Ruby Language

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ruby, Mysql, CentOS 5, and 64-bit

Posted by Michael on January 19, 2009 in SQL, Systems

I have lately switched away from Ubuntu as my desktop and started using CentOS 5.2 because I wanted better support for a lot of RAM and virtualization (where I can quickly commission Linux servers to build out my testbed of target environments).  With the change, I also make the leap into pure 64-bit libraries with [...]

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 [...]

A model-free wizard

Posted by Michael on May 13, 2008 in Programming, Ruby Language

Maybe I’m taking the whole MVC thing too far, but I’ve been reading and learning both Ruby and Rails at a fairly fast clip and just when I thought I was getting the hang of what goes in models, views, and controllers respectively, along comes The Advanced Recipe for Rails book with a recipe for [...]