Burning the midnight oil is a programmer’s CRACK!

If you’ve ever continued working on something, sort of like beating your head against the wall hoping to get rid of a headache, late into the night/early morning only to come back the next morning exhausted AND seeing your code has her panties on her half shaven head. Well, you know JUST what I’m talking about then.

PUT THE CODES AWAY, my friend. Put the codes away for another day.

Hello sobering Monday.

Eager to jump back into the fray of a suite of specs I left half baked Friday, I spent a little time first trying to figure out why I was getting a particular error when attempting to run the spec suite.

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/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:249:
  in `load_missing_constant':
  Expected /sekrat/awesomeproject/app/models/awesome.rb to define Awesome (LoadError)

Nice, eh? I’ve seen it before but I can never remember what causes it. Actually, I there are probably a number of ways you might run into this error message, such as the load order for plugins being incorrect. The way I encountered it today was by injecting a typo into an AR method, set_inheritance_column lacking the final ‘n’ in this case. So if you are shedding some tears over this, double check the spelling on your AR methods (has_many, belongs_to, etc..)

props to lifo

I’ve been using rspec for a while now and as soon as the excitement surrounding the plain text stories development manifested itself into a real feature I was dying to try it out. While tinkering with it I created some scripts in vim to try and bump the experience up a notch.

I’ve put them up on github so that maybe some others will find them useful and make ‘m better. :) I name my stories with a .story extension to make them easy to identify, others seem to like making them extension-less which I guess would be ok too if they could be found in a predictable path.

Included are ftdetection, ftplugin, syntax, and an indentation scripts.

obligatory screen shots…

If like me you’ve tried to update the rmagick gem on a gutsy (or older) release of ubuntu, the outdated nature of your imagemagick installation has been brought to your attention. Kind of amusing how out of date this particular package has been. shrug

Luckily the version in Hardy Heron will suffice our needs, so this is how I went about backporting it for anyone wishing to do the same.

Prepare..

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  sudo apt-get update 
  sudo apt-get build-dep imagemagick
  sudo aptitude install libdjvulibre-dev libgraphviz3-dev

Aquire..

Grab the imagemagick source package from the heron release..

1. Go to the imagemagick page in launchpad, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/imagemagick
2. Click the published version link on the right which at this time will take you to: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/imagemagick/7:6.3.7.9.dfsg1-2ubuntu1
3. Download the tar and diff links near the top of that page.
4. unpack the tar somewhere and apply the patch

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  tar zxvf imagemagick_6.3.7.9.dfsg1.orig.tar.gz 
  zcat imagemagick_6.3.7.9.dfsg1-2ubuntu1.diff.gz |patch -p0

 apt-get source imagemagick 

I suppose you could probably also update your sources to hardy, update and do the apt-get source, put your sources back to gutsy and update again.. whatever works for you, don’t go blaming me if you accidentally find yourself checking out how awesome the hardy heron release is though.

Carress..

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  cd imagemagick-6.3.7.9.dfsg1
  sed -i 's/libgraphviz-dev/libgraphviz3-dev/' debian/control

Build..

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  sudo dpkg-buildpackage && cd .. && ls -l *deb 

Install..

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  sudo dpkg -i l*deb i*deb p*deb

Enjoy..