How to install the `xelatex` binary on Ubuntu 14.04

We're usually running Ubuntu LTS versions. Sometimes newer hardware requires packages from more recent Ubuntu releases that only come with 6 months of support. If there is really no other way, it's possible to install packages from later Ubuntu re...

While the hardware mute button of my Lenovo x230 worked on Ubuntu 14.04 out of the box, it does not on Ubuntu 16.04. It is fairly simple to fix, though.

There is an extensive answer on Ask Ubuntu, but only part o...

While upgrading CarrierWave from version 0.11.x to 3.x, we encountered some very nasty fails. Below are the basic changes you need to perform and some behavior you may eventually run into when upgrading your application. This aims to save you some...

While it might seem trivial to implement an invoice that sums up items and shows net, gross and vat totals, it actually involves a lot of rules and caveats. It is very easy to create invoices where numbers don't add up and a few cents are missing....

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you n...

Boot partitions from installations prior to the 16.04 era are terribly small. When you install updates and encounter errors due to a full /boot partition, consider risizing it.

If you can't do the steps described below, ask someone experienced ...

I really love to use the shortcuts CTRL+Alt+ Arrow Left and CTRL+Alt+ Arrow Right to navigate through the code. It worked great on Ubuntu 18.04 and MATE but after migrating to my new notebook with GNOME and Ubuntu 20.04, I realized tha...

At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (> 1M downloads), active_type (> 1M downloads), and geordi (> 200k downloads)

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, w...

Capistrano 2 brings the shell command which allows you to run commands on your deployment targets.
There is also invoke to run a command directly from your terminal.

Both commands allow running Capistrano tasks or shell commands, and scope to...

For my computer science bachelor's thesis I programmed and evaluated a CLI Test Case Prioritization (TCP) tool for makandra. It has been written as a Ruby Gem and was tested and evaluated against one Ruby on Rails project....