Setting up Ubuntu for Ruby on Rails development

NOTE: This is a work-in-progress. I’m publishing it early so that Sam can use it. If it doesn’t work for you exactly as expected, well, that’s to be expected.
Every time I setup a new Ubuntu machine, I have to search around to come up with a procedure for getting everything I need to develop Ruby [...]

Rain8net Ruby Library v1.0.0

I previously wrote about a product called Rain8net. I’m happy to announce the initial release of my Rain8net ruby library. The library is now available from rubyforge.org.
Or, just install it like this:
gem install rain8net
Now you won’t have to worry about sending the specific codes I detailed in my last post. Controlling your [...]

RFC_READ_TABLE with Ruby and SAP::Rfc

Warning: another code sample is included in this post.
I spent a few hours this morning trying to use Piers Harding’s SAP/Rfc library for Ruby to read a table from SAP. I found several examples using other languages (Perl, VBscript, PHP, etc.), but the only Ruby example I could find reads the entire table. Figuring out [...]

Ruby: Howto convert numbers to letters

Let’s say you have a series of numbers (1,2,3,4,5…500+) and you need to convert them to letters like A,B,C,D…AA…ZZ (think Excel column headers.)
I searched and searched to find a built-in way of doing this with Ruby, but I couldn’t find it. So, I tried to write my own:
def number_to_letter(n=1)
  n.to_i.to_s(27).tr(“0-9a-q”, “A-Z”)
end
That works great except that [...]

Things I commonly do when starting a Rails project

Here’s another post from me for me. When starting a new Ruby on Rails project, I tend to do several things the same each time.
1. Setup SVN repository. Most of my projects are completely unrelated, so I usually have to setup a separate repository. The best walkthrough I’ve found is here.
2. Create development/test databases in [...]

Hostmonster on Rails

A client of mine recently moved their web hosting to Hostmonster, and I was tasked with migrating a Ruby on Rails application to the new server. I ran into a few snags.
First of all, I followed their tutorial.
The default rails welcome page worked fine, but I kept getting “Application Error” on everything else. The logs [...]

Using RubyODBC in Rails on Linux to connect to MS SQL Server

(I really need to work on shortening my titles.)
I spent the day trying to figure out one little problem. I setup a brand new server for the Intranet at work. I set it up with Fedora 7 and started configuring it for my rails apps. Since our corporation has decided to use Microsoft [...]

Using the “dry_scaffold” and “dhtml_calendar” plugins with Rails 1.2.3

I spent the morning trying to get a lame little site up and running. I didn’t know it would be an issue until I couldn’t turn back. Information was sketchy, so here’s my addition to the sketchy info I had found.
Keep in mind, these instructions are only designed to help if you already had these [...]