Mike Perham

Damon Clinkscales, of Austin on Rails fame, has created a one-day workshop to take your Rails skills from 0-60 in 8 hours. While this might be abysmally slow for a car, it’s a rocket sled for software engineering! I’ll be there, teaching about ActiveRecord and how to bend the database to your will. [...]

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We moved part of our FiveRuns Manage infrastructure to use Starling this week. I’m rapidly becoming a convert as it has proven to be simple, fast and reliable. The Starling 0.9.3 release is somewhat long in the tooth but GitHub has several Starling forks which contain performance improvements and bugfixes, including our own [...]

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This prints out “1″:

begin
a = 1
raise RuntimeError, “foo”
rescue => e
puts a
end

I would think that a would be out of scope inside the rescue section but I guess Ruby considers the rescue section part of the begin/end block?

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As someone who was pretty closely involved in an OSS project that exploded into hundreds of little subprojects, I have to say I’m discouraged to see DataMapper and Merb starting to go down that same road.

drwxr-xr-x 3 102 May 10 15:16 adapters
drwxr-xr-x 8 272 May 10 15:16 dm-aggregates
drwxr-xr-x 8 272 May 10 [...]

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A question for you Ruby nerds: the $? variable gives access to the exit code for the last process launched by Ruby. Is referencing $? a race condition in a system with many threads launching many subprocesses? If it is truly a global variable, then it’s inherently unsafe, but it could also be [...]

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There’s only one thing I miss in Java that Ruby doesn’t have:

String[] list = {
“Foo”,
“Bar”,
“Blaz”,
}

Note the last trailing comma. This is a syntax error in Ruby but legal in Java. If you add another element later, you don’t need to remember to add a comma to the previous entry. Minor, sure, but [...]

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I integrated the Youtube REST API into my pet project in about thirty minutes tonight.  It’s amazing how far the Internet has come in providing solid, useful services.  The QuartzRuby guys have published active_youtube, a simple ActiveResource wrapper to make integration with your Rails application easy.  The problem is really one of documentation: aside from [...]

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One of the cleaner syntax options Ruby gives you is what I call expression rescues.  Take this:

<%= @item.parent.name rescue ‘None’ %>

This code is an example of a pretty standard requirement: printing out the name of the parent of an item. If the item does not have a parent, it will print ‘None’. Under [...]

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Brian writes:
My open-source web application will need to submit information to a URL in IBM xfdl format.  Is this possible with currently available tools?
In a word, absolutely.  There’s no XFDL “native” support that I know of but I’m guessing that XFDL is just another XML standard.  In this case, Ruby can create arbitrary XML with [...]

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We’re actually starting to run the new FiveRuns service daemons internally and found that they were dying due to various issues so I integrated a little bit of ActionMailer code to email the dev team when a daemon dies with the relevant details.  Below is what I did - do you have any tips for [...]

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