I’m back from Rubyconf.

Some people say Ruby is dead. We can probably gloss over Zed Shaw’s famous rant, since it’s from roundabout 2007. My understanding is that the thought came about because of the many new trends in programming languages: first node, then Erlang’s comeback and the birth of Elixir. Evented programming, non-blocking IO, all the ( Read more... )

More to the point, should Rails die?

Rails brought a lot of great things - it made it dumb easy to package an entire app together. It abstracted the complexity of the storage layer. It created an entire market. Things like Heroku, Railsonfire/codeship and other companies turned a profit by extending the benefits of Rails. And things like Capistrano ( Read more... )

If you’re using Devise and rspec on Rails 3, and you want to override a controller, and you end up with an error that makes no sense whatsoever:

“Undefined method ‘name’ for nil:NilClass”, well then, you probably want to add the following line to your tests:

@request.env["devise.mapping"] = Devise.mappings[:admin]

Yeah… That took me way longer than ( Read more... )

Ruby has a neat feature called at_exit which takes a block and then executes the contents of this block when the program ends. There are a couple of VERY important details:

1. It takes a block and converts it into a Proc object at the time of parsing. This means that the data has to be available in the binding, or you’ll run into errors. Example: ( Read more... )

On Monday, April 26th, I am starting a new job at Cyrus Innovation. It may well be fair that I am starting a new career - it’s a hop, skip and jump for me. I’m switching from Systems Administration / Tech Support / Hell desk (not a typo, sadly) to Development / Programming.

I am very much looking forward to it. It means a hobby/job switch: I will ( Read more... )

One can’t actually move a remote branch, but you can copy a branch and delete a branch, so…

Copy oldbranch in repo to newbranch.

git push {repo} {oldbranch}:heads/{newbranch}
Ex: git push origin foobranch:barbranch
renames foobranch to barbranch

Remove a remote branch: it’s all about the colon:

git push :heads/

Example: git push origin :heads/some ( Read more... )

So, I play weiqi (known as the game of go, but I prefer using the chinese name).
There are some SGF parsers out there for Ruby, but I wanted to write my own - the other ones didn’t seem comprehensive enough, didn’t seem Ruby-like enough in their objectifiying the women data.
My original goal was twofold: write a script to rename all the SGF files in ( Read more... )

This is known to work on ASE 12.5.1 - you’re welcome to let me know what else worked, I am particularly curious about later versions of Sybase ASE, such as 15.

Prerequisites:

1. Sybase PC Client 12.52
2. The Ruby Sybase  files
3. gem install activerecord-sybase-adapter -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org

( Read more... )

I want to have a variable number of text fields in a form, and sending all of these text fields to one function when it is submitted. My best guess is that they’d have to be passed in as an array, unless there’s a more elegant solution (akin to ARGV in Ruby, or the arguments passed in to a program that starts.. ?).

Does anybody have an idea?

Send ( Read more... )

I know qaexl codes.. Maybe some others do ( Read more... )