This should have been easy – enable Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on Windows 10, and install a version of Linux. However, I ran into a few problems. This post is a collection of the things th...

A programming language like Ruby comes with lots of features and capabilities which we often don’t learn in detail and instead end up rewriting things in our application code. This post looks...

One of the cool things in Ruby is to be able to pass a block to a method or go through all the elements in a class (such as an array or hash) and do something as you step through each element. This...

Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write (from the Ruby web site). On Chri...

There are times when a Windows 10 PC feels very sluggish when you’re going through a list (e.g. emails in Outlook or Thunderbird) or even code in a text editor. Often, it has nothing to do wi...

Windows 10 has a nifty feature that allows you to use a second Windows 10 computer as a wireless display by casting your screen to it. However, you will likely have problems casting winodws that ar...

We use JRuby quite a bit both for Rails applications and also for general Ruby scripts. I do get asked why one would use JRuby instead of Ruby (meaning C Ruby). This short post is an attempt to lis...

A lot of Linux code redirects output to /dev/null as a way of not sending any output to the console. I work in Windows and often use Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as the command shell. This is just a sm...

I just downloaded and tried to run VisualVM on Windows 10 with OpenJDK 8 but it failed. The fix is simple but took a few minutes to find the solution. I downloaded VisualVM and followed the instruc...

When running with JRuby, you have a few options for selecting the Garbage Collector. This post shows one observation on the memory consumption depending on the garbage collector and JAVA version. M...

One of the great advantages of using JRuby is the ability to connect with Java libraries (JARs) and call Java code from your Ruby scripts. This post shows how to use Apache POI (the Java API for Mi...

I work in Windows and often use Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as the command shell. This post touches on the new command prompt I use. Background The default prompt in Command Shell is the full path to ...

Rails 7.0.0 was released just yesterday and as a Ruby user primarily on Windows, I was keen to see if it works and runs on Windows. Thanks to the stellar work of everyone involved, it just works. I...

Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write (from the Ruby web site). On Chri...

Accessing the Oracle database from Ruby on Windows requires a few different things but generally works fine. This post covers some of the things that you would encounter and also shows how to acces...

I have evolved a habit and guidelines on how I handle e-mail categorisation and storing. This aids my productivity, so I am sharing it here in case it helps someone else. E-mail gets a bad rap and ...

E-mail gets a bad rap and depending on who you ask, it’s terrible or wonderful. To me, it complements numerous other tools and I realised that I actually over-think the subject lines for my e...

If you decide to rebuild JRuby locally and want to use Warbler to create an executable JAR with the newly built JRuby, it’s not obvious what you should do. This post provides one way to manag...

There are times when you will need to try out if your code works with a new version of JRuby or maybe, even make a change to the JRuby code and see if this is a change you want to contribute. This ...

On Windows, you might face an error installing SassC for use with Rails or with Jekyll, especially if you are using JRuby. Resolving this issue requires having a C/C++ compiler installed on your Wi...

Cairo Graphics is a powerful 2D graphics library. Although Cairo is a C library, there are bindings available for many languages. The RCairo gem allows Ruby programs to use Cairo. In a previous pos...

Cairo Graphics is a powerful 2D graphics library. Although Cairo is a C library, there are bindings available for many languages. The RCairo gem allows Ruby programs to use Cairo. This page has the...

Getting Cairo Graphics to work with Ruby on Windows is straightforward although it scares you a bit in the installation. In short, using rcairo works perfectly fine on Windows at least with Ruby 2....

This post show how to have multiple Java runtime environments on your PC and switch between them on Windows so that a particular program uses the version that you want it to. Background Due to Java...

I have used Jekyll since Christmas 2016 and have never updated it since it worked fine for me. Just over a year ago, I tried to update to Ruby 2.7 when it was brand new and ran into a few errors an...