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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Tomorrow I’m actually going to do it.
I’m going to change the tools that I use to code in Ruby for the first time in four years. You see, I must be one of the very very few Ruby-programming Mac-users that doesn’t like Textmate.
This is pretty much heresy to most Rubyists. [...]

You may have heard that Ruby 1.9.1 is now out and “production-ready”.  This gives us a number of benefits, not least real threading and a general performance boost.  However, there is “production-ready” and there is “production-ready”; in particular, Ruby alone isn’t much use without the many gems that we all depend upon also being usable. [...]

Any web-developer Rubyist knows about models, views and controllers. The MVC paradigm is embedded in the structure of Rails and Merb and encouraged by Ramaze and Sinatra. If you’re a Mac developer or an iPhone bod then MVC is common practice there as well. Same goes for Sproutcore and even Microsoft is [...]

I’m sure you’ve all heard the Rails 3 announcement. When I first found out my initial reaction was “fuck me“. But shortly after I was filled with a feeling of dread and general unease. And I didn’t know why ….
Firstly, a bit of history.
I first tried programming on a Commodore [...]

I’ve recently been updating some old code – partly written by someone else, partly written by myself. At the time, I thought I had written this code really well; looking back on it now, it looks awful. Fair enough, I’ve learnt a lot – I want to look back on old code and [...]

I’ve written up a new post at the Brightbox blog detailing how we are using RSpec and Cucumber to build acceptance tests for the next generation Brightbox systems.