View Sandboxes for Rails
Designing HTML views is an iterative, interactive process by nature. And anything that slows down the iterations, slows down development. I was working on a form recently where the steps…
Make Emacs-Server Write a PID File
Oddly, emacs-server doesn’t seem to have an option to write a PID file when it starts up. Here’s some ELisp you can drop into your init file to make it…
A Guardfile for Redis
I ran into a project that required a running Redis server for the tests and development environment to work. Here’s what I threw into the Guardfile to make sure a…
Keep local modifications in Git-tracked files
I often find that I want to make local changes in configuration files that have been checked-in to Git. For instance, I find that the database.yml has been checked in…
RubyMine, Spork, RSpec, Cucumber
I can’t take credit for this one; that goes to Ben Lindsey. But since the answer I needed was buried in a comment, I thought I’d give it a little…
Checking the existence of a super method in Ruby
Ruby gives methods the ability to call up to the superclass definition of themselves. Or it may not be a parent class definition; it might call up to a definition…
Determining Singleton Class Status in Ruby
Q: How do you tell if a given class is an ordinary class or a singleton class? A: Test whether the class is the first element in its own ancestor…
Treating Arrays as Sets
Reading through the Rake source code the other day (a pastime I highly recommend), I was reminded of a technique I don’t use often enough: my_array = [:foo, :bar, :baz]…
VirtualBox NAT Forwarding
It takes three lengthy commands to configure a port to be forwarded from the host machine to the guest OS in VirtualBox. My guess is everyone who uses VirtualBox for…