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DHH - "Fuck the real world"

Comment here. Well, yes, but. You also need an idea that's worth bothering with. Paul Graham points out (at some length) that you need to go for something painful that other people think is too hard or difficult and then find a novel and easy way

Rails RJS render throwing mysterious render error in Princely plugin

WARNING: Rails techie stuffif you keep seeing this NoMethodError (undefined method `[]' for :update:Symbol):    /vendor/plugins/princely/lib/pdf_helper.rb:11:in `render' when your controller is doing this:render :upda

Writing

I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there isn't a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.I've been reading num

Maintenance programming

Comment left here - it's also worth following some of the links in the article.Never install the Java Decompiler, JAD, and look at the library code you are dependent on.Just don't.If you do, however, never run the FindBugs utility (which I re

Soap4r woes

Just in case this burns someone elseTalking to a web service that returns an array of mixed complex types (ooh goody!)soap4r returns a lot of SOAP::Mapping::ObjectThese pretend to be a kind of hash (of hashes of hashes if you go really deep), so I co

Rails: I can put together a simple database-backed app really quickly

Comment left here ... and that's why I use RoR. 90% of the "anti" opinions here don't get it. It's quick, it has a low entry barrier, and, if you want the Ajax stuff, it's very easy to do simple things. If you want stuff tha

Getting the number of months between two dates in Ruby/Rails - updated

Here lies the one that works, not the old one I posted ages ago. It also uses dates instead of timestamp differences and should therefore not break if you ask it to go before the Epoch (some time in 1970 I think):

DHH the windows hater - or maybe needs to think a bit before he spouts off?

Comment left here  I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, wen

SQL is dead?

Comment left here.  XML - sighI read Oracle's early papers on XML DB - "we store the schema and the data separately, with pointers into the data"Codasyl in disguise. The same with the o-o databases, hierarchical databases - none of

Deep merge a Ruby hash, the joys of recursion

I was doing some hacking with lists of valid phone number codes (3,4,5 digits depending upon various factors). I used hashes that could be walked down because of the key lengths. Now we've decided to do it  differently because the data file