Today I’ll share what I use for some of my DIY time-tracking when I do freelancing (sometimes I use other tools, depending on the customer). Conventions I currently use: one google calendar per customer (I name these “LoGeek CustomerName” to...

In this article I’ll present some bits of the work we’ve been doing daniel309 (author of jVSTwRapper) and I, around the topic: is it possible to use Ruby to make it easier to prototype VST plugins? It looks like yes...

Learnivore.com is a side-project I’ve been working on during the past few months. It aggregates screencasts from a variety of Ruby/Rails publishers, like PragProgs, RailsCast or PeepCode for instance. It’s possible to filter between free and paid items, search in...

A while back I was looking for a way to generate short unique tokens to be used as authorization tokens in urls. I did some research and asked on ruby-talk. Here’s a summary of what I found. Note that most...

I’m currently using a mix of Ruby interpreters for building a system. For instance, I use JRuby for Celerity, IronRuby for Windows Forms (on Mono) and MRI for other things. To ensure I don’t mess things up, I came up...

I’ve been looking for this one a bit, so I thought I would share it here. As I wanted to start using the Rails 2.3+ application template feature, I thought I would create a script that is able to create...

I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to ‘freeze’ gems with a recent Rails app (2.2.2) I’m developing. A bunch of git repositories have this vendor/gems folder a bit like in Merb, so I was pretty...

Today I wrote some IronRuby tests targetting C# code (using both MSpec and the bundled Test::Unit). Things went out absolutely well. While I won’t share the code in question yet, here’s a working example provided by John Lam on his...

In case that’s of any use to you, here’s how you can query Delicious if you want to retrieve informations about a specific url (ruby code, translate to whatever works for you): require 'rubygems' require 'json' require 'open-uri' require 'digest'...

Not a full article this time but rather a tip that will help poor souls looking for their salvation on Google. By the way I think I will divide this blog in two sections: articles on one side, hints and...

I find it’s painful to go back to Photoshop just to generate a gradient, especially when I’m modifying the CSS at the very same time to find the right colors. Here’s the Rake task I use now to quickly generate...

My gmail account is currently pretty large so I wanted to get an idea of where the data was sitting. I got curious about how to visualize the data behind my account. In particular, I wanted to get answers to...

Velib is a pretty neat service I use every week to move inside Paris. I have a annual subscription (30€) which let me borrow a bike for half an hour from one station and leave it to another. As both...

A common question I’m asked is “which books should I read” ? In this article, you’ll find a selection of books for software developers aiming at becoming Generalizing Specialists. These are mostly timeless books, delivering principles or techniques that significantly...

Sitemaps are a (recently) standardized way of telling search engines which pages they should crawl. How useful are they ? My own experience is that for content oriented websites and blogs, sitemaps are an efficient way to get known by...