Category Archives: Howto

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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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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Howto: Install RMagick on Windows 64 bits

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

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

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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How to change Rake tasks’ prerequisites dynamically

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

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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