Articles

Excel Your Job Interview !!! (Takes 2 mins) !!

Interviews are often the most dreaded part of the job search process, but they need not be. With a little preparation, interviews become effortless and you can secure the job you want. When you sit to write an exam, you studied in advance. Its the same with interviews, but fortunately, not nearly as taxing as preparing for an exam. The steps themselves are simple, and dont require much in terms of preparation.

21 Ways to increase Self Motivation!!!

21 Ways to increase Self Motivation!!!

1. Consequences - Never use threats. They’ll turn people against you. But making people aware of the negative consequences of not getting results (for everyone involved) can have a big impact. This one is also big for self motivation. If you don’t get your act together, will you ever get what you want?

The Google Interview

We were interviewed recently by Dion Almaer, a member of the Gears team at Google. Read and listen at the Google Code Blog and Ajaxian, and let us know what you think.I'm hoping this will really get the project out there and give it some momentum. I'm also hoping that we'll have some time soon to resume development in earnest. Watch this space for updates!

Speaking: AtomPub at GTAC 08

This October I'll be presenting at Google Test Automation Conference on testing of AtomPub implementations. The talk will discuss the best practices in order to test AtomPub implementations, why testing an extensible standard could become painful and how to get started with some useful tools.

Two fixes to ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone

Last night, I pulled in two fixes to the ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone class to the Rails 2-1-stable branch:

1. TimeWithZone unmarshals correctly now
Prior to this fix, if you marshaled and unmarshaled a TWZ, it would be off:
>> t = Time.zone.local(2000)
=> Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 CST -06:00
>> mt = Marshal.dump(t)
=> "\004\bU: ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone…"
>> t2 = Marshal.load(mt)
=> Fri, 31 Dec [...]

Rails 2.1 tutorial series is coming

How to load gems only when your tests are not run from TextMate

Working with new people often influences the way you work. The influences can range from picking up simple tricks to seeing fundamental facts about your craft in a new light.This week when
I began working with James I saw him run his tests directly from TextMate. Of course I knew it was possible to run Ruby from TM, including tests.For some inexplicable reason however I had never bothered to try it.

Why things have been a little quiet…

Pete & I had a baby

Archived comments

Comments were previously allowed on articles. Though no new comments are being accepted you can see the old comments below.

Why Django is more attractive then Rails?

One of my friends was introduced to rails when the version 2.0 was already out. He tried to learn rails for months on his own but couldn’t succeed. Recently he contacted me and asked if I have books, materials or may be links to some good books/tutorials for learning rails 2.0. And to my surprise there is not enough material available for a newbie to learn rails 2.0 which is totally different then the older 1.x version.

Gem permissions

Lately I've seen several people struggling with an error message like this: 

`gem_original_require': no such file to load -- sqlite3/database

This is for the SQLite3 gem but I've seen it also with Capistrano.

The problem is that some files have incorrect permissions in the authors repository and those incorrect permission are replayed by the gem packaging.

The next version of SQLite and Capistrano will solve those problems, the short term fix is just: 

$ sudo chmod -R a+r /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems

Git setup script | Rails Fire

Git setup script

Send to friend

I’ve been plotting to make the git and GitHub setup process a bit easier for new users, so I spent a small portion of my labor day weekend actually doing some labor (the horror). You can see the results in this repo.

So what is this crap? The goal here was to create a simple script users could run that would set all the config options needed in git, generate a key, upload the public key to GitHub, and encourage the use of strong passphrases and ssh-agent. The script needed to be able to run immediately after install, even for msysgit (windows) users. This ruled out my first choice, ruby, since windows users may not have ruby installed. The script also needed to detect msysgit users and help them set up ssh-agent to run automatically, as msysgit does not do this by default. Mac users don’t need this, as ssh-agent is run and even integrates with the user’s keychain, and many flavors of linux appear to run ssh-agent automatically for the user on login.

If you’ve got a fresh install, or just want to play, give the script a whirl:

$ git clone git://github.com/help/setup.git
$ setup/setup.sh

I’d love to hear feedback, suggestions for other things the script should set, or just pull requests.

As an added bonus, I also made a guide on passphrases and ssh-agent. Everyone should be using a good passphrase on their keys, I recently switched myself.

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