A couple months ago I posted some tips on making the ri a bit more useful.

Disclaimer: I hate the term “business value”, it’s completely subjective and generic; it is one of my least favorite synergies.

I have been exploring the wide world of Behavior Driven Development lately with Cucumber. For the longest time I’ve been fascinated with Cucumber from a conceptual standpoint; a written-word testing framework, do go on! I’m quite pleased to finally be able to put it to good use with some recent projects that I’ve been working on.

There was once a time when I prided myself on my ignorance of SQL Joins, foolishly proclaiming “if I need to use a JOIN, I’ve already screwed up.”

It’s almost that time of year again! Almost time for Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles!

There’s something weird in the Ruby community that has been driving me crazy since I started using the language. There’s this habit, by what I hope is a minority, of choosing “clever” gem names instead of useful or descriptive names. I’m not above a good pun or play on words, but some gem names range between confusingly stupid and utterly aggrevating.

Jørgen pointed out that there’s no real compelling reason to use IO#popen over a combo of Open3#popen3 and IO#select. That said, Open3#popen3 is practically as brain-dead in 1.8 as IO#popen is. Regardless, I’m not going to let that get in the way of a good cathartic rant (the changes in 1.9 are pretty sweet though).

I figured I’d try something different for my birthday this year, an event which I normally don’t celebrate at all.

A couple of months ago my wife and I did a 10k trail run because, frankly, we’re idiots. Continuing in that tradition, we have a 12k trail run coming up this weekend, again, because we’re idiots.

One weekend in the not-so-distant past I started playing with Evernote, reading all sorts of LifeHacker-esque articles on how to use Evernote for super mega-awesome organization and note-taking, etc. I was so convinced that I would change everything to revolve around Evernote that weekend, that I went ahead and signed up for Evernote Premium after only a few hours.