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 and built it myself. So if you ever find you need to build yourself an activerecord-jdbc gem from subversion, here you go:

First make sure you have hoe installed.

jruby -S gem install hoe

Grab the source from svn.

svn co http://jruby-extras.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/activerecord-jdbc

Build the .gem

jruby -S rake package

Install the generated .gem file.

jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbc-adapter-[version].gem

MAKE SURE YOU UNINSTALL YOUR PREVIOUS VERSION

The chances that you’ll have to do this are very slim. Nick Sieger is usually super-on-top of making sure things are up and working the way they should be, but just in case.

As odd as it sounds, when you’re playing bachelor for the weekend while your wifey is chillaxing in Indonesia, you find a lot of strange things to do to amuse yourself.

I’ve talked before about a neat little piece that someone discovered over on the Strongspace forums about getting Subversion repositories working over there. I’ve been using this method a lot lately, and typing all the commands gets tedious. The long and the short of it is that you need to create the repository locally first, and then copy it up to your Strongspace account before you can do the checkout over svn+ssh.

As I was writing this little piece, I figured I might as well also say something about how I really love the Vibrant Ink TextMate theme that I originally discovered while reading Chu Yeow’s blog

Quite nice I think. And droplets you ask? Well, I was going through the NLMA (Neat Little Mac Apps podcast) history – and came across Photodrop – which looks incredibly useful. That triggered in my brain some memory that Transmit was actually supposed to do droplets in the latest version, and sure enough it does. So now I have a nice little Transmit droplet that lets me upload files (like this ruby app and the image above) with simple drag and drop onto this droplet mini-app thinger.

As for this ruby Strongspace Subversion app, you can grab it here

Usage is dead easy:

ruby svn.rb [strongspace_username] [repository_name]

You’ll be prompted with your password a couple times. Make sure you’re aware of what this app actually does before you run it – or you could find yourself short some files!

1. Create a new repository in your current working directory with the name [repository_name] provided as a parameter to the app
2. Copy the created repository to your Strongspace account
3. rm -Rf the local repository it just created
4. Checkout the new repository via svn+ssh.