Jim Weirich

James Nolan "Jim" Weirich (November 18, 1956 – February 19, 2014) was well known in the software industry as a developer, speaker, teacher, and contributor to the Ruby Programming Language community. Among his many contributions he created the popular Rake build tool for Ruby. He was active in the Ruby community worldwide, speaking at events in Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States.

Work

Weirich was the Chief Scientist at Neo Innovation, working at Neo's Cincinnati office. He also built and maintained many Open source tools, the most popular being Rake and Builder with 74 and 54 million downloads, respectively.

Rake

Rake build tool for automating tasks in Ruby. It is the most widely downloaded Ruby Gem, downloaded more than 74 million times and has been included with Apple OS X since at least version 10.7.

Builder

Builder is a tool for creating structured XML data through Ruby.

RubyGems

RubyGems is package management tool for Ruby programs and libraries. Ryan Leavengood is credited with creating the very first RubyGems project in 2001 but it did not gain enough momentum to take off. In November 2003 with the need for a proper package manager growing, Richard Kilmer, Chad Fowler, David Black, Paul Brannan, and Jim Weirich got together at RubyConf 2003 in Austin and built today's RubyGems, which shares a name but not the original codebase.

Jim

Jim is a diminutive form of the forename "James". For individuals named Jim, see articles related to the name Jim.

See also

Jim (comics)

Jim is a comic book series by Jim Woodring. It began in 1980 as a self-published zine and was picked up by Fantagraphics Books in 1986 after cartoonist Gil Kane introduced Woodring to Fantagraphics co-owner Gary Groth. The publisher released four magazine-sized black-and-white issues starting in September 1987. A comic book-sized continuation, Jim Volume II, with some color, began in 1993 and ran for six issues until 1996.

Jim, which Woodring described as an "autojournal", contained comics on a variety of subjects, many based on dreams, as well as surreal drawings and free-form text which resembled Jimantha automatic writing. Besides dreams, the work drew on Woodring's childhood experiences, hallucinations, past alcoholism, and Hindu beliefs. It also included stories of recurring Woodring characters such as Pulque (the embodiment of drunkenness), boyhood friends Chip and Monk, and, in Volume II, his signature creation Frank.

Content

Jim is made up of a variety of short comics, text pieces, and artwork. Most of the works are short comics based on Woodring's dreams. Some of the pieces are surreal parodies of advertisements in the Mad tradition.

Gimel

Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Gīml , Hebrew ˈGimel ג, Aramaic Gāmal , Syriac Gāmal ܓ, and Arabic ǧīm ج (in alphabetical order; fifth in spelling order). Its sound value in the original Phoenician and in all derived alphabets, save Arabic, is a voiced velar plosive [ɡ]; in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents has many standards including [ɡ], see below.

In its unattested Proto-Canaanite form, the letter may have been named after a weapon that was either a staff sling or a throwing stick, ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below:

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek gamma (Γ), the Latin C and G, and the Cyrillic Г.

Hebrew gimel

Variations

Hebrew spelling: גִּימֵל

Bertrand Russell posits that the letter's form is a conventionalized image of a camel. The letter may be the shape of the walking animal's head, neck, and forelegs. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)".