Posts tagged 'ruby'

  • Vagrant for Debian testing

    I’ve recently been looking into Vagrant. Vagrant allows you to build virtual environments and easily distribute them. By pragmatically describing virtual environment it easily allows developers to share configuration during development, and also eases the pain of setting systems up for distribution.

  • Kramdown and who-needs-wp

    I’ve just upgraded who-needs-wp to use Kramdown instead of RDiscount. I started using Kramdown for 2 reasons; It’s written entirely in Ruby; and it adds some useful extensions to Markdown.

  • Re-writing Viki's Makefile as a Rakefile

    I’m not a fan of Makefiles. :-( I don’t find find them particularly easy to write or maintain - and they are often too tightly integrated to the programming environment or the developer. I’ve spent far too many hours trying to resolve dependencies on Makefiles. To be fair however there are other tools out there, but the scars still show. :-)

  • Viki - A wiki built on Git

    The last few days I’ve been helping contributing code to Frank Dean’s wiki software - Viki. Frank has been maintaining a TWiki which me and a few of his friends have been contributing our technical notes. Whenever we find something which may be of interest to others we posted it on the Wiki.

  • Packaging with RubyGems

    I’ve been writing a fair few Ruby applications recently, including BetterBankStatement, and a bugzilla poster. Previously I’ve been pointing people to the relevant code repositories and giving them a list of dependencies to install. This hasn’t been ideal.

  • BetterBankStatement

    I’ve been trying to get a grip over my finances - and the best way of doing this is to have a budget - and stick to it. The problem with budgets is that I’m a little optimistic with my budget and manage to underestimate how much I spend.

  • Making sense of Virgin phone bills

    I’m the one that pays for the broadband and phone bill at my house. It’s part of the rent agreement with my parents, I can get a super-fast Internet connection - if I pay for it. When choosing broadband provider it was obvious that Virgin Media offered the best speed, and that it would be cheaper if I transferred the telephone line along with it. After all, it was only an extra £2 per month plus call usage. That shouldn’t really amount to much.

  • Optimizing Thematic theme using YUICompressor

    After making my theme changes (as mentioned in the previous posts) I noticed that my Wordpress blog seems to take too long to load. Without examining how long should be acceptable I decided to make some small optimizations. If I’m thinking about how long something takes to load, then it is too slow.

  • Using Google Charts and gchartrb

    The Google Charts is a simple API for generating charts and graphs. It’s designed so it can easily be embedded into web sites. The API consists of sending different parameters to a URL hosted on Google’s servers. It makes more sense when looking at an example: