Ruby Language

Getting Ruby to talk to MSDE

Posted by Michael on April 9, 2010 in Configuration, General, Ruby Language, SQL, Setups

Getting Ruby to talk to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is one thing. Getting Ruby to talk to Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2000, has one twist that threw me off for hours. Here, I’ll show you how to do and hopefully save you lots of frustration and brain damage from banging your head [...]

Implementing Ruby jobs in the background

Posted by Michael on November 6, 2009 in Programming, Ruby Language

I needed a way to kick off a background job that was triggered by an end-user on my Ramaze-backed website and could run for almost two hours! This article brings together all the elements to get the job done.
Preamble (a.k.a. Ramblings)
I can hear you exclaiming, “Two hours!? Are you nuts? You really [...]

What makes a top award candidate, anyhow?

Posted by Michael on August 1, 2009 in General, Ruby Language

In our local Linux user group mailing list, one of the participant asked the group for recommendations for open source software projects that should be considered for a prominent publication’s top 100 awards. The ensuing discussion got me to wondering: What is the purpose behind doing the awards? Most of what I [...]

One ActiveRecord Model Acting as a List and Tree

Posted by Michael on April 30, 2009 in Programming, Ruby Language

Occasionally, Rails can appear to make your life extremely easy while silently throwing you a curve-ball. I needed a model that required a hierarchy while also preserving order of the records. Although fairly straightforward to set up and start immediately using, there are a couple of “gotchas” to watch out for and this [...]

Ramaze and ActiveRecord

Posted by Michael on February 4, 2009 in General, Programming, Ruby Language

Thanks to the great folks on IRC over at Freenode#ramaze, I was able to not only get Ramaze working with Erubis and Activerecord for a pseudo apples to apples comparison of Rails vs. Ramaze performance benching, but I was also able to get Apache 2.2.9 talking to Passenger to Ramaze. This quick post will [...]

Initial release of Elemental

Posted by Michael on February 3, 2009 in Programming, Ruby Language

I am happy to announce the initial release of Elemental 0.1.1.
Elemental provides enumerated collection of elements that allow you to associate ruby symbols to arbitrary “display” values, thus allowing your code to think symbolically and unambiguously while giving you the means to easily display what end-users need to see. Additionally, symbols are associated with ordinal [...]

Rails has and belongs to many (habtm) demystified

Posted by Michael on October 27, 2008 in CSS, Programming, Ruby Language

Every time I have to implement a many-to-many relationship between Rails models, I seem to have to figure out how to do it effectively all over again. Especially as Rails seems to evolve the relational hooks with better support and elegance. Here, I will show a has_and_belongs_to_many strategy that works well for me. Along the way, I’ll expose a few other minor tricks, such as adding a custom inflector for pluralizing your model or not adding the ID column on a table declaration.

Converting Oddmuse Wiki to Edgewall Trac

Posted by Michael on October 2, 2008 in Macs, Programming, Python Language, Ruby Language, SQL

Our company began long ago with wiki’s, but we chose the Oddmuse wiki way back when. These days, we’re heavy users of Trac wiki because of its integrated ticket support system. So what to do with all those old wiki’s that folks have stopped using and reading. The Oddmuse wikis still hold [...]

Geocoded Zipcodes

Posted by Michael on July 7, 2008 in Ruby Language, SQL

You would think that loading up a database of zip codes would be an extremely simple case of finding a public database on www.usps.gov, and then loading up with a database bulk load. It turns out that, while the USPS does offer products for you to purchase, and a rather nice lookup interface for [...]

DRYing your Views

Posted by Michael on July 5, 2008 in General, Ruby Language, SQL

Let me start out by saying that I am finally beginning to understand a bit about that magical Ruby block notion and how implementing methods through block passing can really empower you as a Ruby developer. Thanks to, a most excellent Ruby tutorial, I am definitely feeling a good bit more empowered about getting [...]

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