Author Archives: Muriel Salvan

About Muriel Salvan

I am a freelance project manager and polyglot developer, expert in Ruby and Rails. I created X-Aeon Solutions and rivierarb Ruby meetups. I also give trainings and conferences on technical topics. My core development principles: Plugins-oriented architectures, simple components, Open Source power, clever automation, constant technology watch, quality and optimized code. My experience includes big and small companies. I embrace agile methodologies and test driven development, without giving up on planning and risks containment methods as well. I love Open Source and became a big advocate.

rb_iterate replaced by rb_block_call API between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9

You may have noticed that some Ruby libraries using C extensions were suddenly having core dumps when compiled using Ruby 1.9, whereas compiling with Ruby 1.8 got no problems. A good culprit might be the usage of rb_iterate method in … Continue reading

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Code surprise for today

A little code surprise today for all my beloved readers 🙂 You find out what it does 😉 Hint: executing it might help and is harmless Enjoy, with all my best wishes for this year! Muriel

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Migrating big applications from Rails 2 to Rails 3

Today will have a rather long and technical post, focused on all the steps needed for migrating big applications from Rails 2 to Rails 3. First question: why bother? Rails 2 is great, but Rails 3 is awesome. Apart from … Continue reading

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The Ruby C API – Basics

In my 2 previous posts, we saw how to write C extensions, and how to package them. Now time has come to see a little bit of the Ruby C API. This post will deal with the basics, next ones … Continue reading

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Packaging Ruby C extensions in nice gems

In the first part of this series on Ruby and C, we’ve seen how easy it is to write a C extension and use it in Ruby environment. However, in real world problems, a Ruby library will have several C … Continue reading

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How to write C extensions easily in Ruby

Lots of Ruby libraries suffer from performance. It is in fact one of the biggest criticism that is being made to Ruby. There are lots of ways to improve Ruby’s performance: use latest Ruby version, use JRuby, use Ruby Entreprise … Continue reading

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Understanding Spam … figures, business model, techniques, protection

Lately I got really bothered by Spam in my various forums, blogs and emails. It regularly costs me hours of anti-Spam protection setup, filtering false positives, reconfiguring my Captchas, and cleaning my databases. So I decided to better understand this … Continue reading

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My daily software stack

Hi This is a recurring question: “What soft are you using for your day-to-day activities ?” First, “day-to-day activities” for me mean lots of different things as a freelancer, developer and CEO. So I will try to cope with each … Continue reading

Entrepreneurship, My life, Ruby, Web development, Windows , , , ,

Howto add email notifications to your Redmine install on Heroku

After my last post (Howto install Redmine on Heroku), I wanted to enable email notifications on my Redmine install on Heroku. Here is the quick howto. Please note that Heroku does not have its own SMTP server (at least for … Continue reading

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Howto install Redmine on Heroku

A little howto to get Redmine running on Heroku: Install Redmine locally. Follow instructions given on the Redmine Install page. I used development mode only in this step. Setup git in the repository with git init Edit the .gitignore file, … Continue reading

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