Just don’t ask why I know this. Please. It’s making me cry.
Install Ruby using the One Click Installer.
Install the ODBC module (by copying the SO files into the c:\Ruby\1.8\i386-mingw32 folder).
Install the ActiveRecord ODBC adapter (gem install activerecord-odbc-adapter).
Edit C:\Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-odbc-adapter-2.0\ lib\active_record\connection_adapters\odbc_adapter.rb – look for line 1588.
Change the line from elsif dbmsName =~ /SQLAnywhere/i [...]

I think Bigwig has become my favourite bit of code that I’ve ever worked on.
Before Bigwig, it was Object Factory, before that it was a Delphi class that I used to create tree-structured data (imaginatively called TNode).
Bigwig’s doesn’t have a test suite and it’s not even my code – it was [...]

One of the problems of being at a startup is the overwhelming amount of work. So much to do, so little time!
Luckily, this helpful flow-chart helps you decide what to do next.

Github aren’t building new gems at the moment as they finalise their move to Rackspace. So what do you do if you’ve got a gem that you would like to make available?
Gemcutter’s the new kid on the block – it works as a set of plugins to the gem command that mean [...]

I’ll admit it – I’m biased. Dom’s a friend of mine and we do an occasional podcast together (which, incidentally, I will be speaking about at Geekup Leeds this coming Wednesday). So even if ThinkVisibility was shit I would have said it was good.
But it wasn’t shit. It wasn’t good. [...]

So _why has vanished off the internet.
I have no idea who he is or why he’s gone. But _why meant a lot to Ruby developers, myself included. He represented style and grace and art and weirdness – that Ruby was about more than just getting the job done in the most [...]

Today, Caius made a discovery that shocked me.
He had a class, descending from ActiveRecord::Base, with a custom constructor (initialize method). To debug it, he had the constructor raise an exception. In the console, Thingy.new(params) raised the exception as expected. But wotsit.thingies.find_by_field(value) did not. Even though it was instantiating an [...]

I always forget how to do this so I’m writing it down (especially as it’s really easy and git, as usual, makes me feel stupid as Linus is so much smarter than me).
Suppose you’ve been working in branch X and you’re about to merge those changes into branch Y …

work in branch X [...]

A project I’ve been working on was recently moved up to Rails 2.2 (Rails 2.3 migration coming soon, but we wanted to take things one step at a time).
All the tests passed. Poking it on the staging server worked well. On to production and all was good.
Time passed. [...]

For some reason ferret server on a site I have been managing has been giving me a load of grief.
I seem to have nailed it down to two problems.
Firstly, monit only seems to like monitoring ferret server under certain circumstances.
Secondly, the ferret indexes don’t seem to like being rebuilt. [...]