Priceless! (via LuisDS)

Stonch's Beer Blog: The Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell

Had some good times here last night with the London Ruby User Group.

About the pub: The Crown is, for me, one of the best pubs in Clerkenwell. A year ago I wouldn’t have said that. The pub has an upstairs room which once hosted music hall performances. It’s reputed to be the location of a meeting between Lenin and Stalin in 1905, when the former was editing Iskra from 37a Clerkenwell Green a few doors down and the latter was in town to suck up to some party elders.

[daily dose of imagery] lightning in sunset

Small Talk with a Web Designer (via Doug and Aaron)

Full time with ROOV!

I’d been working with ROOV.com as an independent contractor for a few months now, and really enjoyed the vision and direction of the team. Just this month I have taken on a more involved role and am excited to be working full-time with ROOV.

Check out the site and let me know what you think so far. You can hit me up at nick@roov.com for ROOV-related things.

Also, we’re always on the lookout for good people! In particular, we’re currently looking for a stellar designer and another developer or two. Hit me up if you occasionally find yourself having conversations about Photoshop vs Illustrator, HTML vs XHTML, CSS frameworks vs CSS from scratch, RSpec vs Test::Unit, Rails vs Merb, Mootools vs JQuery, technology and postmodernism vs Christian traditionalism…

Gotcha: Building Merb from source

Trying to install the latest Merb from source but having a problem with rake install for merb-more?

(in /usr/local/src/merb/merb-more)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- merb-core/tasks/merb_rake_helper
/usr/local/src/merb/merb-more/rakefile:12
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

Assuming you had no problems installing merb-core, then it’s likely that merb-core’s lib directory is only readable by root. Try the install again with sudo, then check the permissions on the gems you just installed to make sure they’re readable to everyone. On OS X that might look something like this:

chmod -R a+rX /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/merb*

Rail Spikes: Testing is overrated

The truth is, no single technique is effective at detecting all defects. We need manual testing, peer reviews, usability testing and developer testing (and that’s just the start) if we want to produce high-quality software.