pggbee

RspecAbandoner version 0.1 has been released!

mig — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:46:59 +0000

This is a script, that when run inside of your project, will convert your RSpec specs to Test::Unit tests.

It still needs some serious work, right now it creates a bunch of obnoxious files in your spec directories, I will change that soon.

I borrowed code from spec_converter and inspiration from Barbara Boxer

Changes:

0.1 / 2008-06-13

Initial release

Installing Ruby 1.8.7 on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)

mig — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:22:29 +0000

The new ruby has some interesting new features, and I am hot to try them out. I’ve got Leopard installed, which comes with ruby 1.8.6, so I guess we could replace that. However, it’s generally a good idea to leave that stuff be.

So, I am going to installed it somewhere else. The ruby that comes with Leopard is installed in /usr/bin

  which ruby

I am going to put my new 1.8.7 in /usr/local/bin

First I downloaded it: ruby-1.8.7.tar.gz

Then, I opened up my terminal and:

  mv ~/Downloads/ruby-1.8.7.tar.gz ~/src &amp;&amp; cd ~/src
  tar xvzf ruby-1.8.7.tar.gz
  cd ruby-1.8.7
  ./configure --enable-shared --enable-pthread --prefix=/usr/local
  make
  make test
  sudo make install

Make sure /usr/local/bin is at the begining of your PATH environment variable. You can now play around with ruby 1.8.7! You will most likely want to reinstall rubygems in /usr/local as well.

Using Erubis in Rails

mig — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:05:08 +0000

Swapping out ERB for Erubis in a rails application is dead easy:

Install the gem:

  gem i erubis

Require it:

  # config/environment.rb
  require 'erubis/helpers/rails_helper'

Preprocessing is awesome:

  # config/environment.rb
  require 'erubis/helpers/rails_helper'
  Erubis::Helpers::RailsHelper.preprocessing = true

With that, you can use [%= %] inside your views instead of <%= %>. So doing this…

  [%= link_to "New Post", new_article_path %]

…will process the link_to when the template is loaded. However, when it comes time to render, what is being rendered is something more like this:

  <a href="/articles/new">New Post</a>

Which loads a lot faster than the ruby.

You can also preprocess enumerable statements, this is especially useful for something like this:

  [% Category.find(:all).each do |c| %]
    <li>[%= link_to c.name, category_path(c) %]</li>
  [% end %]

Very intense.

Follow Rails Patches

mig — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:43:52 +0000

Now that the Rails team has moved to using Lighthouse for bug, feature, and patch tracking, it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to track the patches coming in.

Just point your rss reader to: http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/events.atom and watch the action! I know that ton’s of people followed development when they were using Trac, it just wasn’t as nice.

Emacs Key Navigation in Gedit

mig — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:10:38 +0000

It’s a lot easier for me to hit ctrl-f than the right arrow key. Especially since I use my caps-lock as a ctrl key. These are Emacs navigation key combinations, and I can’t really work without them. TextMate has them built-in which is wonderful, Gedit on the other hand does not.

However, you can dig into your gconf settings and specify a “gtk key theme” other than the default one. You can specify emacs! Doing so, will allow you to use key combo’s like ctrl-f in Gedit and other Gtk applications.

Set the value of:

/desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme

To:

Emacs

Gedit Rails Development Pack

mig — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:05:56 +0000

I’ve put together a couple of Gedit plugins and snippets that will help your developing rails projects in Gnome.

Download gedit-rails at github.

This package includes a script that will register ERB templates and YAML files with gtksourceview. That means that you will get some nice syntax highlighting! Enjoy!

Pastie Textmate Theme

mig — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:09:29 +0000

I like the default color scheme for syntax highlighting at Pastie, so I decided to make a TextMate theme using the same colors. It’s not perfect, but it’s close!

You can download it as part of my custom TextMate theme repository on github. If you don’t have git installed, just hit the download link on the github page.