I just came to move some ruby scripts onto my mac mini, and to do so I needed to install a couple of gems. Now I realised I hadn't installed or updated rubygems on the machine for a while, so I figured it was best to update gem before installing the gems I wanted. Easier said than done.

When I create a new rails app, I'm constantly going back to another project and stealing the .gitignore file from it to make sure that git doesn't know about certain files rails either updates frequently, or stores machine-specific data in. The latter is generally just config/database.yml, because I develop alongside my colleagues at Brightbox and we deploy via capistrano, ...

When I create a rails app from scratch I like to include certain plugins to help me write the app, such as the Rspec testing framework instead of the built-in Test::Unit and jQuery instead of prototype.

This is just another example showing how I refactor code down to its bare minimum. The reason why I do this so much (and indeed I think why ruby is so easy to read compared to other languages) is because it makes my code more readable and less of a bugger to pick up after a while.

To search your php.ini file quickly and easily with the option to use regular expressions, I tend to drop back to the cli. The reason for this is I can easily parse the output of phpinfo() with grep, and can do various things with the output, could even pass it to a script if I really wanted to.