log4p

Today I went to the RubyEnRails 2008 conference. Last year I went there as well and was really enthusiastic about the presentations I visited. This years’ conference was good, but didn’t manage to come close to what I expected. Maybe my expectations where to high this year.
Zed Shaw gave a really nice opening presentation. […]

I was experimenting with transactions in Rails/ActiveRecord to see what they can and what they can't do. At first it seemed I couldn't get transactions to work at all. I made sure I was using the InnoDB storage engine. I rechecked my code. But the test kept failing.
This, by the way, is the test:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

require [...]

Januari 28 will be the day of the first gathering of the Amsterdam's Ruby User Group. I'd like to be there but due to the fact that at that time my wife will be over 40 weeks pregnant... I just wont...
Still, I think it's a great idea and will certainly be joining future gatherings! For [...]

A couple of weeks ago a I read about the free online Ruby course by Satish Talim. The course is aimed at people who want to start learning Ruby. I've probably passed the 'starting stage' a while ago, but was intrigued and registerd (as did over 2000 enthousiasts from all over the globe).
At the beginning [...]

I attended Joshua Blochs' presentation on closures at JavaPolis last week (watch the video here). This slides about return not return from what you'd expect kept me wondering: how do other languages solve this 'problem'.
The example from Bloch, taken from Slide 38 of Blochs' closures controversy presentation:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVA:

static <E> Boolean contains(Iterable<E> seq, {E => Boolean} [...]

Recently the Groovy team introduced a new operator to the Groovy language. It is called the Elvis operator. There is one thing I particularly like about this operator. It's name.
To bad the Elvis operator is only a shortening of Java's ternary operator, written like ?:. One use-case for the operator is returning a 'sensible default' [...]

I couple of days ago I was looking at XML parsing solutions available in Ruby. I played a bit with REXML, a conformant but kind of dull XML processor, it works great. When working with less conformant XML-like (like websites) data it might just not be what you're looking for. Luckily ruby demi-god and respected [...]

Today I was fiddling with Rails to create a simple web UI on top of some REST services. Therefor I didn't really need (or is it really didn't need) a database server. Just writing and running Rails code without a database isn't a problem. Running unittests (and rspec tests) however is a problem. By default [...]

Some months ago I visited Aslak Hellesøys' RSpec presentation at RubyEnRails 2007. I was really intrigued by some of the concepts introduced by RSpec.
After checking out the way testing/TDD works in Grails I just had to see if my initial interest in RSpec would stand ground.
Just to recapitulate on what RSpec is:

RSpec is a framework [...]

Today I visited the (free) RubyEnRails 2007 conference. Although my day job doesn't include any Ruby or Rails at the moment I keep hoping that is will in the (near) future. During weekends and evenings I use Rails for small websites and services.
The conference opened by a keynote presented by Dr. Nic Williams; a bit [...]