Daniel Wintschel is humandoing

I’ve started to use Paperclip on a pet project I’m working on (a recommendation from Josh Owens), and the API is great, except for the fact that I couldn’t get it to work. Files were being uploaded fine, but my thumbnail and other variations were not generating. The documentation says that the whiny_thumbnails option defaults [...]

Avdi Grim has begun a thought-provoking series surrounding the idea of sustainable software development – specifically targeting Ruby as an example. With some of the recent discussion surrounding “monkey patching” in Ruby, I think that the timing seems about right, for some serious thought to be given about the long-term effects of maintaining Ruby-based code-bases, [...]

A couple weeks ago I ran into some horrible issues with Oracle and activerecord-jdbc. Inserts were failing with an “invalid column index” error. It turns out this was reported as JRUBY-2018 and resolved, but there wasn’t a release of activerecord-jdbc that contained the fix. Being impatient like I am, I grabbed the head from svn [...]

In the process of setting up my new dev machine, I decided I was going to try using MacPorts to install all of the dev-type-software instead of installing into /usr/local. James Duncan Davidson has a great overview article (that needs no further explaining from myself), titled Sandboxing Rails With MacPorts. Another similar article can be [...]

I wrote this article for IBM developerWorks a while back, but never ended up blogging about it. So at any rate, here it is: Ruby on Rails and XML – for better or for worse.