I uploaded files from my home (Linux) computer to Dropbox but could not access those files from my (Linux) laptop.  I was using the same distro (Fedora Core) for both computers with the same versions of Dropbox.  I was frustrated to say the least.  Fortunately I found the answer to my problem - courtesy of Fixing Dropbox Will Not Sync.

It seems the issue is permissions.  The author of the blog post included a script to fix the issue.  I used his script with a small alteration...  I removed the sudo parts of his chown and chmod commands.  Here is my ...

One of the key differences in the languages (Ruby vs. PHP) is the level of “object-orientation,” and (obviously) syntax. Ruby was designed from the start (~1993) to be an object-oriented (OO) language (EVERYTHING is an object) while PHP was, until recently (v5.0 – 2004), a procedural language. As a long-time PHP programmer who migrated to Ruby in 2006, I prefer Ruby’s implementation of Types and Objects over PHP's. I also prefer Ruby’s syntax AND coding best-practices over PHP’s.

Why is "Everything is an Object" in Ruby and not PHP?  (I know those of you who are ...

There does seem to be a "method to the madness" in the parameter order of PHP's built-in functions. 

For array functions the order is (needle, haystack).

For string functions, the order is (haystack, needle).

Array Function Example (needle, haystack):

array_key_exists( mixed $key , array $search )

String Function Example (haystack, needle):

stripos ( string $haystack , string $needle [, int $offset = 0 ] )

As of Friday, May 6, 2011, the Geekystuff dot Net blog was migrated from Mephisto (a CMS built on Ruby on Rails) to Zinnia (a blog built on the Django framework).

I decided to migrate for three reasons.  First, development efforts for Mephisto ended some time ago; second, I wanted to expand my programming experience into a non-PHP / non-Ruby language which has a web framework; and three, I found myself enamored with the Django framework and wanted some real-world experience installing and supporting it.

For those of you remarking to yourselves that this is the ugliest "look and feel" for ...

I noticed a lot of people searching for a way to delete all installed ruby gems and finding my Painless Cleanup of Ruby Gems With Similar Names page. I added this page for those of you who want to delete all installed gems instead of just cleaning them up.

Listing all gems is easy: gem list

OK, we can list our gems, but how do we delete them all? My list looks something like this:

abstract (1.0.0)
actionmailer (2.2.2, 2.1.2, 2.1.1, 2.1.0, 2.0.2, 1.3.6)
actionpack (2 ...

I have been riding the bleeding edge of Merb and Datamapper for about seven or eight months. Whenever the source was updated at Github , I would pull in the changes, rebuild, then reinstall the gems. There was a time when the Merb and Datamapper contributors were bumping versions regularly and I was having problems with versions interfering with each other. I wanted only the latest and greatest gems installed.

Luckily Merb gems all start with ‘merb’ and Datamapper gems all start with ‘dm’. All I needed to do was write a shell command which lists all gems beginning with ‘merb ...

Today I ran into an issue where my keyboard stopped working in KDE (Fedora Core 10, KDE 4.1). I just updated some rpm’s which included the xorg ati drivers and thought that might have been the problem. I logged out of KDE and into XFCE where the keyboard worked fine… doh!

I googled and discovered the problem was in my ~/.kde/share/config/kaccessrc file. The SlowKeys attribute was set to true (SlowKeys=true). I set the attribute to false (SlowKeys=false) and all is well once again.

I set the SlowKeys attribute to true when I was ...

This was my first Agile / Scrum book purchase and remains the cornerstone of my Agile library. It's an easy read and a superb starting point for people getting started with Scrum. Ken Schwaber uses case studies to illustrate Scrum concepts and practices. One of the most attractive attributes of the book is that Ken Schwaber does not mind sharing "the good, the bad, and the ugly" about implementing Scrum. He does a great job explaining roles, artifacts, and some "best practices." I consider this a must-have for anyone using or interested in Scrum!

This is number two in my ...

I am working on a Rails application using Apache and Mongrel on a Linux (Fedora Core) box. I want to be able to rotate the Rails logs to prevent them from taking up too much disk space. I found a number of blog posts / articles which had complicated(ish) directions to halt the mongrels, move (rename) log files, and then restart the mongrels. I knew there had to be a simpler way to handle this using the operating system. After much searching I ran into this blog post by Mike Mangino: Log Rotation with Mongrel.

I use Vlad the Deployer ...