.

[ I had blogged about the Moblin platform a few days ago. ]

Excerpts from the OpenedHand site:

"The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Center and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimized software stack for Intel Atom processors".

"OpenedHand has grown to a solid team of experienced open source developers with skills covering all areas of a device’s software stack".

They have products such as:

- Matchbox.

"Matchbox is an open source base environment for the X Window System on embedded platforms with limited screen size and system resources".

- Poky.

"Poky is a platform build tool to aid the design, development, building, debugging, simulation and testing of Linux based device software stacks".

- Pimlico.

"Pimlico is a suite of lightweight Personal Information Management (PIM) applications providing address book, task list, calendar and synchronisation software."

As they say on their site:

"One of our areas of focus is leveraging proven and popular desktop technologies to embedded platforms. This provides a widely tested and maintained base which we can use to build optimised systems".

This looks like an interesting and viable business model for some software companies - take an existing, mature, open source software product which is available for the desktop, and optimize and make it smaller for use on devices (which have less powerful CPUs and less RAM than desktop computers).

Vasudev Ram.

Video: The story behind Google Chrome

jugad — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:40:41 GMT

This is a video from the development team on the thinking and features behind Google Chrome. Note: This is not the same as the video of the Google Chrome press release (which was features in posts on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, for instance).

Video below.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

New Enterprise Ruby book by Maik Schmidt

jugad — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:52:12 GMT

Just got to know that a new book on Ruby and Rails is available. The book is Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails (I'm calling it ER3 for short), written by Maik Schmidt, and published by The Pragmatic Programmers.

Maik Schmidt is also the author of an earlier book, also from The Pragmatic Programmers, called "Enterprise Integration with Ruby" (I'm calling it EIR for short); yes, I know - the names of both books are similar (see below for more on that). I had written a short review about EIR, here:

http://jugad.livejournal.com/2007/04/15/.

after buying the book and reading it.

To summarize, I think it (EIR) is one of the best Ruby books I've read (and also one of the better programming books overall that I've read).

I had a quick look at the contents of this new book, ER3, by Maik. The fact that it is written by him, plus the table of contents, is what makes me think that this book is likely to be quite good too - despite the fact that, going by the table of contents, some of the topics in the two books seem the same (however, it could be that there is more material in the new book on any given topic). But of course, I'll have to actually buy and read it to know for sure.

Here is the full table of contents of the ER3 book. It's a Beta book, so the exact content may change.

UPDATE: I read the full table of contents for the book; it looks like ER3 has quite a few more topics than EIR has. I suspect the format of the book may be a bit different from EIR, too, in that each topic may be shorter (since they use the words "Recipe" in the book title), whereas many or most of the topics in EIR were covered at some length, with the author showing the evolution of improved versions of the software in some cases.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Good Google Chrome articles / posts

jugad — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:19:52 GMT

Google Chrome has, as expected, generated a lot of interest in quite a short period.

I'm sharing some of the interesting ones I've come across so far:

Comment Of The Day: Chrome, Android, and the Cloud on Fred Wilson's blog - A VC.

Chrome, Android, and The Cloud, also on Fred's blog.

The Chrome Comic Book, where the first news about Chrome was released by Google, apparently a little too early, by mistake. Though it actually is a comic book, it seems that it's one of the good place to learn more about Chrome's features and the reasons why Google created Chrome.

Download link for Chrome - it's live now.

Inside Chrome - very interesting article on Wired.com with some of the background about the Chrome project, going back to the start of it. The article is by Steven Levy, who wrote the book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" - a very interesting read about the original computer programming pioneers over the first few decades of computers. He also wrote some other books including "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything".

Google V8 JavaScript Engine, which is used in Chrome. Supposed to be one of the reasons for Chrome's claimed much higher performance that previous browsers. It's still early days for independent reports, but some of the reports indicate that it is at least a good amount faster. Google identified Danish computer scientist Lars Bak, an expert on virtual machine development, to develop the V8 JavaScript engine.

A review of Chrome by Scott Berkun, who was at Microsoft and worked on Internet Explorer versions 1 through 5, and currently uses Firefox 3.

The cloud's Chrome lining, a post by Nicholas Carr. He gives his views about some of the real reasons why Google is developing Chrome. Seems to make sense ...

Finally, here is a Google Blogoscoped review of Chrome.

Blogoscoped was where a lot of people first heard about Chrome.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Powerful Python 2.6 module? - multiprocessing

jugad — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:03:01 GMT

The new Python 2.6 module called multiprocessing looks innovative and useful - I'm going to check it out.

It's a large module with many features, so I'm not going to write more about it until I've checked it out, but on a first look of the above documentation and code examples, I think it has a lot of possibilities.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

Its real! Google's new browser - Chrome

jugad — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:33:38 GMT

Referring to my previous post, it turns out that it is true - I re-checked the Blogoscoped post and saw an update - a link to a blog post by Google about Chrome: A fresh take on the browser.

It's going to be released tomorrow - Tuesday, 2nd September 2008.

Chrome is going to be open source.

Excerpts from Google's post about Chrome:

"We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.".

"So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.".

"All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser.".

"Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board.".

"We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.".

If all the claims are true, it surely seems like good news - let's hope so ...

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Google creating a Browser - Chrome?

jugad — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:29:48 GMT

This looks interesting - just saw it on the Google Blogoscoped blog:

Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project

If true, it looks like a potentially very good development.

Though some of the commenters on the Blogoscoped post grumbled about it meaning more work for them - to need to test their apps against one more browser, overall, I think its likely to be a good thing for web users.

I won't write any more - will leave it for you to check out for yourself.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Download Visual JQuery Magazine Issue 1

jugad — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:27:18 GMT

JQuery is a new kind of JavaScript library. It has been around for a while and got popular fairly soon after it was first released.

According to the JQuery site (see bottom of its home page), users of JQuery include Google, Dell, Bank of America, Digg.com, Technorati.com, mozilla.org and many others.

Excerpt from the site:

"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript."

I just saw this - looks useful for JQuery developers:

Visual JQuery Magazine Issue 1

Apart from the technical articles, it also has an interview with John Resig, original creator of JQuery.

The magazine issue is freely downloadable; look for the words "download it here" at the above link, or directly get it here.

Vasudev Ram.

World's cheapest Linux-based laptop?

jugad — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:54:38 GMT

Looks like the trend towards smaller and lower cost Linux-based PCs is increasing ...

World's cheapest Linux-based laptop?

Related links:

Low-cost, small-form-factor Linux PC reviewed.

Linux-based diskless notebook costs under $300.

Mini-notebook shipments up sharply.

Vasudev Ram.

MobLin.org by Intel - Mobile Linux Community

jugad — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:10:31 GMT

This looks like an opportunity for mobile Internet startups ...

MobLin.org is "an open source community for sharing software technologies, ideas, projects, code, and applications to create an untethered computing experience across Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), Netbooks, and embedded devices."

Its meant for Intel's Atom Processor technology, which requires software optimized for low power, low footprint, high performance, wireless, and graphics. They have a Moblin Core Linux Stack on top of which you can build applications to run on Mobile Internet Devices.

Here is a video of Dirk Hohndel, Chief Open Source Strategist, talking about MobLin.

The MobLin Resource Center has lots of links to learn more about MobLin, including papers, presentations, articles, videos, demos, a mailing list, a FAQ, downloads.

Intel® Capital's Open Source Incubator Program is a venture funding program for MobLin applications.

There's an Intel® C++ Software Development Tool Suite 1.0 for Linux OS Supporting Mobile.

Excerpt about it:

"The Intel® C++ Software Development Tool Suite for Linux* OS Supporting Mobile Internet Devices (MID) is a complete tools solution set to address MID software performance requirements, and to enhance the productivity and experience of the Linux-based MID system and application development process.

The Tool Suite covers the entire cycle of software development: coding, compiling, debugging, and analyzing performance. All included tools are Linux hosted and compatible with GNU tools.

The Tool Suite is available for free download".

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

Raphael - very cool JavaScript library

jugad — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:26:34 GMT

Just read about this on Hacker News. Looks quite interesting and potentially useful for doing vector graphics on the Web.

What is Raphaël? Excerpt from the site:

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library.

The creator of the Raphaël library is Dmitry Baranovskiy who works at Atlassian. (His site gives a "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" error right now - maybe due to a lot of people accessing it.)

I did a quick search and found these related links:

Painless cross browser vector graphics with Dmitry Baranovskiy’s Raphael Javascript Library, a post on the Web Directions blog.

Announcement of Raphael on Dmitry's Tumblr.

As a quick test, I copied and modified an example from the Raphael site; the code below shows how easy Raphael is for basic use:

Just include the library raphael.js betwen the opening and closing head tags of your HTML; then this code in the HTML body will draw an image with three colored circles diagonally across and down the screen:

 // Creates canvas 320 × 200 at 10, 50
 var paper = Raphael(10, 50, 320, 200);

 // Creates circle at x = 50, y = 40, with radius 10
 var circle1 = paper.circle(20, 20, 15);
 // Sets the fill attribute of the circle to red (#f00)
 circle1.attr("fill", "#f00");
 // Sets the stroke attribute of the circle to white (#fff)
 circle1.attr("stroke", "#fff"); 

 var circle2 = paper.circle(70, 50, 30);
 circle2.attr("fill", "#0f0");
 circle2.attr("stroke", "#fff"); 

 var circle3 = paper.circle(140, 90, 45);
 circle3.attr("fill", "#00f");
 circle3.attr("stroke", "#fff");

And here's the resulting output:

Neat, no?

Vasudev Ram

New Python book - Expert Python Programming

jugad — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:01:02 GMT

A new Python book is coming soon from Packt Publishing.

Blog post about it by the author, Tarek Ziade.

Packt page about the book.

About the book - in detail

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

Using XML-RPC from Google App Engine

jugad — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:22:16 GMT

Came across this interesting post just now.

Making XML-RPC calls from a Google App Engine application.

Looks like a useful technique. Google App Engine (GAE) doesn't support sockets, so anything that requires them, doesn't work - at least out of the box. XML-RPC is one such thing.

The blog author, Brian M. Clapper, shows how to use the urlfetch.fetch routine (of GAE), to make XML-RPC work on GAE, and then uses it in a blogging app that runs on Google App Engine.

Vasudev Ram

Infosys to buy Axon for $753 million

jugad — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:36:03 GMT

Just read about this ..

Infosys Technologies, my former employer, is going to make a big acquisition.

Here is the official press release from them:

Infosys announces its plans to acquire Axon Group plc.

Excerpt from the above release:

"Infosys Technologies Limited (NASDAQ: INFY) is pleased to announce that it has agreed terms for a recommended cash offer for a leading UK-based SAP consulting company, Axon Group plc (LSE: AXO), in a deal valued at £407.1 million (INR33.1 billion; US$753.1 million".

After reading various articles about the news, it seems that this is a good deal for Infosys as well as for Axon. It should enable more marketing and financial resources to promote Axon's services, and hence larger revenues for the combined entity, as well as bolster Infosys's strength in the SAP consulting space. Unlike some of the other large Indian IT services providers, Infosys has not made all that many acquisitions to date, but it looks like they've made a good move with this one.

More comments about the deal, from various sources:

The Hindu Online.

From Bloomberg.

Excerpt from above link:

"The proposed takeover is the largest ever by an Indian technology company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.".

From CIOL.com.

From the Wall Street Journal Online.

From LiveMint.com.

From Times Online of the UK.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

Vinod Khosla, the Venture Assistant (not Capitalist)

jugad — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 10:14:21 GMT

I really liked this, because it says what its all about for him nowadays:

Vinod Khosla:

"I have set aside the idea of being called a Venture Capitalist, because I am not in the financial business. I am in the Venture Assistant business. My goal is to be the best assistant there is for anybody trying to build a large technology oriented company."

The above quote is from the left side of this page on his web site.

A video of him talking about ethanol as biofuel.

His current venture firm.

Some more links about him:

Wikipedia entry about Vinod Khosla.

Catching Up with Vinod Khosla

Vasudev Ram

Google releases KeyCzar - easy cryptographic toolkit

jugad — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:52:28 GMT

Google has released KeyCzar - an easier to use and potentially safer to use cryptographic toolkit, as open source under the Apache License 2.0.

Key points (pun intended :) I could gather about KeyCzar (from reading some of the links about it below), are:

- Since cryptography is a complex subject, one of the main goals of KeyCzar is to make at least some of the common crypto operations easier for developers - this is a good idea, IMO.

- It has a simple API

- Uses some safe defaults

- Has support for Python and Java, with C++ support coming

- Supports authentication and encryption with both symmetric and asymmetric keys

- It is not meant to replace some of the existing cryptographic libraries such as OpenSSL, PyCrypto, and the Java JCE libraries, but builds upon them. I've always felt that this is one way in which many developers can add value in software - build something upon something that already exists. Of course, this already happens all the time when anyone uses a library in their app, but what I mean here is something like what Google has done with KeyCzar - they've built another toolkit upon existing crypto toolkits, to add some value in terms of easier and safer use for the average developer who is not a crypto expert.

- It was originally developed by members of the Google Security Team.

Here is their blog post about it.

So this looks like a good move by Google and should help many developers who need to include cryptographic capabilities in their apps.

Here are some links about it:

The KeyCzar.org site.

KeyCzar on the Google Code site

An article on CNET's News.com:

Google's Keyczar designed to make cryptography easier.

- Vasudev Ram

My comments on "Why I stick with Perl" by Jonathan Rockway

jugad — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:13:47 GMT

While browsing Hacker News, I came across this post by Jonathan Rockway:

Why I stick with Perl

I found it was interesting - not so much for the points he makes about Perl (although those were interesting too), but for what he says about libraries.

[ BTW, Jonathan is one of the Catalyst Core Team members. Catalyst is a web application development framework for Perl, which is similar to Ruby on Rails in some ways. He's also the author of this book about Catalyst. ]

One such point of his:

"But it irritates me when I need to get at gpg from a web application, and can't just use a "libgpg". I have to fork a gpg process, setup file descriptors just right, write input to a pipe, wait for input on another pipe, and then parse the result -- all for what amounts to a few XOR operations and bit shifts. How could anyone think this is a good idea? (There is libgpgme, but this just hides the fork inside a library. There is still tons of totally unnecessary work going on.)"

I strongly agree with that. I really think most programs (even if ultimately meant to run standalone), should be written, not as monolithic apps, but as one or more libraries in the first place. And one should then just write a main function or main class, that calls those libraries, to do the bulk of the work for one's app. This idea applies even more for open source apps. If the developer of gpg had written a libgpg as Jonathan says above (and had then used libgpg to write gpg), Jonathan (and anyone else in the world) could use libgpg in their own work without reinventing the wheel. They would thereby improve their productivity a lot - for that particular piece of code that needed the libgpg (or other) functionality. Multiply this by tens of thousands of such cases and you can see how much time could be saved, overall. Not to mention that (if the libraries in question were of high-quality), a lot more time would be saved by not having to fix errors that often get added during cut-and-paste, as any programmer knows: "Oops, I copied that function, but forgot to copy its declaration into the header file" (for C or C++ - substitute any other language and type of error here), etc.

The point is not so much the errors themselves (which are often easy to fix, though not always), but the fact that, since they have been introduced, YOU NOW HAVE THE NEED TO FIX THEM, when you may not have needed to at all (because they might not exist) if you just had to call a library function or three and pass some arguments. Basically, more code leads to more errors, and less code to less errors (in general) and cut-and-paste leads to more errors (in particular).

Even in proprietary software shops, this point still makes sense - because the developers on the same team or other teams in the same shop, can reuse that code much more easily later if it's a well designed, modularized and refactored library, rather than having to cut-and-paste the necessary parts from out of one huge (monolithic) app, or blog :-) - as Jonathan says in the case of Rails programmers (*). And I've seen this advice being followed in the breach (i.e. not being followed) even in some big companies.

(*) Jonathan is off the mark, though, when he claims that MOST Rails programmers cut-and-paste code from blogs. That has to be a generalization without enough data to back it up. I'd say that, across the board, good programmers try to find or write libraries.

This concept is actually similar to this rule in The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric Raymond, the Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.

I disagree about this, though:

"If you are like me, most programming you do is about gluing things together with libraries."

I'd say it depends, on a case-by-case basis.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

World's fastest growing mobile market is India?

jugad — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 09:47:56 GMT

This may be known to many people, but not to many others. And it is a potentially big business opportunity for both startups and established companies, both software companies and other kinds, so I'm writing about it:

The world's fastest growing mobile market may be India; and it has been growing very fast for some time now.

Here are some links that indicate that:

When in doubt, focus on the core customer from the "Corporate Dossier" supplement of Friday's edition of The Eonomic Times of India.

That article above was the inspiration for this post. However, I've been seeing news items about this factoid for many months now. The article is about how Nokia is doing well including in India, although it also covers other companies.

Excerpt:

"This success has seen the company’s market share rise to more than 70 percent currently from 46 percent in March 2003. So how did Nokia do it?

One key reason was its ability to obtain fast and accurate customer insights, which is the new basis for true and lasting competitive advantage".

India World’s Fastest Growing Mobile Market on Stuart Henshall's blog.

India becomes the fastest growing Mobile Market in the World

Gartner: India’s mobile services market to surpass $37 billion by 2012

India, fastest growing mobile phone market, on Rediff.com, quoting a report by Boston-based Pyramid Research.

Also, the iPhone 3G is coming to India; see:

Airtel To Launch 3G iPhone In October on ContentSutra, which says that the iPhone 3G will be available via Airtel and Vodafone.

and

Apple iPhone 3G will be Available in India via Bharti Airtel

And, of course, apps for the iPhone 3G are already selling well in the short time since the phone was launched, such as this crossword puzzle game by Eliza Block. Interestingly, Eliza developed that game while working on it part time :)

Vasudev Ram

"The Well-Grounded Rubyist" is coming

jugad — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:22:28 GMT

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is a forthcoming book by David Black, about the Ruby programming language, covering Ruby 1.9. The publisher is Manning.

It's likely to be a good Ruby book - here's why I think so.

David Black also earlier wrote the book Ruby for Rails which is popular and sold well. I own a copy of it - thought it was quite good. I recommend it (as one good Ruby book, not the only one), to anyone who asks me for suggestions for Ruby books, even for Ruby on Rails development, because:

a) there is a popular misconception that you can work well with Rails without knowing Ruby well - which is simply wrong - Rails IS Ruby - Rails is a web application development framework written in Ruby - so if you want to debug or just view the Rails source code (sometimes you need to do that to figure out what's wrong in your Rails app), you need to know Ruby quite well, and more important, to even do any programming in Rails, you basically have to program in Ruby;

b) Ruby for Rails is a good book explaining both general topics about Ruby, that are independent of Rails, as well as specific topics that show how to use Ruby for Rails development.

Of interest: the foreword to the Ruby on Rails book by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails.

Related links:

An interview of David Black on InfoQ.com

David Black's Ruby and Ruby on Rails consulting and training company, Ruby Power and Light

A review of the Ruby for Rails book on Vitamin, a popular web development portal.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises