Installing the nanite gem in JRuby

January 13th, 2010

“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” — Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I ran into a small problem while trying to get the nanite gem working under JRuby. I just wanted to post a quick heads up with a solution. Hopefully google can somehow route people here that have the same problem.

First you need to install the dependencies amqp, eventmachine and jruby-openssl, which should install without a hitch (jgem install amqp eventmachine jruby-openssl).

But now a jgem install nanite will complain about building native extensions. This is because it’s trying to use the json gem. This is easily fixed by first installing the json-jruby gem, then modifying nanite’s Rakefile to point to this gem as a dependency instead of the regular json.

Now a jgem install nanite should work.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 2

January 11th, 2010

“A list is only as strong as its weakest link.” — Donald Knuth

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 2

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Reviewing Stuart Halloway’s Programming Clojure, introducing the delicious social bookmarking engine, sharing a cool slideshow presentation on The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs, demonstrating Node.js and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit.

How are you spending your time? What are you learning about? Leave a comment and let me know.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 1

January 7th, 2010

“Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.” — Tim Berners-Lee

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 1

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Video review of Gary Vaynerchuck’s (@garyvee) Crush It!; Jerry P. King’s Mathematics in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour; Joseph Mazur’s Euclid in the Rainforest; Woopra; and StaticMatic.

2009 Hacker of the Year Award

August 14th, 2009

“I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” — Jack Benny

Trying something a little different with this post, I present to you my picks for the most influential developers of the August 2008-2009 season. I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions on developers which I may have missed that deserve a mention. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the API, stupid

August 4th, 2009

“Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.” — Russell Simmons

My first real language was Pascal. My first few programs were written in Basic, but even then it felt like a toy language. Many of the techniques that I learned from Basic applied directly to Pascal though — control structures like loops, conditional statements, operator precedence and so on. Just like mathematics is built upon fundamental axioms like the Well-ordering principle, programming is built upon these fundamental techniques. They’re constant, they don’t vary from language to language. Read the rest of this entry »

Book Report: Letters To A Young Mathematician

June 23rd, 2009
I’ve been focusing a fair amount of energy lately on sharpening the math skills, so I was intrigued when I stumbled upon this book, Letters To A Young Mathematician by Ian Stewart. Read the rest of this entry »

The Virtues of Version Control — Presentation

May 10th, 2009

This is a presentation I gave at our local developers meetup. It’s based on an earlier post of mine from here. Read the rest of this entry »

Book Report: The 4-Hour Workweek

April 2nd, 2009

I just finished reading this book by Timothy Ferriss so of course I needed to write down my thoughts and comments. This is a quick and enjoyable read and you definitely owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. Read the rest of this entry »