http://blog.inquirylabs.com Politics, Programming and Possibilities Fri, 16 May 2008 03:22:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm not sure how I feel about ThisJune5th. On one hand, it could potentially cause a lot of damage to our financial infrastructure---it's basically an organized bank run. But on the other hand, actively supporting something like this is a peaceful and legal way to support a (possibly ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/05/13/mass-bank-withdrawal-next-month/ José Valim has improved the Footnotes plugin and kindly taken the lead on maintaining it for Rails 2.0. Read about his awesome new features here. Thanks, José! http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/05/12/textmate-footnotes-30/ B.J. Lawson became the Republican nominee in his North Carolina district 4 last Tuesday. Congratulations, Dr. Lawson! http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/05/08/victory-part-i/ I had a fascinating conversation last Thursday with Lance Walley (of Engine Yard) regarding life, religion, economics and building businesses. There were so many gems that came out of the conversation that I'm afraid this post may be a little haphazard. In any case, I was pleased to ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/05/04/a-visit-with-lance-walley/ I have a shared account on a server where Ruby 1.8.5 is installed but Merb is not. To install gems, I added "$HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin" to my path, and the following 3 lines to my .profile: export GEM_HOME=$HOME/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 export RUBYLIB=$HOME/lib/ruby:$HOME/lib/site_ruby/1.8 export RB_USER_INSTALL=true I had to add the last line because hpricot is a compiled extension ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/30/installing-merb-in-your-home-directory/ I've been told that jQuery has been around since January of 2006. At some point during the last year, many developers within the Ruby community began to embrace it as an alternative to Prototype and Scriptaculous. Many of the programmer friends I look up to in the Merb ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/29/what-makes-jquery-a-good-choice/ Extraordinary as it may seem, my loving and persistent wife, Kelty, has finally graduated from BYU! I'm so happy for her, and relieved to finally see her on the other side of the divide. Now we just have to get me over there :) Here's a 3-minute video I ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/29/hey-graduate-i-love-you/ The Facets gem is fairly popular, and for good reason. I was poking through the documentation on the plane home from Chicago (I have a contract position there for the next month) and found a couple of neat things to share: Facets library Autoarray class—an Array that autovivifies any number of ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/25/notes-on-the-facets-gem/ I can't believe I didn't know about this until recently... it's such a gem of a tip. :) If you type "gem server" in the shell, you'll start a webrick server that's listening on port 8808 to dish out all of the help files for your installed ruby gems. ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/24/did-you-know-about-gem-server/ Introduction Merb ActiveAdmin is a drop-in backend for Merb applications that use the Sequel ORM. It gives application administrators direct access to specific models so they can add, edit or delete anything they need to. It also provides a way to add or remove associated data, e.g. one-to-many, or ... http://blog.inquirylabs.com/2008/04/22/merb-activeadmin/