You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll core-dump

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a month:

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

Rubygems – a confession

I have a love-hate relationship with RubyGems.

Over the years, the interface and usage has changed a little here and there — and it seems I never learned to keep up with it. When I use gems (on a variety of systems, sometimes with varying versions of RubyGems and/or the Ruby interpreter), I sometimes use trial and error to get things to work.

It used to be standard practice to set RUBYOPTS=rubygems — but I think that changed. It used to be necessary to do that or to require “rubygems” in the source — but I’m not sure what the current state is. For awhile we had to use require_gem or gem_require or something; but that changed. I thought for awhile we could get away with a simple require — but I’m not sure.

Bottom line, I’m never sure of the exact current usage of RubyGems, nor whether it is dependent on the RubyGems version, the Ruby version, or both.

While I’m on the topic of gems — in general, I like case sensitivity in most areas of computer life. With gems, though, it is more of a nuisance than anything else. I have been bitten by this multiple times. Should this change?

I like the concept of integrating gems with github. But it needs to be handled carefully — let’s make sure we coordinate well between github and the “classic” gem repository. Everyone should play well together. I think Eric Hodel had some good ideas here, but I am so out of the loop, they may have been implemented weeks ago.

Rebooting my Ruby blog…

I’ve been ignoring the Ruby community lately — I haven’t been reading or posting to the mailing list, and I have a long list of unfinished projects both large and small. My old blog is history.

That’s going to change. Not 100%, and not overnight. But I am a Rubyist, and I need to be a participant in the community of like-minded people.

For starters, I will grit my teeth and start this new blog. If I fail to maintain it, please feel free to comment or to email me and say, “Why aren’t you blogging?” I have a big bag of excuses already prepared.  🙂