global fixtures are evil, but we’ve got a bunch of unit tests depending on them, so we still need them around
here’s a neat [and generally fast, though a degenerate O(#tables^2) case is possible] way of deleting all fixtures without invoking db dependent ways of ignoring foreign-key constraints, and without loading all the objects into memory [...]

Trampoline Systems is hosting a visualisation workshop this coming Saturday, 24th May, organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Come along if you’re interested in open source visualisation technologies (Prefuse, Flare etc.). The goal is to have a very informal setting to talk about various aspects of visualising data. Find out more in the official announcement.
Hope [...]

I’ve put together a script for creating DMG files without using OS X…it requires Linux, I’ve tested it on Kubuntu 7.10 but it should work on anything recent.
Run the following commands:
# This gets and builds a patched version of Apple’s diskdev_cmds package which will work on Linux
wget http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/mb_boot_tv/diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
wget http://www.ecl.udel.edu/~mcgee/diskdev_cmds/diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2
tar xzf diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
bunzip2 -c diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2 | patch [...]

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It’s a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

No big changes this time, mainly compatibility fixes for JRuby 1.0. It is now also possible to build the project using Maven, for those too afraid to use rake. Documentation and code for springy are available here.

I just started working at Trampoline Systems yesterday. Some of you might know my blog already (the one with kitten pics and programming rants). The first thing I did was configuring all the software on my new MacBook. Most of it went all right without any problems, but a few gems didn’t want to install, complaining about jni.h missing. jni.h was on the box, so the problem was basically that the gems were looking for it in a wrong place. Problems like that can usually be solved by strace -e trace=file gem install whatever | grep ‘jni.h’ and a symlink. Not this time, because Macs does have strace. There’s something called ktrace, but it didn’t seem to provide information I needed.

While trying to create a unified testing framework (shared between Rails and our Java backend code) I came across ActiveRecordJDBC which is an adapter to use JDBC drivers with JRuby on Rails. It works fine, although it can be a bit complicated to get a DRY database.yml configuration. The goal is to get rid of our dbunit/manually crafted database tests on the Java side by using ActiveRecord fixtures. After some research I found out about the Rails integration project (now called GoldSpike), which tries to make it easy to deploy a Rails app on a Java servlet container such as jetty. As far as I know Thoughtworks uses this approach to deploy their new product, Mingle. GoldSpike is under constant development but it is already usable, although a few patches were required. After everything was set up, a simple

We use last.fm a lot in the office - but one thing I always found annoying was that there’s no easy way to find out what’s currently playing (you need to go to the web page and hit refresh, very distracting) so I knocked up a little ruby script which uses growl to display the currently playing song.

While working on some tweaks to our website I decided that for the archive I needed to be able to select a list of categories used. Should be easy, right? Here’s a sample of the XML:

We’ve just got ourselves a couple of new servers for running SONAR on, for internal use and demonstration. They are quite beefy, with 8GB RAM, 15k disks, and 8 x 3.2GHz threads. We decided to go with centos 5 as the operating system, since we have had pain installing Oracle on our debian platforms. Here is the install procedure I uncovered, which gets the server ready for SONAR on either MySQL or oracle. It covers installing Ruby, RubyGems, lots of useful Gems, Java, and Oracle 10g