Foliosus

Since I posted the first version of this article, there have been a couple of changes. The biggest one is that Intel has released Intel Mac versions of the InstantClient. Woohoo! That makes the previous version rather too complicated, so I’ve updated it here. This tutorial assumes that you’re using Rails [...]

I know that some people really don’t like monkeypatching, and I see why. But sometimes it’s just unavoidable. Recently at work we came across a situation where the standard rake db:schema:dump task just wasn’t working. So I started by writing the new version of the rake task that I wanted:
namespace :db do
[...]

Before I launch in to this, let me just say that, really, there’s no universally right way to choose the ideal web designer. There is no idea web designer. There’s just the best way for you, and the best web designer for you. I hope that the thoughts I lay out below [...]

Woohoo! Today, Microsoft made the right decision about IE8. The default rendering mode will be fully standards compliant. They’re not going to punish the people who know what they’re doing.
This is truly great news, for several reasons. One is that Microsoft is now arguing for greater openness. That can only help the marketplace. [...]

Here’s a neat trick I just learned from Obie Fernandez (The Rails Way, p. 30: you can see what your Rails app’s HTML output is from the console. To make this work you have to fool the app into thinking that there’s a request coming in by setting some environmental variables, and then call the [...]

Yesterday two articles appeared at A List Apart discussing a Microsoft-backed proposal to change how the web works (round-up here). The proposal, on its face, is quite simple. Developers would put a meta tag in their documents (X-UA-Compatible) stating what version of a browser the pages were coded against. The browsers would [...]

NOTE: This tutorial has been superseded by a newer version that takes advantage of the newly-released Intel Mac version of the Oracle InstantClient. The new version is much, much simpler, and causes far fewer headaches.
Updated (12/11/07): The ruby-oci8 library just went to full 1.0.0 release. I’ve updated that section to reflect the new file [...]

This one’s real easy. Leopard ships with a default Rails installation (/usr/bin/rails), but overriding it is quite simple, since it’s just a gem.
sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.org
Then, enter “y” at each prompt, to install all of the dependencies. That’s it! Check yourself with:
rails -v
Right now it will show Rails 1.99.0 which [...]

Every time I get frustrated with an aspect of Rails, it turns out that it’s just my idiocy and not actually something to do with Rails.
Most recently, I wanted to code this algorithm:
If on the current page
show <a href=”blah1″>link 1</a>
else
show <a href=”blah2>link 2</a>

Right on, Mr. H!
Andrei Herasimchuk has just written an open letter to John Warnock at Adobe, suggesting that he, and really Adobe, contribute a small group of roughly 10 core fonts to the public domain. That’s not so cool. What’s cool is the rationale behind the request. If these fonts — fonts [...]