Wrongly used randomness can be the source of hard-to-detect bugs and security holes. This is relevant every time you use randomness, for example, when implementing an existing protocol/interface that requires random values or generating tokens for your next raffle. This article describes when to use which of Ruby’s randomness methods. […]

The NumberHelper functionality is now available as Numeric#to_s […]

Ruby’s structs are one of my favorite data types in Ruby. They help you to keep some defined structure in the dynamic world of Ruby. Often, it makes sense to use them instead of hashes or arrays. Read-only structs take the idea a level further. […]

And you’ll never want to miss them again! […]

A little #whyday project, finished at eurucamp 2012, that displays the urls and summaries of all the gems of a Gemfile. Put the code somewhere in your $PATH (I keep little helper scripts like this one in ~/r) and run gemfile from within a the project. […]

This is how you can use JRuby to connect to an oracle database without requiring Ruby to be installed on the system, but only Java. […]

After releasing version 0.9 of my cli password manager, I received friendly feedback and suggestions, which encouraged me to further improve it. Here are some of my experiences implementing pws 1.0: […]

• stores your passwords in a file on your disk
• encrypts the file with a master password
• is designed for every-day-use
• is written in 234 lines of understandable Ruby code… Read it!
• is tested with 222 Cucumber steps […]

This is my first jruby code (written for the clipboard gem) and I was quite surprised that you only need one-liners ;) […]

So you’ve installed (or upgraded to) ubuntu 11.10 and everything looks great… Except – uh!, lots of gedit plugins are only compatible with gedit 2! But don’t be sad.. or angry.. This guide points out, how to, nevertheless, create a solid foundation that allows you getting prodcutive with gedit! […]