Author Archives: Lee Mallabone

mig_constraints is not compatible with rails 2.3

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

Although it’s old, mig_constraints has sat in my rails plugin directory for a while now because it adds much needed foreign key support to ActiveRecord. I’m on of those crazy guys that thinks a relational database should maintain relational integrity, … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Setting up a kick-ass rails server on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Posted on June 27, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I recently created a new slicehost and thought I’d try the latest Ubuntu release with it. Unlike brightbox hosting, you only get a plain boring ubuntu installation out of the box on slicehost (and various other VPS-based hosting services). A … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | 1 Comment

Wisdom from a different (Internet) age

Posted on May 11, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

It doesn’t happen very often, but I was pointed to an online article recently that dates back almost a decade. The Pitchman is a story by Malcolm Gladwell about “Ron Popeil, who invented a better rotisserie in his kitchen and went … Continue reading →

Posted in Starting up | Leave a comment

Nokogiri fails to work on Solaris (11), but fix it like this!

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I’ll have a better fix up in the near future, but for now, the ruby gem “Nokogiri” crashed out on me on Joyent’s Solaris platform. Its error was a little cryptic unless you’re familiar with libc. I can’t reproduce it here … Continue reading →

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Issues with JBCP and Sybase

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

BCP is a method for quickly copying data into SQL Server or Sybase databases. It’s much faster than running INSERT statements, so if you have a large amount of data, it’s a tempting option. However, the trade-off for the speed … Continue reading →

Posted in Java | 1 Comment

Getting Rails 2.2 to work on Mac OS X, despite the MySQL ruby “gem”

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

rubygems makes package management a nightmare. This is demonstrated every time you try and setup a new server using your operating system’s ruby/rails packages. It gets fully demonstrated when you try and upgrade to Rails 2.2 on a Mac. You can … Continue reading →

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Head Hunting; a brand new way to recruit top talent

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I’m pleased to announce the first public beta release of an exciting new service from Crossbone Systems. Head Hunting is a revolutionary new way to recruit employees at a fraction of the cost of other methods such as recruitment agencies … Continue reading →

Posted in Announcements, Starting up | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fun with FBJS: “Can’t find variable: a43014453287_slider”

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Lee Mallabone

I’ve been trying to get a slider bar working recently as part of a facebook application. To get the example on the Facebook wiki working out-of-the-box was no problem. The problems came when I wanted to create the slider bar … Continue reading →

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Effortless online VAT returns with KashFlow

Posted on November 20, 2008 by Lee Mallabone

Once you are registered for VAT, sending in your returns every three months can be a bit of a daunting task, especially if you’re not keeping strict electronic records on a regular basis. I’ve blogged about various online accounting packages … Continue reading →

Posted in HOW-TOs | Leave a comment

Explained: learning Ruby on Rails (Part 2)

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Lee Mallabone

If you followed along in , you will have downloaded and installed Netbeans 6 to get a complete Ruby development environment. You should also have prototyped a web design idea, added some dynamic code to it, and got cosy with … Continue reading →

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