We’re always looking for good programmers at Fog Creek, but right now we could really, really use a top notch Win32 (C/C++) developer to join the Copilot… Read more "Win32 programmer needed"
3 Apr 2009
31 Mar 2009
Following the DataMapper 0.9.11 release, we just pushed a new minor Merb release. This release is mainly targeting new developers and Windows users wanting to install the full Merb stack. Others can simply update their dependencies if they use the dependencies.rb file or install the new gems if nothing is bundled and no hard dependencies are set. Merb is a…
22 Mar 2009
Last updated: 15 Feb, 2010 Part 1: Domain-Driven Design and MVC Architectures Part 2: Domain-Driven Design: Data Access Strategies Part 3: Domain-Driven Design: The Repository Some of the Domain-driven design concepts explained above are applied in this sample application. Directory Structure app/ config/ controllers/ UserController.php domain/ entities/ User.php UserProfile.php repositories/ UserRepository.php views/ lib/ public/ The […]
21 Mar 2009
18 Mar 2009
Streamline your Reddit experience with Eddit: Less noise, more signal!
We just pushed a really tiny update because of a bug in 1.0.9 affecting people using: Merb::Config[:max_memory] Merb::Config[:max_memory] has been fixed and now polls for memory usage every 30s instead of 0.25s. (memory is set in KB) This new version also uses DataMapper.repository instead of Kernel#repository (DM and Vlad related bug fix) We are still on schedule for Merb 1.1…
16 Mar 2009
Unraveling the Flex framework: A journey from button click to screen update.
15 Mar 2009
"Your guide to navigating the Flex learning curve – no fluff, just facts."
Part 2: Domain-Driven Design: Data Access Strategies The Ubiquitous Language The ubiquitous language is the foundation of Domain-driven design. The concept is simple, developers and domain experts share a common language that both understand. This language is set in business terminology, not technical terminology. This ubiquitous language allows the technical team become part of the […]
"Dude, like, totally dodge those math blobs in L.A.!"
13 Mar 2009
So I've got all these fancy blog posts planned. More than planned, actually — they're well underway. But it's also been a busy couple of months, so nothing's really ready yet. To make my schedule even worse, I kind of sort of got myself a little bit addicted to the writings of this one blogger. Normally I can't frigging stand…
12 Mar 2009
Part 1: Domain-Driven Design and MVC Architectures The Domain Model Here are some of the features a Domain-driven design framework should support: A domain model that is independent and decoupled from the application. A reusable library that can be used in many different domain-specific applications. Dependency Injection in order to inject Repositories and Services into […]
11 Mar 2009
According to Eric Evans, Domain-driven design (DDD) is not a technology or a methodology. It’s a different way of thinking about how to organize your applications and structure your code. This way of thinking complements very well the popular MVC architecture. The domain model provides a structural view of the system. Most of the time, […]
5 Mar 2009
Here’s the thing: you’re developing a server deployed application, it could be a web application but it doesn’t have to be, and you’re probably deploying to more than one server. Even if you just have one server to deploy to, it still get tiresome in the long run to build your project, fire up your […]
2 Mar 2009
Yesterday, Carl Lerche, Yehuda Katz and myself had a meeting to discuss Merb 1.1’s roadmap. Key items on the agenda were: Ruby 1.9 Mountable apps migration path to Rails3 After spending some time arguing back and forth, we decided that few things had to happen before we could migrate the current slices to pure mountable apps. Freezing the releases while…
23 Feb 2009
"Navigate the tricky waters of 'this' in JavaScript objects and callbacks."
22 Feb 2009
The Zend Framework is a very flexible system, in fact, it can be used to build practically anything. But, the problem with using a flexible system is that flexibility costs. And the cost of flexibility is complexity. Martin Fowler wrote: Every time you put extra stuff into your code to make it more flexible, you […]
21 Feb 2009
I found this project thanks to Raphael’s post Turning a Zend_Log log file into an RSS feed. Developed by Simone Carletti, ApacheLogAnalyzer2Feed is a really powerful open source PHP 5 class to parse and analyse Apache Web Server log files. Results are converted into a feed to let users subscribe them with a feed reader. […]
16 Feb 2009
Aptana has just released a beta version of its ActiveRecord.js which is an ORM JavaScript library that implements the ActiveRecord pattern. It works with AIR and other environments: ActiveRecord.js is a single file, MIT licensed, relies on no external JavaScript libraries, supports automatic table creation, data validation, data synchronization, relationships between models, life cycle callbacks […]
6 Feb 2009
Hope you like these recommendations and if you know of any other good tech-related video, then please let me know. 1. Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep One of my favourites. In this presentation Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer) talks about expanding people’s expertise in their domains of interest by not treating them uniformly as […]
As they say: fail early, fail often. Well, I’ve been failing to blog recently, but as always I have some good excuses ;) Yehuda has been blogging a lot about the work done on the merge. I have been busy working on probably the awesomest CouchDB Ruby DSL/ORM. I have been working with the Rails Activists on the new wiki…
3 Feb 2009
Rsync is great, however, it only synchronizes files in one direction. Unison, on the other hand, synchronizes both ways. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts, modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Why […]
1 Feb 2009
When you develop or deploy an application, dependency tracking is one of the problems you must solve. Keeping track of dependencies for every application you develop is not an easy task. To solve this problem I’ve created Zend_Debug_Include, a Zend Framework component that supports automatic dependency tracking. We all agree that dependencies cannot be maintained […]
24 Jan 2009
The Java platform will be celebrating its 14th birthday soon and one side-effect when a successful and ubiquitous language reaches this kind of milestone is the widespread proliferation of libraries, tools and ideas. In this article, Ted Neward tacks through the vast tides and presents a list of the key resources any up-and-coming Java developer […]
22 Jan 2009
"Making Javascript look like Python: A whimsical Moose Observation Project"
During his keynote presentation at OSCON last year, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth described application extensibility as an important enabler of innovation and user empowerment. Citing the Firefox web browser and its rich ecosystem of add-ons as an example, Shuttleworth suggested that the Linux community could deliver a lot of extra value by making scriptable automation […]
19 Jan 2009
13 Jan 2009
Lately, I have been really busy with my business, an upcoming training and some non rails-merb related experimentations. (I’m learning objective-c and playing with macruby) However, here are some of the latest news: Merb 1.0.8 should be released soon with some bug fixes and some improvements The Merb book got 2 new sections, Sequel and Active Record. I’ll be spending…
6 Jan 2009
Meet today’s merbist: Hampton Catlin I’m personally looking forward to seeing Hampton’s work migrated to Rails 3 in a few months. Matt Aimonetti: Hi Hampton, could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living. **Hampton Catlin: **I’m Hampton Catlin. I’m “The Haml Guy” as I’m apparently termed all the time when introduced. I’m an early…
5 Jan 2009
Today is Monday. I usually don’t like Mondays. Being Monday goes with waking up early, going back to work, and lots of deadlines. However, today is a special Monday. It’s the first Monday of the year and I have a special announcement! During the Rails/Merb merge announcement, it was mentioned that I will be joining the soon to be created…
4 Jan 2009
Jetty Web server can be invoked and installed as a stand alone application server. It has a flexible component based architecture that allows it to be easily deployed and integrated in a diverse range of instances. The project is supported by a growing community and a team with a history of being responsive to innovations […]
2 Jan 2009
Replication has its problems, specially if you have a multimaster replication system. To make matters worse, none of the PHP frameworks support multimaster replication systems nor handle master failover. Symfony uses Propel and only supports master-slave replication systems. When the master fails, it’s true that you have the slaves ready to replace it, but the […]
29 Dec 2008
Foy Savas, author or the “merb way” wrote a very well written post on “Rails monoculture” Pat Eyler, wrote an article asking if Rails and Merb would be better together. Ben Aldred, tell people to stop worrying and start loving Rails 3. fotonauts.com a Rails and Merb Photo website developed by an ex-apple team, was featured in TechCrunch. Fotonauts is…
27 Dec 2008
This is the second installment of a little series of discussions. They're not much more than that, just discussions. And I hope I'm inviting discussion rather than quenching it. But I'll be honest — the goal of this series is to pound a stake through the heart of a certain way of thinking about the world that has become quite…
See 3.12 of Williams. Let where and . and . is right continuous. Then by the proof . Thus and is therefore an upper bound (if not then such that and but by monotonicity ). Therefore . On the other hand suppose then (if not then but then is a lower bound for all such … Continue reading Skorokhod Representation…
25 Dec 2008
I finished Fallout 3 maybe six or eight weeks ago, and it was hands-down one of the best games I've ever played. A game like that gets you in the mood for more gaming, so I thought to myself: "Hey, I should plop down $160 for Fable II!" Actually that's not exactly what I thought, but it's what happened. I…
December 23, 2008, was an important day for the Ruby community. People who used to argue and not get along, have decided to sit down, talk and evaluate their differences. The end result is a strong collaboration of two teams who share the exact same goal. Overall, the news was very well received, just look at the tweets out there…
24 Dec 2008
If you are using the Memcache functions through a PECL extension, you can set global runtime configuration options by specifying the values within your php.ini file. One of them is memcache.hash_strategy. This option sets the hashing mechanism used to select and specifies which hash strategy to use: Standard (default) or Consistent. It’s recommended that you […]
This is huge! While people still try to find some drama an in hypothetical war between rails and merb. The Rails team and the Merb team announced working together on a joined version of the 2 frameworks. This is so exciting, nobody believed it could ever happen (I personally, had my serious doubt). Yehuda had a great post laying down…
23 Dec 2008
This is huge! While people still try to find some drama in a hypothetical war between Rails and merb … The Rails team and the Merb team announced today that they will work together on a joined version of the 2 frameworks. This is so exciting! Nobody believed it could ever happen (I personally, seriously had my doubt). Yehuda had…
20 Dec 2008
Today I’m interviewing Jason Seifer known for the funny envyads and the weekly RailsEnvy podcast. Matt Aimonetti: Hi Jason, could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living? Jason Seifer: My name is Jason Seifer and I do mostly web development for a living along with podcasting and screencasting. Matt Aimonetti: How did you get…
18 Dec 2008
Today, Andy Delcambre is our featured merbist. Matt Aimonetti: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do for a living. Andy Delcambre: My name is Andy Delcambre and I work for Engine Yard (https://engineyard.com) as a Software Engineer. I work primarily on internal and customer facing projects. These projects are almost exclusively written in Merb. At Engine…
17 Dec 2008
](https://loriholden.com/) Today, I’m interviewing Lori Holden from YellowPages.com/AT&T Interactive. I met Lori on IRC a bit before MerbCamp 2008 where she gave a very interesting talk on Sequel. Matt Aimonetti Hi Lori, could you please introduce yourself and the company you work for? Lori Holden: Hi Matt, my name is Lori Holden. I originally became interested in software development when…
15 Dec 2008
Today, I’m starting a new series called meet the the merbists. My goal is to feature various people from our community and ask them a few questions about Ruby, Merb and their projects. Let’s get started with Derek Neighbors from Integrum. Matt Aimonetti: Hi Derek, could you please introduce yourself and the company you work for? Derek Neighbors: I am…
11 Dec 2008
I hear a lot of people asking for better Merb documentation as they are learning Merb. I remember struggling with the very same problem when I started using Rails a few years ago. The good news is that the core team is working hard on improving the state of documentation. You have the Merb Book on which I am actively…
9 Dec 2008
Heads I win, tails you lose: the tale of the corporate welfare state.
8 Dec 2008
3 days ago, I announced the Merb Open Source Book project. I expected that few people would be interested as we heard complaints about the lack of documentation. What I did not expect, was more than 60 emails and pull requests in 2 days, people committing pages of content, fixes and offering their services to translate the book. The mailing…
4 Dec 2008
Here is a graph representing the growth of of web searches related to the programming category. This is not a comparison of the amount of searches made. We can see a huge peak around the time Merb 1.0 got released. More and more people are looking for information about what’s already being called the “Ruby web framework for the enterprise”.…
2 Dec 2008
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“240” caption=“Love is in the air”][/caption] Yes, it is true and no, I am not being passive aggressive or cynical. As you might have heard there has been some tension between the Rails team and the Merb team in the last few weeks. Sometimes caused by us, sometimes caused by them. I already addressed this issue in…
30 Nov 2008
Wow, It’s been two weeks since my last post. I’m really sorry about that but at the same time, I really enjoyed Qcon and Thanksgiving which did not give me much time to work on a blog post. [caption id=“attachment_291” align=“alignleft” width=“200” caption=“Mr Bean vs X-mas turkey”][/caption] Thanksgiving is a big thing in America, and after few years I got…
18 Nov 2008
Here are two useful backlog templates provided by Agile Software Development. Both of them are in Excel format (XLS). Check them out: Simple Product Backlog Example Simple Sprint Backlog Example
Many threats that are common to distributed systems are common to Web services as well. There are a few specific threats associated with the Web services processing model, such as: Message replays: An attacker may re-play an entire message or a part of a SOAP message. Man in the middle attack: An attacker may view […]
17 Nov 2008
So! I have all these cool things I want to write about, but I broke my thumbnail. Can you tell that's a long story? See, this summer I got excited about playing guitar again. I usually switch between all-guitar and all-piano every other year or so. This summer I dusted off the guitars and learned a bunch of pieces, and…
16 Nov 2008
I’ll try to keep the community posted on the latest merb news. Feel free to email me if you want me to feature your app, plugin, tool or blog post. Quality time with Yukihiro Matsumoto (ã¾ã¤ã‚‚ã¨ã‚†ãã²ã‚) aka Matz, Ruby author Hack time with Aaron Paterson (Nokogiri) and Bryan Helmkamp (Webrat) Merb presentation at ORUG RailsCamp Australia Rails podcast Rails vs…
14 Nov 2008
 As you must know by now, last week,Merb 1.0 got released. Because we wanted to assure the release was fine, we asked Engine Yard, Apple and YellowPages.com to help us by hiring the NSA to monitor Merb users. After all, we need to know what people complain about so we can fix it ASAP. Turns out all the echelon…
12 Nov 2008
"Unveiling the hidden dangers in our misguided fears"
11 Nov 2008
9 Nov 2008
Japanese translation On November 7, Yehuda Katz gave a talk at RubyConf and made 3 major announcements: Engine Yard to offer Merb support m|a agile to offer professional training Merb 1.0 released! The first announcement is pretty substantial. Engine Yard has been financially supporting Merb by letting some of their staff work on Merb, fly them to different conferences and…
3 Nov 2008
When you’re building an infrastructure that is distributed all over the internet, you’ll come to a point where you can’t rely on synchronous remote calls that, for example, synchronize data on 2 servers: You don’t have any failover system that resends messages if something went wrong (network outages, software failures). Messages are processed over time […]
As you might have noticed, we’ve been pushing a lot of Release Candidates out the door. The reason is that we want to make sure 1.0 is really ready for showtime! We are also getting a lot of bug reports that help us focusing on the main issues. Today RC5 was pushed to a RubyForge mirror close to you and…
29 Oct 2008
Taming IE's trust issues: A quick fix for cross-domain NTLM authentication.
On page 19, O’Neill comments that the proof of Lemma 33 is a mild generalization of the proof of proposition 28. I think (2) (3) requires spelling out. Let and let be a co-ordinate system at . Let be a co-ordinate system at . Then by (2) has rank . Thus by exercise 7 and … Continue reading Immersions
I write a column for computer programmers called "Stevey's Blog Rants." It's basically a magazine column — I publish to it about once a month. The average length of my articles is about 12 pages, although they can range anywhere from 4 to 40 pages, depending on how I'm feeling. But for precedent, don't think blogs: think of Reader's Digest.…
Yesterday, Yehuda Katz annouced Merb 1.0 RC3 released and today we re released the same version with a hotfix (some dependencies got broken). Here is a quick sum up: improved the testing framework with full webrat integration. merb-action-args works with ParseTree 2.x and 3.x. improved merb-auth dependency “parse_treeâ€, :require_as => “ParseTree†{ # do stuff after the gem is loaded…
27 Oct 2008
Mislav & Pjhyett’s will_paginate plugin has been a reference in the Rails world for a little while now. The need for Pagination is arguable, but that’s not the point of this post. There are few existing pagination solutions for Merb, but people moving from Rails and porting a Rails app will be happy to hear that will_paginate is now Merb…
25 Oct 2008
This weekend I decided to spend some time developing my first cross-platform Adobe AIR desktop application. My first impression of Adobe Air was: Wow! It takes only a few minutes to see how easy and powerful this platform is. What’s great about AIR is that you can build Rich Internet Applications that run across operating […]
22 Oct 2008
It’s always handy to have a complete list of packages installed, specially if you want to create a system that is similar to a different system you have already set up. In this post I’ll cover how you can export a list of installed packages on one Ubuntu system, and import them into another to […]
MySQL’s full-text search functions provide a simple framework for an easily implemented, approximate site search. Many sites, written in an interpreted language and powered by MySQL, can use MySQL’s full-text search to avoid third party dependencies. The basics of the MySQL full-text search functions are well-documented in the MySQL online documentation. For those lacking patience, […]
21 Oct 2008
As I’m writing this post, Merb 1.0 RC2 (v0.9.10) is being propagated through all the RubyForge mirrors. $ sudo gem install merb will install/update Merb Stack. Merb stack is a meta-gem/package installing all the gems you need to get started (including merb-core, merb-more, datamapper and sqlite3 driver) The main focus for this release was to fix bugs and make the…
20 Oct 2008
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. — Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach Note: Today's entry is a technical article: it isn't funny. At least not intentionally. Update, Oct 20th 2008: I've added an Updates section, where I'll try to track significant responses, at least for a week or so. There are three entries…
16 Oct 2008
1.0RC1 was released less than a week ago and we are already planning to release RC2 next week or so. Thanks to all the contributors who reported RC1 bugs and submitted patches. RC2 should iron out most of the small bugs and annoyances encountered. [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“180” caption=“Rosemary has a very old reputation for improving memory."][/caption] However, RC2 top…
I’ve been following what people say on twitter about Merb. I simply used twitter search engine. Because I only have a private twitter account I can’t reply to everyone. freels: I keep expecting merb to have a view helper for random things… @freels, feel free to let us know about the view helpers you miss. We might not be able…
14 Oct 2008
The MySQL Master-Master replication (often in active-passive mode) is popular pattern used by many companies using MySQL for scale out. Most of the companies would have some internal scripts to handle things as automatic fallback and slave cloning but no Open Source solution was made available. In 2007, the High Performance Group at MySQL AB […]
13 Oct 2008
Few hours ago we finally pushed Merb 1.0 RC1 to rubyforge. RC stands for Release Candidate. And we will need your help to make a rock solid 1.0 final. For the occasion, we switched to our new wiki. Installing Merb stack is now dead easy: $ sudo gem install merb Here is a tutorial to get you started with Merb…
Tonight, the core team members present during MerbCamp got together at my place to prepare and release 1.0 RC1. The problem is that we spent more time joking, laughing and arguing about the new git system that we didn’t feel right about pushing a release at 4am :( The git -core and -more repos got merged into a centralized repo.…
11 Oct 2008
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“240” caption=“MerbCamp registration by Andy Delcambre”][/caption] Day 1 went very fast. The day started with a Keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, author of Merb. Ezra covered the past and present of Merb and introduced Nanite: self assembling cluster of ruby processes. (Carl Lerche) introduced the awesomeness brought to you by the new router. Daniel Neighman introduced Merb’s slice…
A real quick post to let people know that MerbCamp just started. If you couldn’t make it to San Diego, you can follow live. (For FREE) [caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“160” caption=“Ezra during his Keynote”][/caption] Merb 1.0 RC should be released tomorrow with a new option to get started with a Merb stack including Merb Core, Merb More, DataMapper Core with…
9 Oct 2008
We just finished the first stand-up. A stand-up according to the scrum/xp practices is just an occastion to say what you did yesterday, what you are going to do today and any problems you encountered if any. The stand-up followed a sprint review & retrospective we had last night. The amount of work done in few hours is just amazing,…
7 Oct 2008
Some of Los Señores del Merb, AKA the Merb “core team” met tonight in a secret location in San Diego, CA. Obviously, we had to meet in a Mexican restaurant and enjoy Tuesday Fish Taco night special ;) While not everybody could make the trip, Yehuda, Andy, Daniel, Carl and myself met to plan the very first Merb Sprint. Unfortunately,…
6 Oct 2008
Mode changes to init.rb, user updating to a newer version or Merb will need to add c[:log_file] = Merb.root / “log” / “development.log” to their init.rb file or config/environments/development.rb for instance. (Newly generated apps are already setup properly) We made some changes to the way Rake files work. Merb-core doesn’t require the rspec tasks anymore so Test::Unit see annoying rspec…
5 Oct 2008
I thought I should share few changes that my affect your apps if you want to upgrade to Edge. merb_helpers which was previously in merb-plugins now moved to merb-more and got renamed merb-helpers. What that means for you is that you probably want to install merb-helpers and change the reference in your init.rb from dependencies “merb_helpers” to dependencies “merb-helpers” People…
4 Oct 2008
Intrepid Ibex is the codename for Kubuntu 8.10, due to be released October 30 2008. The focus for 8.10 for the Kubuntu community will be transitioning to a KDE 4 desktop. The plan is to integrate the existing Kubuntu software while at the same time offering the best out-of-the-box KDE 4 experience around. Intrepid Ibex […]
This is what Mike Peters says he can do: make your site run 10 times faster. His test bed is “half a dozen servers parsing 200,000 pages per hour over 40 IP addresses, 24 hours a day.” Before optimization CPU spiked to 90% with 50 concurrent connections. After optimization each machine “was effectively handling 500 […]
Merb 1.0 is almost ready to be pushed out and you might be impatient to start playing with some of the goodies not yet available in the latest stable release. Before getting started, you should know that not everything has been ironed out yet so don’t expect to have a fully stable Edge. The easiest way to get started requires…
1 Oct 2008
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“224” caption=“Mint was originally used as a medicinal herb to treat stomach ache and chest pains. (Something developers eating too much pizza know a bit too well)"][/caption] Paul Sadauskas aka Rando posted a very interesting article showing how he handles exceptions in his JSON webservices built on top of Merb. After discussing with NewBamboo guys it was…
30 Sept 2008
I actually run into a small problem when updated an older Merb app. Here was how my router looked like: Merb::Router.prepare do |r| r.resources :channels do |channels| channels.resources :shows do |shows| shows.resources :episodes end end end But after updating to the latest version of Merb, I got links looking like: https://localhost:4000/channels/#<Channel:0x27b7300>/shows The first thing to do is to read Carl’s…
29 Sept 2008
Mike Brittain wrote: In the months prior to leaving Heavy, I led an exciting project to build a hosting platform for our online products on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We eventually launched our newest product at Heavy using EC2 as the primary hosting platform. We set out to build a fairly standard […]
I haven't been blogging much this summer. Mostly it's because all my free time has been spent engaged in an important research project called "What Would Niko Bellic Do?" I've been enrolled in a high-quality Management Scenario Simulator with the unconventional name "Grand Theft Auto IV", probably some sort of inside joke, and I've been going through all its Developer…
If you read this blog, you probably know that Merb’s best ORM friend is DataMapper. [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“compounds in basil oil have potent antioxidant and is used for supplementary treatment of stress”][/caption] Merb works very well with ActiveRecord and Sequel but most of the Merbivores get excited about DataMapper. DataMapper has a lot of cool stuff going for…
26 Sept 2008
Yesterday I spyed on wycats aka Yehuda Katz while he’s working on cleaning things up for 1.0 which will be released during MerbCamp Oct 11-12. Here is the screenshot of how you would see ugly backtraces originating from Merb’s core: [caption id=“attachment_83” align=“aligncenter” width=“150” caption=“old backtraces”][/caption] Note: Did you notice that wycats is using Ruby Enterprise Edition? Merb 0.9.8 has…
25 Sept 2008
François Zaninotto wrote: When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more […]
[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“182” caption=“Fennel, one of the primary ingredients of absinthe helps developers' creativity."][/caption] Good news regarding Merb slices: the new router allows you to mount a slice directly as: /the-slice-action (previously it had to be /the-slice/something) On IRC, Nagash came up with an interesing snippet allowing you to easily serve static views (like Django’s generic views) (Merb::Template.template_for is…
24 Sept 2008
Dear Merbivores/Merbists/Merbians, It’s hard to believe that in less that 20 days, Merb 1.0 will be released! We are all really happy to to be almost there but we have to be honest and admit that we are also under pressure. We are all dreaming of a post 1.0 world but in the meantime we have to focus on last…
23 Sept 2008
Since Merb 0.9.7 the Merb team decided to change the way you can bundle an app. Until 0.9.7 you would use the merb-freezer plugin which was supporting git submodules and gems. The only problem was that you still had to install merb-freezer on your server and it had to stay in sync with your app… kinda lame :( [caption id=""…
20 Sept 2008
The practices discussed in this article are based on Ezequiel Cuellar’s observations. These practices will help any software development team as they come up against common obstacles. They will also contribute to a solid foundation for healthier development and help speed up production. The seven practices are: Improve business processes before starting development. Create a […]
18 Sept 2008
I’ve made two new interesting discoveries about wpa_supplicant since writing my last blog post on the subject. (Actually, I pretty much made both of them while reading documentation in order to write it, and have been lame about writing them up). Using wpa_gui It turns out that wpa_gui not only allows you to select existing networks, but also to scan…
16 Sept 2008
As most of you probably know, X has several different mechanisms for copy-paste, used by different applications in different ways. I know some people who use them deliberately, juggling two pieces of text in different clipboards at once, but for me, it’s always just been annoying. When I copy something, be it by Gnome C-c, emacs C-w, or selecting it…
That’s now finally official, MerbCamp 2008 registration are open! What an exciting time! History To understand why I’m excited, we need to go back few months back. Merb was first released by Ezra has an alternative tool to handle file uploads. Merb came to reality because Ezra needed something fast, light and flexible to handle something that, let’s be frank…
14 Sept 2008
In software engineering, “refactoring” source code means modifying it without changing its behaviour, and is sometimes informally referred to as “cleaning it up”. Refactoring neither fixes bugs nor adds new functionality, though it might precede either activity. Rather it improves the understandability of the code and changes its internal structure and design, and removes dead […]