Here be hax. Don't ever do these. ;-) --More--

Here's a few things I refactor as I write code down initially. Not entirely convinced it's strictly refactoring, but it's how I amend from one pattern I see in a line or three of code into a different structure that I feel achieves the same result with cleaner or more concise code. --More--

In a ruby script, there's a keyword __END__ that for a long time I thought just marked anything after it as a comment. So I used to use it to store snippets and notes about the script that weren't really needed inline. Then one day I stumbled across the DATA constant, and wondered what flaming magic it was. --More--

Sometimes you need to have a rough idea of where your website visitor is located. There's many ways to geolocate them, but if you just want to go to country level then MaxMind have free geo databases available to help you. When we needed to do this quickly on-the-fly at EmberAds, we came up with the trifle gem, which supports … --More--

OS X Lion comes with ruby 1.8.7-p249 installed, although it's compiled against libedit rather than libreadline. Whilst libedit is a mostly-compatible replacement for libreadline, I find there's a couple of settings I'm used to that don't work in libedit. (Like history-beginning-search-backward.) --More--