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.

Today’s xkcd: the whole World’s map

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Muriel Salvan 5 Comments

xkcd is a fantastic webcomic. I follow it for a few years now, and I must say I love it. Today’s comic (number 1110) featured an enormous scrollable world to visit. I downloaded all images of this world and assembled … Continue reading →

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Howto: Install RMagick on Windows 64 bits

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

I ran into a lot of problems trying to install RMagick on my 64bits Windows, but finally succeeded. Here is how: Install ImageMagick: version 6.6.9-5 32 bits. The version is important: I tried with 64bits versions, and also with 6.6.9-9 … Continue reading →

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A little helper to understand French companies’ system

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

Lately I was focused on understanding the way French companies work, how are taxes paid, and how to best choose companies’ statuses based on this. I wanted to have real figures and understand where does money go when ruling a … Continue reading →

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Unobtrusive Ajax on Rails3: Welcome to rails-ajax

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

My recent contribution to Rails: rails-ajax. Here is its story: I am always amazed to see how simple the Ajax use-case can be, how many websites could take benefit from a basic Ajax setup, and yet how difficult it is … Continue reading →

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Full stack integration testing with Rails3: browser-oriented, JavaScript, continuous integration

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Muriel Salvan 4 Comments

This post is a complete summary of all my efforts to have a complete and decent solution to test Rails applications. As it is a long post, here you have the table of contents: Introduction Prerequisite for this tutorial Ruby … Continue reading →

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How to compile FastCGI library

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

The simple answer, as usual is ./configure; make; make install … … Well not in this case: it will break in some environments (mine is x86_64-linux with gcc 4.4.5 and fcgi >= 2.4.0). During the make command, you will likely … Continue reading →

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Using data sets in Ruby: performance of Hash vs Set

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Muriel Salvan 1 Comment

A data set is a collection of objects that ensures each object is present only once in the collection. In Ruby, there are 2 simple ways to define data sets: use the Set Ruby standard library, or use the Hash … Continue reading →

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How to change Rake tasks’ prerequisites dynamically

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

Several times in my developer’s life I have found it very useful to use Dependency Graph Programming. That means mapping processes into invokable targets having dependencies on other targets that need to be invoked prior. This is typically what Rake … Continue reading →

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How to require Rake >= 0.9 with Ruby >= 1.9

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Muriel Salvan Leave a comment

Very simple problem, judging by this title. I have Ruby 1.9.2 I installed Rake 0.9.2.2 with RubyGems (gem install rake) I want to use Rake 0.9.2.2 in my Ruby environment (Rake 0.9.2.2 defines Rake::DSL module). How can I do ? … Continue reading →

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How to pilot external processes’ stdin and stdout in real time using Ruby

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Muriel Salvan 1 Comment

I finally made it! Regarding my previous post about failing to pilot processes on Windows, I searched again and finally found a solution. [EDIT] I have bundled the solution I explain in this article in a nice gem that you … Continue reading →

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