Using POSIX signals in Ruby is pretty easy. Use the trap method and pass it a block that will execute when the trap is received.trap("TERM") { puts "TERM signal received."}sleep(50)If you run this and send it a TERM signal (using kill <pid> for example), it will print "TERM signal received." One thing to note, this will override Ruby's...

Using POSIX signals in Ruby is pretty easy. Use the trap method and pass it a block that will execute when the trap is received.trap("TERM") { puts "TERM signal received."}sleep(50)If you run this and send it a TERM signal (using kill <pid> for example), it will print "TERM signal received." One thing to note, this will override Ruby's...

I had a great time at Railsconf. I got to meet up with a lot of coworkers I haven't seen in a while. The buzz around the conference was energizing. It definitely feels like the community is maturing. There were a lot of people there using rails for their day to day business. I also was happy to see how a lot of the sessions were very ruby...

I had a great time at Railsconf. I got to meet up with a lot of coworkers I haven't seen in a while. The buzz around the conference was energizing. It definitely feels like the community is maturing. There were a lot of people there using rails for their day to day business. I also was happy to see how a lot of the sessions were very ruby...

I've been working with the iPhone SDK lately. I'm working on an application to input receipt information for expense reports. It's a fairly simple app, but its useful to me and a good starting point.Here's the things I like so far:Apps are written in Objective-C and use the same Foundation framework as OS X apps. Things like NSArray,...

I've been working with the iPhone SDK lately. I'm working on an application to input receipt information for expense reports. It's a fairly simple app, but its useful to me and a good starting point.Here's the things I like so far:Apps are written in Objective-C and use the same Foundation framework as OS X apps. Things like NSArray,...

Ruby has a nice class in the core library for turning objects with iterator methods into Enumerable objects: Enumerable::Enumerator. I discovered this class a while ago, but hadn't thought of a need for it at the time.Recently, I was integrating with some web services and needed to parse some XML. REXML's XPath is a great tool for this. XPath...

Ruby has a nice class in the core library for turning objects with iterator methods into Enumerable objects: Enumerable::Enumerator. I discovered this class a while ago, but hadn't thought of a need for it at the time.Recently, I was integrating with some web services and needed to parse some XML. REXML's XPath is a great tool for this. XPath...

A couple months ago, we were trying to improve our build process to better reflect our production environment. Our application runs on Oracle and the database schema is owned by one Oracle user, and our application logs in as another. The application user is granted rights to the tables it needs to use. There are also synonyms defined for all...

A couple months ago, we were trying to improve our build process to better reflect our production environment. Our application runs on Oracle and the database schema is owned by one Oracle user, and our application logs in as another. The application user is granted rights to the tables it needs to use. There are also synonyms defined for all...