Ruby is a really dynamic language, and you can do a lot of cool things, one of them is a Struct (Structure) that allows you to make throw away objects that you can call methods on….

If you are using BE DE DE or TE DE DE, then you will get situations in your specs or tests where you want to be able to just create a valid model of another type to test against. This is where factories and builders come in handy.

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…

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.

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.

If you are using a Ruby on Rails app, or Nitro, or just a plain Ruby application that handles email, you will need to handle at some point, bounced messages. This a simple way to get to the guts of the email and find out what the error codes are…

I had a situation where I had two tables, one was read only data and the other was where I would put my new data. They both modeled the same object (a person) but I had to figure out how to have ONE object for the system to interact with.

That is, how do you make two tables into one model in Rails?

MULTI-TABLE INHERITANCE!!!!!

Well, 1.2.2 is now released. You can get the latest version by gem install tmail or download from the TMail Rubyforge project

If you have ruby and a mac, no doubt you want to try out 1.9 – but be warned, some things can break! This little tutorial shows you how to install Ruby 1.9 in parallel to your 1.8.x installation… which can be handy…

Ruby on Rails makes wonderful use of the two cornerstone Ruby classes, Hash and Array. Here I give a short tutorial on how to use Hash and Array with Rails.

Being in Australia, I could not go to Ruby Conf 2007, but they have put the talks online, you can check it out at the Ruby Conf CodeFreaks website.

I might be biased, I might be talking from a lack of experience, but if you are reading this and you are not involved in an open source project, then you are not a real programmer…

THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE

SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot’s Monopurpose Programming Language
Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for
Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code
with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN,
END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can’t make
a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus
they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without
the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.

(Care of OpenBSD forturne)

TMail 1.2.0 is now out. Here are the gory bits: