---
date: "2006-01-14T17:45:26Z"
title: Sweep Gruff Under the RUG
---

<p><em>Finally</em>, a <acronym title="Northern Virginia">NoVA</acronym> Ruby users group!  Here's the brief post from
<code>ruby-talk</code>:</p>

<blockquote>
    <p>January 25...details can be found here:  <a href="http://www.novarug.org">http://www.novarug.org</a></p>
    
    <p>I will be posting an itinerary soon, but we will be showing the app
    were are working on at InfoEther (Ruby + Flash).</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I'll be there, although that means forfeiting my previously sacrosanct
poker night.  </p>

<p>As you know, a user group meetup, regardless of the topic, isn't
complete without a nutty guy waving his arms and ranting about some
petty grievance, I'm already prepared with my crazy pedant rant.</p>

<p>Why the hell, and I'm looking at you, <a href="http://gruff.rubyforge.org/" title="A graphing library, written in Ruby, that doesn't freakin work.">Gruff</a>, would you ship a
library that doesn't even work?  It's got a bit of documentation, some
sample code, and examples of pretty output.  Except it doesn't work.  At
all.  Why?</p>

<p>Anyway, "novarug" &mdash; or is it written "NOVARUG" &mdash; has to be
one of the less sexy names I've heard recently.  Hopefully 
<a href="http://richkilmer.blogs.com/" title="This guy logs in and out of AIM more than anyone else I know.">Rich Kilmer</a>'s presentation in a couple weeks is as interesting as it
was at <a href="http://paulduncan.org/gallery/200410-rubyconf/" title="Pictures from RubyConf 2004 in Virginia.">RubyConf 2004</a>.</p>

<p><b>Update:</b> Apparently the <a href="http://gruff.rubyforge.org/" title="A graphing library, written in Ruby, that doesn't freakin work.">Gruff</a>
library isn't broken, but the <a href="http://gruff.rubyforge.org/" title="A graphing library, written in Ruby, that doesn't freakin work.">Gruff</a> 
gem is.  It doesn't check for or require the RMagick gem.
</p>