Typically, you would install rubygems like so:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz
tar xfvz rubygems-0.8.11.tgz

cd rubygems-0.8.11
sudo ruby setup.rb

Unfortunately, attempting to install anything will generate an error:

sudo gem install rails –include-dependencies
ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
Could not find rails (> 0) in the repository

As I understand it, the Ruby package will look in /usr/lib/ruby/gems, but the rubygems tarball will look in /var/lib/gems. To get around this, create a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ruby/gems/ /var/lib/gems
sudo gem update –system
sudo gem install rails –include-dependencies

I haven’t had much time to do anything but sleep or work the last few weeks but I had to take a quick break to share something very, very cool.

I needed to add some browser detection code to my current project. This is such a standard thing I knew someone had to have written a version that I could use and lo and behold, Mozilla has done it: The Ultimate JavaScript Client Sniffer.

The page is marked as obsolete and a historical reference but that’s okay with me. I’m trying to detect obsolete browsers, so I figure it’s appropriate.

As a whole I love C# but sometimes I find some quirk that I just don’t understand. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation of why it works the way it does but I don’t know what it is.

I was building a Gtk.TreeView last night and setup an enum for each column in the TreeView. No big deal, right? The enum looks something like this:


enum Fields
{
enum1 = 0,
enum2,
enum3
}


Then, to build the column I do something like this:

TreeViewColumn col = new TreeViewColumn ();
CellRenderer NameRenderer = new CellRendererText ();
col.PackStart (NameRenderer, true);
col.AddAttribute (NameRenderer, "text", (int)Fields.Keyword);


Notice on that last line that I have to cast the enum member to an int, even though the type of the enum is int, you still have to cast its value.

You can specify the base type of an enumerator, but it defaults to an int. You could do this (and I tried) but it doesn’t change anything:


enum Fields : int
{
enum1 = 0,
enum2,
enum3
}


It would be nice to not need to cast the value of the enum, especially given the ability to explicitly set the type of the enum. I don’t know the internals of how the compiler works nor have I read the CLR specification. It’s just annoying to to tell an enum that it’s an int, only have to remind it of that fact every time you use it.

So I sit down tonight to make some layout changes to a client’s website. The changes were minor, moving a form from the bottom of the page to the top and shifting some data around. No big deal, right? The code in question involves some external javascript code supplied by a third-party vendor. No big deal, I thought. Famous last words.

I move the code around and refresh the page. There is significant lag while the browser tries to render the form. Odd, I think, but maybe the server the javascript is being pulled from is slow. Better to pull the javascript local, right? I pull the code down and crack it open, with the intent of either embedding it directly in the page or at least pull it from a local file.

Holy shit what a disaster.

The file consisted of 5 lines of code, only one of which was actually necessary. The problem was that the single line was approximately 46,838 characters long. Yes, you read that right: 46,838 characters.

Let this serve as a public plea to anyone who develops web applications in any form: For the love of all that is sacred, never, ever, neglect the endline. Endline characters are my friend. They should be your friend, too. If you can’t grasp the fact that an application, especially a web browser, might have problems handling FOURTY SIX THOUSAND characters without a line break, then I have one favor to ask: find a new line of work. People like you make it more difficult for people like me to do my job. Sure, I get to play the part of hero when I show my client their “new and improved website” that loads an order of magnitude faster because I simply applied sane whitespace rules. At the end of the day, however, I would rather spend my time doing my job and not cleaning up your crap.