Ariejan.net

It may seem easy for some, but for others, installing MySQL on Ubuntu or Debian Linux is not an easy task. This article explains to you how to install the MySQL Server and Client packages on a Ubuntu/Debian system.

First of all, make sure your package management tools are up-to-date. Also make sure you install all the latest software available.

As a web developer, you probably know all about browsers. They suck. Well, some more than others. But, if you develop apps for Windows users, you’ll have to test your app with Internet Explorer.

Sometimes you’re working on a Rails project and you think: “hey! This should be easy!”. Well, most of the time it is. I’m working on a project that allows people to rate objects (what they really are doesn’t matter at all).

Got bash? Here’s a nice snippet that will return the number of messages currently in the postfix queue.

postqueue -p | tail -n 1 | cut -d' ' -f5

Feel free to post any updates or improvements.

We all know “The Flash” to be a very useful tool in almost every application we write. What does “The Flash” actually do?

The flash provides a way to pass temporary objects between actions. Anything you place in the flash will be exposed to the very next action and then cleared out.

Well, that’s all nice, but what if you notice that your flash is not cleared, and is shown in one or more subsequent requests as well?

As David Heinemeier Hansson already told us all during his RailsConfEurope 2007 keynote, it’s time to take off the party hats. It’s no longer at time to celebrate all the new stuff we get. It’s time to celebrate what we have already.

With this statement DHH ends the revolution of Rails. During the past three years a lot of new and exiting features were added to Rails. However, now the time has come to evolve Rails further. No more new and exiting stuff, but fine tuning. Making things even better than they already are.

You may have heard of a very nice Rails technique that used content_for and yield to stuff custom blocks of content into a layout. For example, in a view you could add a block like this:

4e744f7c8e49381089cae92aba2174b6016

A few days ago BlueprintCSS 0.5 was released (read the Olav’s posts here). I’ve updated the plugin accordingly. The most important change is the use of 24 (!) instead of 14 columns.

Installation and usage of the plugin have not changed. See my original announcement for more information.

This plugin is no longer available. Blueprint nowadays ships with a very good ‘compress’ script that allows you to generate all kinds of nice BluePrint layouts. Having a plugin to just copy some files seems a bit excessive.

I hereby proudly announce my Super Simple Authentication plugin and generator.

All right, what does it do? Sometimes you need to protect your actions and controllers, but you don’t want to go about installing restful_authentication or anything like that. Adding a simple password for certain actions would suffice. So, I wrote a little plugin that can generate some code for you that allows you to easily protect your app with a simple password.