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Ruby Learning by Reversing: Native Gems, Part 3
The first series of Learning by Reversing examines a Ruby native gem to understand how it works. Part 3 continues the exploration by looking at what is included in the gem and how it is set up so that the native extension is built and available once the gem is installed.…
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Ruby Learning by Reversing: Native Gems, Part 2
In Part 1 , we looked at the background to the gem that we are going to explore and saw how the gem works, and also how to change, rebuild and install the gem locally. Part 2 explains how the gem gets picked up and used by Ruby when you require it, and how Ruby knows what to do. In this part, we will jump across a number of files to figure out what is happening. We will not rebuild the gem or look at the Makefile, etc. in this post.…
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Ruby Learning by Reversing: Native Gems, Part 1
In this series of posts, I want to look at how to create a native gem for Ruby in C. Actually, it would be more accurate to say – I want to look at how a native gem has been created in C for Ruby. So, I will look at one native gem and we will reverse back and understand what has been done and what it means.…
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Getting FreeMind to work with OpenJDK
This is a short note for me to remember how I got the fantastic open source FreeMind mind mapping software running on Windows 10 using OpenJDK instead of the Oracle JDK. It seems like FreeMind is really old and has not been updated for a while but honestly, it does a lot of things and most of them really well.…
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Ruby 3.2 on Windows: Day 0 - install and Hello World
Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write (from the Ruby web site). On Christmas Day 2022, the core team released version 3.2 with major improvements and new features. Now that RubyInstaller 3.2.0-1 has been released and is available for all to try, it’s a good time to set it up on Windows and try the features of Ruby 3.2. This post will help you get started with Ruby 3 on Windows, and covers the basics of installation. This post is along the same lines as the JRuby Day 0 post from earlier.…
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Grace under fire: thoughts on support during an issue
For a while, I have wanted to put down my thoughts on how we should behave when providing support to the users of our systems if an important issue has been found. More specifically, these ideas come from providing support in enterprise setups where you might work with a system integrator or a business user of your product.…
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HotWire and Stimulus Tutorials - Bookmarks
Rails 7 brought Hotwire and StimulusJS into the forefront. I have been meaning to spend some time on it and had bookmarked these sites or tutorials. This post is just a collection of bookmarks that I can add more to if I find other things.…
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Information Display at Kyoto Bus Stops
One of the great things about travelling is the opportunity to see how other cities and countries do things. I’m always curious about how transportation is different in different cities and how information is shown. In this, I find Japan fascinating in how information about public transportation is shown. This is an example that I spotted in Kyoto.…
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Textile Markup Tip 1 - Creating an Anchor on a Page
I keep forgetting how to create a link to a part of a page using Textile Markup and have to look it up every time I need it. So, I’m putting this short post here so that I remember.…
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Uninstalling Ruby On Windows
I was surprised to see a question on the GitHub tracker of RubyInstaller2 on how to uninstall RubyInstaller2 on Windows. I had not expected it to be a big problem. This post just quickly summarises the options.…
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24 JAPAN: Lessons for Project Managers and Programmers
I watch a fair amount of television (well, technically, streaming video on apps) and recently, I watched (and really enjoyed) 24: Japan – the Japanese remake of the American 24 franchise. It was really good and as I watched through the 24 episodes, I started to notice that there are things that we can learn from the show about managing projects. That brings us to this post – written half-seriously and half in jest.…
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Bookmarks: Resources for Images, Sounds, etc.
This post is a collection of links and resources where you can access and find images, sounds, etc. for your next presentation or creative pursuit such as creating your desktop wallpaper.…
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Despite problems, making WSL2 Work
This should have been easy – enable Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on Windows 10, and install a version of Linux. However, I ran into a few problems. This post is a collection of the things that I had to do (and where I found the information) in case I ever need to do it again.…
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Ruby Tips 11 - Level up your usage of the Ruby Hash (Part 1)
A programming language like Ruby comes with lots of features and capabilities which we often don’t learn in detail and instead end up rewriting things in our application code. This post looks at a few simple things within the
Hashclass that you could be using.…
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Ruby Tips 10 - Adding enumeration to your class
One of the cool things in Ruby is to be able to pass a block to a method or go through all the elements in a class (such as an array or hash) and do something as you step through each element. This is a short post on how to add an
eachmethod to your class.…
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Ruby 3.1 on Windows: Day 0 - install and Hello World
Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write (from the Ruby web site). On Christmas Day 2021, the core team released version 3.1 with major improvements and new features. Now that RubyInstaller 3.1.0-1 has been released and available for some time, it’s a good time to set it up on Windows and try the features of Ruby 3.1. This post will help you get started with Ruby 3 on Windows, and covers the basics of installation. This post is along the same lines as the JRuby Day 0 post from earlier.…
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Solve: A fast Windows PC feels sluggish when moving through code or a list
There are times when a Windows 10 PC feels very sluggish when you’re going through a list (e.g. emails in Outlook or Thunderbird) or even code in a text editor. Often, it has nothing to do with the computer per se, but just the keyboard settings.…
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We're having trouble with your reqest - Netflix fails on Windows
Windows 10 has a nifty feature that allows you to use a second Windows 10 computer as a wireless display by casting your screen to it. However, you will likely have problems casting winodws that are running streaming video, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.…
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Why we like to use JRuby
We use JRuby quite a bit both for Rails applications and also for general Ruby scripts. I do get asked why one would use JRuby instead of Ruby (meaning C Ruby). This short post is an attempt to list out the main reasons we like to use JRuby. As background, I should mention that we are more a Ruby house and do quite a lot of work in Ruby.…
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Redirect all output to /dev/null on Windows Command
A lot of Linux code redirects output to
/dev/nullas a way of not sending any output to the console. I work in Windows and often use Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as the command shell. This is just a small note to remember how to do the same in Windows.…