The default scaffolding generated for a model has the capability of throwing a number of exceptions, resulting in a 500 level response status being sent to the client. The largest cause of these ex...

I was running a deployment using Capistrano earlier and came across a strange error. The error said: Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - /tmp/501/SSHKeychain.socket This was a puzzling er...

The validations provided by the Rails framework are very powerful and provide a very easy, no cost way of validating forms prior to submitting them to the database. You might see the validations in...

There has been a performance issue that has been well documented when using Builder::XMLMarkup. Over the course of time, I’d noticed that my rails app has gotten slower and slower building XML as m...

One of my main likes of the Ruby language is that it very clearly allows you to express programmer intent. I don’t want to get into the argument of whether or not Ruby is more beautiful than anothe...

I’ve been absorbed in some of the testing sessions, specifically RSpec, while down here at SDWest. What has become crystal clear to me over the past few days is that simply writing unit tests is no...

After having upgraded to Leopard 10.5.2 and enabling IMAP support through Mail.app, I have had a problem with a new label being consistently generated on my gmail account. No matter how many times ...

For some time, I’ve wanted to learn more about RSpec and how it can be used to express desired behavior in your story tests as well as your unit tests. At the SDWest conference today, I took a sess...

I arrived yesterday in Santa Clara for the SDWest conference. This being my first time to the Silicon Valley, it came as quite a big deal to drive down Great American Parkway, past the McAfee campu...

Leopard’s new backup system has made it virtually inexcusable for users to not have automated backup systems in place for their Mac. It can not get any easier to do this: plug in a USB/Firewire dri...