Posts Archive

Robby Russell is a constant source of information on Ruby and Rails, I have used his instruction on how to set up Rails and PostgreSQL on Mac a number of times. It is therefore fun to see that I have actually used 3 out of the 5 things he wants to know more about::

RSpec User Stories

We were very early adopters of this one, we started using it the same day it hit trunk in a useable form. Everyone should start using it today - I cannot speak highly enough of it. The only thing I miss is a Fit-style table approach to rules, but I have my own thoughts about that one.

Mathias just sent this video of Boston Dynamics Big Dog. If this is the next level of mechanized warfare, the future will most certainly be scary.

The Ahnve family spent the afternoon at the Stockholm Technical Museum. It was the last day of the Vintage Gaming exhibition, and man, did they have hardware to reminisce about.

I first stopped by an old Commodore Vic-20, my first computer which my dad bought me in 1983. It was running a Tetris clone, programmed by the computers owner two years ago. He also showed me the flash card add-on card I suppose he soldered himself which replaced the tapedrive. Awesome.

I found a bug in my HTML code today running Firefox 3. <script> tags must supposedly be closed by a </script> and not by the less verbose but obviously wrong <script/>, as explained in this dismissed bug report.

If you insist on using <script/> FF3 will punish you with a blank page caused by the body tag being self closed, <body/>. Sort of: “You close your script tags like that - I’ll close your damn body tag like that. Now, how do you like that???”

Yesterday I twittered that I was trying to find a version of Ruby that both cc.rb and Rails likes. Last night, Wordpress plugin Twittertools posted yesterdays twitters to this blog. And this morning, I have an answer from Alexey Verkhovsky what the good versions are. Gotta love the lazyweb.

I use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard with my MacBook Pro - make that two, one at home and one at work. The function keys stopped working last week on the one at work which is a pretty big deal if you use Exposé as much as I do. I did the whole routine and could not find the problem. As the keyboard at home worked just fine, I started to believe that there was something wrong with the actual keyboard.

I have never programmed anything using Microsoft products, but if I did, heroes happen here and source fource would make me feel embarrassed. Who are they targeting?

I managed to send an invite to TripIt to everyone in my GMail addressbook this morning. This was unintentional, I guess either I am stupid or the TripIt interface is unclear.

Anyway, as I have 500+ email addresses in GMail, and some are people I have mailed once, this might turn out to be quite awkward. So sorry about that if you got the mail and wonder why the hell I sent it.

I am creating a small site using Merb, DataMapper and RSpec, all in all a very enjoyable experience. I did however have problem getting the test database to be automigrated when running the specs, as I am used to in Rails.

As Google did not help, I turned to #merb on IRC, and got immediate help.

Two alternatives:

1. Run rake MERB_ENV=test dm:db:automigrate before running rake specs
2. Insert DataMapper::Base.auto_migrate! into your spec/spec_helper.rb

Big thanks to topfunky, afrench and jdempsey for the help.

For all the good reasons, yak shaving is the thing to do these days.