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Getting Ruby 1.9.1p243 to work on OS X 10.5.8 with Japanese input support on irb

Awhile back I installed Ruby 1.9.1 in such a way as to co-exist with my current Ruby installation [1], [2] (I should use rvm [3] these days…) However, one issue that cropped up during an IRB session was I could not copy and paste Japanese characters into the IRB repl. This is very very painful […]

Using a non-standard port for Capistrano SSH gateways

I have a love-hate affair with Capistrano. It is a great tool if you are a Ruby person and need to do something NOW on a bunch of machines. But the docs are in a constant state of suck from my point of view. The Capify.org website helps for remembering the ‘simple’ details on what […]

Glad I’m not the only one who prefers monit over god

Seems someone else ran into issues while trying to deploy god. While, I don’t think god sucks I definitely don’t endorse it. At this point I would only use it under the following conditions: Need for a process monitor tool with more dynamic configuration setups. This is where god really shines against monit’s simpler understanding […]

svnbackup-restore.rb, svnbackup’s handy companion tool

Doug Hellman’s svnbackup script tool is a really handy tool for setting up automated backups for a subversion repository. However, the non-fun time comes when one wants to restore a subversion repository that has way too many dumpfiles parts. The instructions for restoration are basically ‘roll your own’ if you want to try to automate […]

RubyKaigi 2008 Day 1 The Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are one of the more interesting parts of a conference in my opinion since 5 minutes really forces the speaker to get to the point and it becomes painfully obvious if the presentation has no focus or if there has been real work to get across the main message in the shortest amount […]

RubyKaigi Day 1 The Matz Keynote

Okay this is my notes from Matz’s Keynote. I was 5 minutes late since finding lunch took a really long time to find anything around the area unfortunately. Unfortunately, most of the visiting Rubyists decided to do KFC however Charles Nutter decided to stick it through and we finally found a nice Yakiniku restaurant to […]

RubyKaigi 2008 Day 1 Part 3 Notes

Evan Phoenix on Rubinius Evan started off with a quick intro on Rubinius and proceeded to talk about some of the big pieces of Rubinius from a 10,000 feet high view. The kernel of the system The C Compatibility Layer It’s a big project and Evan wants to have a conversation with anyone who wants […]

RubyKaigi 2008 Day 1 Part 2 Notes

Here’s a continuation of my scribbled notes from the RubyKaigi. This one from the JRuby implementors. Some of my own thoughts and comments are inserted in parentheses. Charles Nutter on JRuby Quick intro and the impressive live demos of JRuby in action (or as the IRC channel said Nice Live Coding (NLC)) This summer, work […]

RubyKaigi 2008 Day 1 Part 1 Notes

Ruby Kaigi 2008 is happening. I’m sure there other posts on the Ruby Kaigi happening however here are some of my own hasty scribbles for anyone that cares… Introduction Speech This is the 3rd year of the conference One theme of this year is multiple implementatios More people coming into the Ruby community and we […]

mod_rails aka passenger == nice && easy

I looked over mod_rails today and realized how nice and easy looking it was to install. The general install process is: 1. Install rubygems 2. Run gem install passenger 3. passenger-install-apache2-module 4. Follow the instructions and install any missing dependencies (it actually is smart enough to detect which ones you need before splatting itself into […]

The Rails Horde at RailsConf 2008

Egads… so… many… Rails… zombies

A quick survey of del.icio.us APIs for Ruby

I had this task where I wanted to pull information from del.icio.us for some data processing so I decided to take a look at what was available for Ruby. Before, I say what path I took let’s go over the choices I dug up. Ridiculous First up was Ridiculous which labels it as a simple […]

The Ruby Programming Language book out on Safari now

I just noticed that The Ruby Programming Language Book by David Flanagan is out on Safari now. This looks like an update to Ruby in a Nutshell which has been a rather disappointing title for me personally. After a glance through the contents of this updated edition it looks like this one could be a […]

Design Patterns in Ruby Sneak Preview Review

I’ve been slowly reading the Design Patterns in Ruby: Rough Cuts on Safari and have been finding it a pretty good read so far. I have to admit I’ve slept through the original Gang of Four Design Patterns book since it looked so excruciatingly boring and I wasn’t really convinced I needed such patterns for […]

Book Review: Practical Ruby for System Administrators

One of the things I do with Ruby is to use it to help handle some of my tasks when I am wearing my sys admin hat. I can’t say I’m a Ruby expert by any means but when it comes to writing code, I always get the shivers looking at Perl which is a […]