By default Ubuntu comes with gedit as it’s text editor (if you are using the standard Ubuntu version, which comes with Gnome), I however personally prefer to use vim instead. If you don’t have gvim installed yet, you can do so by installing the gvim-gnome package. To make gvim your default text editor do the following:

Yehuda Katz wrote up an excellent description of the procedures to build and release gems on his blog. You can find it here: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/04/02/using-gemspecs-as-intended/

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization program (for those of you that don’t know what that means: simply put it is a computer program that can emulate other computers within your own computer). One of the things that I use it for is to run my personal development and testing servers within my own workstation that don’t exist to the outside world. You don’t have the mess of dual boot, nor do you have the need for lots of additional hardware for your development and testing setups!

Over the years I have used numerous programming editors and IDE (integrated development environment) programs. At the beginning of this year I decided that it was time to pick one text editor and master it. I decided to take a look at two long time players on the text editing field that are available on most platforms and then choose one to master… I am talking about Emacs and Vim.

Good news for Linode customers that want their data hosted in Europe, as Linode announced that they’ve opened a datacenter in London. Read their blog article here for more information :)

Upgrading Ubuntu server 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Karmic) on Linode is a breeze. Simply change the kernel to the latest available version in the Linode manager, reboot your Linode, logon to the Linode shell (to get console access to your Linode), update your packages to the latest versions (apt-get update and apt-get upgrade) and install the update-manager-core package (apt-get install update- manager-core) and then perform do-release-upgrade (as described here)).

At work we recently upgraded from Rails 2.1.2 to Rais 2.3.4. Lots of good improvements in 2.3.4, my compliments to everyone who made the new release possible!

The upgrade was relatively problem free, the only real issue that we ran into was that somewhere in between 2.1.2 and 2.3.4 the *_tag helpers (text_field_tag and such) have started behaving slightly different in relation to element ids. These helper methods now call the undocumented sanitize_to_id method, which cleans up the element ids by getting rid of characters such as [ and ] and putting in underscores instead.

To access my work’s network from any location outside the office my employer requires me to use a VPN. In Ubuntu this does not work by default. While the network manager does have a VPN tab, all it’s buttons are greyed out. Depending on the type of VPN that you need to access you need to install additional software packages.

SQLite has the advantage that it is an embeddable database, so you don’t need a separate database server to use it (which is very convenient when developing software). Note that when you are using JRuby you can also use Apache Derby (which is an embeddable database written in Java) instead of SQLite if you want to.

After reading about the topic of my previous post (your browser history not being secure), I decided to take a look at the various security plugins that you can get for Firefox (my browser of choice). I came across the plugin BetterPrivacy that referenced Local Shared Objects (or LSO).

LSO are basically Flash cookies (some people call them super-cookies), and from what I have read any Flash app that gets loaded (including those annoying adds you get everywhere, or perhaps a hidden app that you don’t even see) can store a set amount of data on your hard drive (the default is 100k).