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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
For my part-time gig I needed an elegent way to nudge an absent minded customer of his past due account balance. I typically invoice via an emailed PDF which I thought would be cool because one day I could create a “second notice” version by placing an appropriate watermark behind the original invoice. That at [...]
Greetings from Ruby Code Camp in Columbus, OH and thanks to the Columbus Ruby Brigade for spreading the word and to all the sponsors, especially Agile Consulting and EdgeCase. Here’s what I’ve learned… Beside many other brilliant things he said, Rob Stevenson demonstrated the following (figurative – not literal) gem that will display all methods [...]
In the midst of my Rails based Web development I was tasked with the creation of a simple, one page Web form. I knew it would be a snap to write given my background in PHP and the broad support for PHP in OS X but I decided to “teach myself” how I could do [...]
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 [...]
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 = [...]
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 [...]