Dave Burke : Online Community and Social Business Specialist

If you do test driven development in Ruby on Rails you are probably familiar with running $ rspec spec/whatever_spec.rb at the command line where you'll see green or red, depending on the phase of the testing.  Guard is a Ruby Gem that automates runn... [More]

How many times have you heard people say that they need to keep a Windows PC around because they need it to do Quicken? I've heard it often. In fact, I'm one of those people, but I do not know for how much longer since I installed the ve... [More]

If you are a happy Apache Passenger user you might lose some of that joy when your Rails site looks like this after an upgrade to Ruby 2.0.0. This was particularly problematic for me since I had recently re-installed Ruby to reside in a perso... [More]

If you find yourself using sudo when installing and updating your Ruby Gems, sorry to have to be the guy to say it, but something is wrong with your Ruby setup.  But hey, it works, right?  Yes, but weirdness can result when gems are installed wi... [More]

I recently came to the conclusion that I was spending too much time at the Linux Terminal command line navigating to my Rails Projects and knew there had to be a better way.  All of my projects have the path /mintland/webapps/[PROJECT]. Given that al... [More]

After moving from Microsoft Windows to Linux I discovered that I now think more in terms of efficiency, of using the power of Linux to get the job done better and faster.  Most of us Linux geeks seem to always have a terminal window or two open, whic... [More]

I read several instructions on upgrading RubyGems in Linux and didn't have much success until discovering the Rubygems-Update Gem.  With Rubygems-Update keeping my RubyGems version current is no longer an issue. Using one recommended upgrade approac... [More]

If you're like me you find yourself using cloud storage more and more.  Most cloud services like the two I use most often, Dropbox and Ubuntu One, tell us that our documents are secure and I believe them.  But I've been around long enough to kno... [More]

Like most of us, my work is divided between a laptop and a PC and I use cloud services like Dropbox and Ubuntu One to share data between them.  Grsync and Rsync takes data sharing to the next level, giving me the ability to synchron... [More]

According to Wikipedia, a Koan is a story, dialogue, question or statement used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and test a student's progress.  When referring to learning Ruby, the Koans Project is a valuable introduction and l... [More]