Two days ago my MacBook Pro’s screen turned black. Following what I assume was an unsuccessful firmware upgrade, my laptop stopped displaying anything on its LCD. It would boot, greet me with a chime and I could even login and adjust the volume, all without seeing a thing. After researching the issue online, I
Continue ReadingYou drank the Kool-Aid and downloaded the awesomeness which is DB2 Express-C. Good job! Next you proceed to install it on Linux with sudo ./db2setup and boom, instead of a launchpad all you see is a gray window. Now what? This problem is a known Java bug (resolved in Java 6) that shows up
Continue ReadingZenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0
Continue ReadingA few days ago I announced that I was going to give away a free ticket for the first Professional Ruby Conference, organized by Obie Fernandez and Addison-Wesley, to one of my readers. Each person who took the survey, received a discount code for the conference valued at $200. More excitingly, every eligible participant
Continue ReadingIn yesterday’s address to the Ruby community, Dave Thomas invited Rubyists to fork Ruby, to freely research and experiment with new and interesting features. If this process is successful, many of these features will inevitably see their way back into Ruby’s core, thus improving the language in leaps and bounds. And I feel he
Continue ReadingAddison Wesley will hold their first Professional Ruby Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between November 17 and 20, 2008. This conference, for which Obie Fernandez is the Technical Chair, is highly educational and boasts some of the best speakers from the Ruby and Rails communities. The organizers were kind enough to invite me, offering me
Continue ReadingOnce upon a time there was a Ruby library called Hpricot. Well it’s still here in fact. This library is the de facto standard for parsing HTML in Ruby, and is often used to parse XML as well. Hpricot is normally considered to be quite fast, as far as Ruby libraries go. Yet Nokogiri
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