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
I was talking to Luke Melia of Weplay.com about various cultures of startup companies. We compared two ideas that we referred to as a culture of product and a culture of code. They similar in concept but require defining.
By eric
Lots of people forget about the usefulness of the core utilities (the tools available in Bash). I am even pretty guilty of it at times with such quick and easy things like Perl, Ruby, or Python that allow you to process items from the command line. However, they load up an entire interpreter. It is …
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
Anyone who has spent any time in a shell and has been cut off while working should know about screen. If not, then I recommend reading up on it (here or here). But I’m not here to tell you about screen as a general tool, I want to show you how to use it for …
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
Since Google Buzz is Twitterish in the sense that you can post a quick note, but different in the sense that (amongst other things), it can be longer than 140 characters. So in that vein, I’m starting to try to make a habit of a quick post (a couple per week) of things I do …
By eric
While diving into Gearman using Gearman::Client with MySQL and libdrizzle (I know, a mouthful), I ran into what I thought was a bug. I was only able to add 1 background job of any type at a particular time. The launchpad “bug note,” which is available in its entirety here, is rightly labeled won’t fix.
By eric
