It seems installing Ruby 1.9 on Ubuntu without the use of RVM isn’t all that trivial. I had to poke around the system for quite a while before I got it running.

Why not RVM?

Well, I tried RVM but compiling Ruby took 3 hours on my EC2 micro instance and was eating all my CPU so that my webserver was basically not available anymore. To me that isn’t acceptable. Besides, I think it is highly wasteful to compile packages from source when there are precompiled versions available. I admit that apt is too slow to keep up with the rapidly moving gems ecosystem but for the Ruby interpreter itself I strongly prefer the OS to handle the installation.

I struggled with this today whilst trying to figure out Apache’s config options.

A thought or two about CSS precompilers

I just started a new job where git is being used and since I had accumulated some stuff in mit .gitconfig, I wanted it to be on my work computer too. I use a git repository for all my dotfiles, which I then clone on the machine and symlink files like .gitconfig or .vimrc to the home directory. This means if I add something to those files at work and want to use the configuration at home too I just need to commit, push and pull the changes at home. Well, this works pretty good until you realise that there are some config entries you want to be different in the two environments. Git’s user.email is obviously such a case.

Today I was desperately looking for some sample XML that Cobertura generates, as I was writing a converter from jscoverage’s JSON to Cobertura’s XML.