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Three items of note from Charles Nutter’s ‘blog: 1. [JRuby 0.9.8](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/behind-scenes-jruby-098-released.html) has been released with 98% support for Ruby on Rails. The road to a 1.0 release seems well signposted. 3. Netbeans support for Ruby and JRuby is “[even better than expected](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/netbeans-6-ruby-support-even-better.html)” (see the [demos](http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/two_demos_jruby_on_rails) on Roman Strobl’s blog) 5. [Ruby on Grails](http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/03/ruby-on-grails-why-hell-not.html) – Charles has analyzed the contents of the grails project and concludes that it could easily be fronted by JRuby rather than Groovy....

Glen Smith has launched a new blog aggregation site called GroovyBlogs.org. Created in just 20 hours in Grails, the site attempts to gather all the news that’s hot in the Groovy world and present it in one place. The source code is also available.

The [learning lab](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk) at my University launched its first podcast today. I feel obliged to blog about it as Chris Hall interviewed me about the *Blackboard Quest* that I developed as a Blackboard training exercise for first year engineers. The podcast is [here](http://learninglab.swan.ac.uk/podcasts.html). The interview itself is quite quiet compared to the rest of the podcast, but then people have always said that I mumble! powered by [performancing firefox](http://performancing.com/firefox)

I have published another literate program on literateprograms.org. This one shows how the Rot13 encoding system can be implemented in Java. However, that is trivial! The real point is to document the basic use of JUnit testing and Apache Ant which are standard tools in the professional Java developer’s toolbox (in fact they make Java just about usable Within 24 hours of the first mention of my program, another literate programmer had documented the altogether more elegant implementation as a sed script....

I am grateful to [Dion Almaer](http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001379.html) for pointing me to a new add on for Windows called Enso Launcher which allows you to launch applications right from the keyboard. For example you just hold the Caps Lock key and type Op[tab]Ex release caps lock to open explorer. Not quite as quick as [windows]+E but not far off!. It also does stuff like spell checking any text anywhere. It also has the function I use a lot: changing upper case text to lower case text in any program or text field in programs other than Word!...