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 [...]

attachment_fu may not be the in-thing any more but there are still a lot of sites out there using it. And every now and then you realise, far too late, that you should have used S3 instead of the local filesystem.
Switching is easy – just change the :storage parameter to :s3. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

We just had some customers report a bug. Not good. We didn’t get an exception email. All the tests passed. We couldn’t see anything untoward in the log files. But it was there. We could reproduce it, both in staging and in production. Not good at all.
But the weirdest thing was we couldn’t [...]

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. [...]

Writing estimates up-front is a really tricky part of client work.
From the customer’s point of view it’s pretty essential. You need to know how much you are spending before the work begins so you don’t get stung.
From the developer’s point of view it’s pretty difficult to do because [...]

I have just written a load of test code that needed to verify that a particular set of classes behaved correctly when a transaction was rolled back.
However, the rest of my suite relied on transactional fixtures (which is Rails’ badly named way of saying that a transaction is started before each test and [...]