Trying to remain agile in a BIG design world.

If only I had better Google_fu this post by Josh Goebel would have saved me a day. The key was remembering that Oniguruma is more than than a Rails gem. So you have to (1) make sure that Oniguruma is installed (I recommend via MacPorts) and then (2) make sure that the gem can find [...]

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§60 · April 6, 2010 · Apple, Rails, Ruby · (No comments) · Tags: , ,


This post started as a comment to a recent post on KillerPHP.com entitled, “What happened to Ruby? And why PHP is KING of the Web.” The longer my comment became the more I thought I could use a little Google juice myself and why let someone else have all the fun?! A Twitter post by [...]

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§46 · July 12, 2009 · PHP, Rails, Ruby · 4 comments ·


I just spent a few hours banging my head on this one but it appears that my local git configuration was the source of a Fixture::FormatError occurring while running tests in Rails. The specific error looked like this: Fixture::FormatError: a YAML error occurred parsing /dev/current/myapp/test/fixtures/blogs.yml. Please note that YAML must be consistently indented using spaces. [...]

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§42 · May 15, 2009 · Rails · 1 comment ·


During a recent Cincinnati Ruby Brigade meeting a new member who was running Windows would have benefited from a minimalist guide to installing Ruby on Rails on Windows. A few days later I was forced to press my old Windows desktop system into service as an emergency Rails development platform. So I decided to write [...]

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§17 · March 15, 2009 · Rails, Ruby · 4 comments ·


The “Rails” components of the website were completed in about 20 minutes and consist of nothing more than a form which provides the user a means to supply a date and returns an appropriate (some would argue) list of the deceased. After quite a bit of experimentation and refactoring I have refined the script which [...]

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§5 · April 20, 2007 · JustMissedMe, Rails, Ruby · (No comments) ·


OK, need proof that I’m a nuby? How’s this for proof? #!/usr/bin/env ruby fp = “/Users/sjobs/data/enwiki-20061130-pages-articles.xml” page_start = /\ / page_end = /\<\/page\>/ has_persondata = /\{\{Persondata/ regex_name = /\|NAME=(.*)/ regex_alter_names = /\|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=(.*)/ regex_description = /\|SHORT DESCRIPTION=(.*)/ regex_page_title = /\(.*)\<\/title\>/ regex_page_id = /\(.*)\<\/id\>/ regex_date_birth = /\|DATE OF BIRTH=(.*)/ regex_place_birth = /\|PLACE OF BIRTH=(.*)/ regex_date_death = [...]

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§4 · April 17, 2007 · JustMissedMe, Rails, Ruby · (No comments) ·


I became interested in hpricot while experimenting during the creation of a prospecting system for my employer. Driving home from work one day I hatched an idea for a website that would employ hpricot to pull its data from Wikipedia’s Persondata. Due to the extremely large size of the associated data file I soon determined [...]

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§3 · April 12, 2007 · JustMissedMe, Rails, Ruby · (No comments) ·