I’ve noticed over the last year or so that occasionally Ruby would start using 100% and I would have to kill -9 it.

I figured that I was the only one with this problem, and for some reason assumed that it was cucumber, since it usually happened after running features.

However, it looks like it happens when I close an iterm window with an open ruby console without quitting the console first.

So, you just did a git reset --hard HEAD^ and threw out your last commit. Well, it turns out you really did need those changes. You’ll never be able to implement that algorithm that perfectly twice, so you need it back. Don’t fear, git should still have your commit. When you do a reset, the commit you threw out goes to a “dangling” state. It’s still in git’s datastore, waiting for the next garbage collection to clean it up. So unless you’ve ran a git gc since you tossed it, you should be in the clear to restore it.

Over at Ilya Grigorik’s blog, there’s a great post on using decision trees to figure out what attributes matter in a decision

I had some hiccups trying to implement this in a project, so this is a quick post on how you might actually use his decisiontree gem in your app.

Well I finally bit the bullet. While I had tried vista on my work laptop, and after sweeting it for 3 months, went back to xp.
Microsoft Windows 7 seemed to be the answer to what I was looking for.

So I finally decided to use the Beta on my main gaming machine. My main work machine is a MAC.

First, Lets see how well the beta behaves. So I created a new VM on my Mac, and did the install from the ISO.
Wow, it went smooth and easy. Very fast install compared to XP. And so much better than Vista.

Mailing lists (and bulletin boards and forums and so on) are important parts of becoming a better developers. Even the best programmers need help, and a mailing list such as ruby-talk (or the Usenet version, comp.lang.ruby) is the traditional place to go.

Mailing lists are also a good place to get better at your craft; watch the list, and try to answer questions. Think of it as pop quizzes at Ruby U.

This is a list of Rails User Groups from around the world. If you are part of a User Group not on this list, please feel free to add it. If you can’t find a user group in your area, look on Rubyholic, RubyGarden User Group’s Page, or the WWR Groups. There may be a Ruby user group out there that has a lot of Rails interest, too.

Pat Eyler just published an interview/discussion with Dave Thomas, Cory Foy, Tim Bray and I on the subject of code reading and testing legacy code. I think the resulting article is a very interesting read with a lot of insight (thanks to the other participants). It was a fun discussion which left me feeling honored to be among such distinguished people.

In order to use Cucumber to test a site that uses subdomains to scope things like user accounts, add something like this to your relevant step:

Given /^An account$/ do
  account = Factory(:account)
  host! "#{account.subdomain}.example.com"
end

and if you’re using SubdomainFu, make sure the tld_size for your test environment is set to 1 (or whatever is appropriate). By default it is set to 0. You can do this in features/support/env.rb: