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Comments have been turned off on my blogs for months, and I’ve been happy with the result. Gone were both the SPAM comments and the less than useful comments. There is a full discussion of my reasoning...

Using RSpec With Mixed Random and Or...

I prefer to have my RSpec tests ordered randomly to ensure we have condition independent code. Back in July, RSpec 2.11 was released, which added support for the –order argument on the commandline. Now...

Turning issues into pull requests

For the past several months, I’ve been using a nice feature that I’ve recently found out that many others don’t know about, so thought I’d draft it up.1 You have an issue in Github, so...

Heroku, UTF-8, and DATABASE_URL

Recently, I’ve been fighting with Ruby 1.9 and encoding in a Rails 3.1 app that we’re running on Heroku. The strange thing is that encoding was working fine on any local system we would try, but...

Server specific banner using RMagic ...

So, I have a complicated Rails project. I have a local server, a remote dev server, a remote staging server, and a production server. Recently, I had a situation where the dev server was shunting traffic to...

Bundle update “killed:” ...

Today was supposed to be a normal day. A simple pull-request merge, an automated Jenkins build, and then a database migration. What followed instead was a search for the cause of a build failure– or, rather,...