One of the features that I miss most from my Perl days (and to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot I miss from my Perl days) is autovivification. For more information on what it is, read the wikipedia page on it here.
By eric
This little Rubyism is something that I use frequently for debugging my objects. I add a method to every object to show only the interesting methods. What do I mean by interesting methods?
By eric
One of my issues with MongoDB is that, as of this writing, there is no way to retrieve a random record. In SQL, you can simply do something similar to “ORDER BY 1” (this varies depending on your flavor) and you can retrieve random records (at a slightly expensive query cost). There is not yet …
By eric
While trying to get the curb gem up and running using Ruby 1.8.7p174, I kept getting segmentation faults. I Google’d around and really wasn’t able to come up with much other than lots of people saying not to use ports here. Since I don’t use Mac Ports, I use Homebrew, I figured this wasn’t an …
By eric
I recently had a very repetitive configuration file that needed creating. There were approximately 50 config blocks of 10 lines each with only the host name changing with each block. So I decided to take a shortcut and do it in Ruby using ERB templates. This is so easy and literally save me hours worth …
By eric
I have been trying to figure out how, while using OptionParser to be able to check for files being input on the command line and if they don’t exist, check other input streams (like Bash). This initially wasn’t very easy since input streams are blocking. So with a little help from friends (thanks roberto), I …
By eric
I don’t know what the right answer is, so any insight would be appreciated. From Googling around, I came across this thread on StackOverflow which talks about Validating exits and aborts in Rspec. I have a few issues with this, namely that I am using shoulda and I don’t want to validate the exit, I …
By eric
One of the best ways to learn something new is to find a project in that realm and do it. I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I wrote a web site. I wanted to learn Python, so I did a project in it for work. Now I want to get better at Ruby, …
By eric
I use Capistrano to deploy my webapps and have been for a while. I also deploy right from my laptop quite frequently. So I was a little taken aback when I could deploy in one place and not in another. It turned out that Capistrano was having issues with deploying to multiple servers. In fact, …
By eric
In one my Rails applications, I allow the user to search for surrounding businesses from their current location. I always showed them a You Are Here marker. The issue I had with this was that the marker was always the icon as the search results. Differentiating these markers is actually extremely easy with ym4r_gm plugin. …
By eric
