Articles

Twitter me this

If a tweet is uttered with no followers, does it make a peep? I'm getting going with Twitter on http://twitter.com/d2h.

67. Rush - The Ruby Shell

rush is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax.

It combines the power of unix with the elegance of Ruby.  

Simple Expense Tracking with Google Docs

As my family prepares for our pending Disney trip, I’m thinking about clever ways to take advantage of my wife’s iPhone. One of the things we’ve done is budget the trip based on a few simple categories of expenses. There’s a lot of ways to track expenses to budgets, but I’m particularly happy with how this worked out using Google Documents and the iPhone.

RTeX 2 Preview 1 Released

I’m happy to release RTeX 2 Preview 1 (v1.99.0), now available as a gem from RubyForge. RTeX can be used as a plugin with Rails 2.0.1+.

History

In 2006 I released a Rails plugin, Rtex, used to generate PDFs via the LaTeX typesetting system. It became a popular choice for people looking for a more advanced alternative to PDF::Writer, especially for larger documents.

Wiebe Cazemier joined the project in 2007, helping to improve the plugin and fielding patches and bug reports.

The Paris Project

One of the nice things about the last two and a half years has been working from home. You avoid 90% of the dilbert-style office drama, and the commute is hard to beat. But the nicest thing about working from home is that, strictly speaking, I can work from any home, not just our little place.

So from July the 4th till the end of the year Anika and I will be living in Paris. You know, this paris:

Now running on Passenger

Today I had a few hours to spare and decided to try out Passenger. This blog is hardly a high traffic website, but it has some crazy RewriteRules that I figured would test the limits of the module.

Everything appears to be working perfectly, and it took less than 5 minutes to set everything up. I’m seriously impressed at how simple this was. I’ll confess to being skeptical at first, but so far the package lives up to the promises on its website.

Rails Chops: Layouts and Flash notices

Please view in full screen:

The silent majority

I had a great time on the West coast recently with stops in Santa Barbara and Palo Alto. What always surprises me at events like these is the huge number of people I meet that are doing cool things with Rails that I've never heard of. The kind of people who are just really happy to be using Rails and happy to build businesses with it.

Tropa Da Elite Trailer


Shutting Down Windows from Ruby Code

Someone recently asked how to shut down or restart Windows from their Ruby code. Windows provides an executable, "shutdown.exe", to accomplish this. Execute this command from your script with the appropriate parameters and you can log off, shutdown, or restart the OS.

Parameters accepted include, but are not limited to:


-l        Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s        Shutdown the computer
-r        Shutdown and restart the computer
-t xx     Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
Joseph Wilk | Rails Fire

Joseph Wilk

Frozen Rails 2010

Although Berlin looks a bit like Antarctica right now, I'm really looking forward to travel to Helsinki, Finland for Frozen Rails on May 7th.

Forzen Rails is organized by the guys from the HHLinuxCliub and Kisko Labs. I've met them in Amsterdam back in October and we had a great time. I'm sure Frozen Rails will be too.

Testing Domain and Release Specific Features via Cucumber Tags

While my last post highlighted spork as a way to speed up your rspec runs, unfortunately it doesn't currently seem to work out-of-the-box with cucumber. While I am sure this will be resolved in good time there is another approach to speeding up your feature runs & more besides: Tags!

A postful of shortcuts

Some quick links to popular pages, all in one place:
Conference Registration, and information about the venue.
The free BDD & Cucumber Workshop information & registration

Joseph Wilk talks about BDD and Cucumber

I had time for a quick chat with Joseph Wilk to talk about Cucumber and BDD!

MC: JosephwilkThanks very much for taking the time to chat - can you tell us a bit about yourself, and what you do?

Reuse Cucumber step definitions inside step definitions

via: Joseph Wilk » Cucumber waves goodbye to GivenScenario.

Did you know you can reuse steps definitions inside step definitions? Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say you’re writing a scenario for Logout and it looks something like this:

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