http://blog.emson.co.uk Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:02:07 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Google Chrome is not just a browser Google Chrome was launched a few days ago on the 2nd September 2008, since then there has been much hype and articles written about it. So what is it? Well, Wikipedia describes it: "Google Chrome is a free and open source web browser developed ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/09/chrome-is-a-desktop-web-application-platform/ A friend had the following problem with their laptop the other day. When they open Microsoft Word they cannot select any text with the mouse, they couldn't even place the cursor into the text by clicking the mouse on the text. She said that the situation seemed to have occured when Norton ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/08/cannot-select-text-with-mouse-in-microsoft-word-fix/ I'm trying to put together a number of blog articles and many of them use the MySQL database, so I figured that I would post up some of my most used everyday MySQL SQL commands. Most likely I will append further commands as I write more articles so this ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/08/everyday-mysql-commands/ It's been a wee while since my last article, which has largely been due to my summer holiday. Anyway I've been reading up and experimenting with the SproutCore JavaScript framework. Its excellent but I wanted to explain why companies and developers should consider using it. So I've written an article on ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/08/sproutcore-and-web-applications/ Introduction I wrote this article originally so that I could write command-line apps using Ruby, as I got further and further down the line I realised that what I really wanted to do was create a command-line app using RubyGems. I use both Windows and an Apple Mac and I ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/an-almost-fix-for-creating-rubygems-on-windows/ When I initially started writing this RSpec guide I had planned to cover both traditional RSpec Specs and the new Stories feature, however the guide quickly became to big so I decided to focus purely on RSpec Ruby Stories, as opposed to RSpec Rails Stories. Why Unit Testing? Every pragmatic programmer tells ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/understanding-rspec-stories-a-tutorial/ I run some SQL scripts against Microsoft's SQLServer in a number of environments, test, staging and production. One of my problems is that these scripts alter the database schema and I only want them to execute if the change hasn't already been made. One of these changes was to remove a column ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/how-to-determine-whether-a-column-exists-on-sqlserver/ The Windows version of Ruby on Rails does not ship with the Sqlite3 database, even though the database.yaml configuration file is preconfigured to use Sqlite. This is a how to guide on how to install Sqlite3 on your Windows PC. This article assumes that you already have Ruby and Ruby on Rails ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/installing-sqlite3-on-windows-for-rails/ If you are using TextMate on your Apple Mac you may wish to download the RSpec TextMate Bundle and install it. The TextMate bundle can be found in the RSpec Git repository. In your Terminal.app enter the following commands. Please note that you will need Git installed ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/installing-the-latest-rspec-textmate-bundle/ Git is a version control system like CVS and Subversion. It was created by Linus Torvalds and used for Linux. It has recently been adopted by the Ruby community and many of the new Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects now use it. One of the reason's ... http://blog.emson.co.uk/2008/06/installing-a-git-client-on-osx/