If you have a Soekris Net5501, sometimes they will not reboot when you tell them to. Hanging just after the memory test. Here is how you force them to reboot.

It is a great tip, and one I do fairly often, go download some code and read it until you understand it.

If you use Rails, you sometimes get a situation where the custom error messages just don’t work, here is how you can fix it…

Ruby is marvelous, everything evaluates. Which means a lot of the time, you can get away with things like ‘if @user…” and just depend on the existence of the @user var. But what if you just really need a Boolean true or false? Here is a little pattern you can use to do this…

What is an <em> tag? How do you manually make a select box? What about a multi value select box? Do you know the difference between a <submit> tag and a <button> tag? Can you hand code a form to make a restful post to one of your Rails controllers? If you can’t do all the above with plain HTML and no rails helpers or don’t know the difference between a GET and POST request and when you use either, then you need to read on. If you can, feel free to skip to the next section.

This year on May 15th there is going to be a world wide bloggers unite on the subject of Human Rights.

This is a great opportunity to raise public awareness on the subject of Human Rights. We all have them, but in the modern world of pending global governments (which I think are just another way to remove power from the people) It is time for all of us to become away of what it means to be living on this planet, what it means to be a member of this society, what it means to have a family and what it means to just be you.

If you are using Rails, you are most likely using migrations. Have you ever had a migration fail half way through? Have you ever then had to figure out how to find each change and revert it in the database? Would you like to never have to do that again? Here is how…

Learning Rails is hard enough without also facing the task of learning Ruby at the same time. Here I go over some of the must knows in Ruby so that you get some basic understanding of how to do Rails.

I know it is a bit late, and all the other cooler technology blogs have already covered this…

Being a Rails developer means that, yes, you too need to learn how to (gasp) program! No, seriously! Here are my tips on that subject.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that when you take the plunge to learn something as encompassing as ruby on Rails, you forget just how MUCH you need to learn, and it can all seem a bit overwhelming at first. Here is a good way to go about learning it.

Face it, you use Ruby, you use Rails, you are going to use the shell, either in the console or directly, here are some shortcuts I can’t live without.

If you are using PostgreSQL on Windows and you get: FATAL: pre-existing shared memory block is still in use Or you get: HINT: Check if there are any old server processes still running, and terminate them. errors, here is how you fix it.

So, in the last two tips, I have shown how to check the format of the email and save the actual address only in the database. But how to check that the email domain name is valid? Easy!

So you have an email address field on a form in Rails, but how are you going to make sure that all those users enter a sane and well formatted email address? Here is a simple fix to that problem.