If you copy the data files of a VirtualBox machine to another PC without exporting it as an .ova appliance first, it's painful to get it into another VirtualBox installation. Thankfully there is a workaround:

• Create a new machine
• Copy the .vdi drive data into the new machine folder
• In the machine settings, add that .vdi as a hard drive, and remove the dummy .vdi you created when creating that machine.

One of the more controversial changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 beta is the Mac OS-inspired change to have window buttons on the left side. We’ll show you how to move the buttons back to the right.

Or run this via console:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout \
 --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Soon after having written our shell-for script, we wanted to easily get dumps of our productions machines, too. This is how we do it:

dump-for staging [-s]

It will copy the dump to your project's tmp directory and name it according to the capistrano stage you're calling for, here: staging.dump. When you pass the optional -s option, the dump will automatically been sourced into your local development database.

This script ...

After having written useful scripts into makandra notes for a long time, we’ve now tied them into a powerful new gem: geordi.

It gives you the power to

• get a dump from your production database with dump-for production
• install your local gems to the production machine with install-gems-remotely
• execute rake tasks to several environments at the same time with power-rake db:migrate
• and much more

Check it out from github.

If you manipulate the DOM with JavaScript and your page contains nested elements with position: relative, chances are Internet Explorer 7 will not properly move to the right position.

I have not found a fool-proof workaround, but these are options that have worked for me:

• Try to lose some position: relative attributes, so they do not nest. This is often impossible, though.
• Force the correct redrawing of the elements using JavaScript. Adding a bogus class ($(element).addClass('touch')) seems to suffice.
• Try to give the off...

Recent versions of the Faker gem retrieve their strings from your locale file (e.g. config/locale/de.yml). This leads to awesome errors like this:

undefined method `shuffle' for "translation missing: de.faker.lorem.words":ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer

To fix this, copy the contents of a Faker locale file into your config/locale/de.yml.

This is stupid.

You need to
apt-get install libcurl3-dev

Since May 2011 we are cutting new gems using Bundler, which is less painful than cutting gems using Jeweler. You know a gem was cut using Bundler if you see the word Bundler in a gem project's Rakefile.

This is how to update a gem that was cut using Bundler:

• Say git pull or check out a repository from Github like git clone git@github.com:makandra/geordi.git
• Update the gem version in `lib/project...

Wrapping a string in this class gives you a prettier way to test for equality.

This is an awful way to test whether a number is shown on the screen:

Then I should see "5"

It is awful because the step above is green for 5, 5123 and -51.

This step definition below makes sure this doesn't happen. You can use it like this:

Then I should see the number 5

The step also works if you you'd like to test that the number is followed by a unit:

Then I should see the amount 5 €

The separator between the number and its unit is allowed to be either a space or a [nbsp](https://makandracards.com/makandra/838-generate...

Install FreeBSD

• Download a suitable image from this site
• Select File > New… to and follow the instructions, choose the .iso file you downloaded as image file
• Start the new virtual machine and follow the instructions
  • formatting is a little complicated, so let freebsd.org help you

Install VMware Tools

Choose Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools from the VMware menu, then as root:

^
# install required packages
pkg_add...

Capybara allows you to select DOM elements, e.g. by using field, find_field(...) or field_labeled(...):

role_select = field_labeled('Role')

In the example above, role_select is now a Capybara::Driver::Node. You can call a number of methods on such a node, e. g. in order to click it or to make a selection on its descendants. These methods should be the same regardless of the driver Capybara is using (drivers are e.g. the headless Rack::Test or Selenium).

It i...

Asset pipeline, HTTP streaming, jQuery as default framework, auto-reversable migrations, identity map for ActiveRecord.

Ruby 1.8.x support will be dropped with or after Rails 4.

passenger-install-apache2-module --auto

Today I needed to execute a ruby gem executable with sudo. But, surprisingly, bash would tell me command not found for the gem that ran lovely without sudo.

Gem bins are installed to /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin, which is not in sudo’s PATH. Unfortunately, you can’t change the path, since sudo for Ubuntu is compiled with the --with-secure-path option.

#Solution A: symlink the gems (if you need only some few gems)

• for each gem you need for sudo, run `ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/gem_for_sudo /usr/local/bin/gem_for_sudo

#Soluti...

Before installing chef, make sure curl is installed and sudo finds your gems

• setup chef-client: follow this guide
• setup chef-server: follow this guide

#Important

• execute all commands from within your chef-repo directory, else you'll be missing out on configuration files

Sometimes PDF cucumber tests fail at the first test run and succeed at the second run. You can fix this with this step:

When PDF generation is ready
And I follow "Save as PDF"
# Checks for PDF contents go here

Here is the step definition:

When /^PDF generation is ready$/ do
  Then 'I should see ""'
end

If you need to strip carriage return characters from a text file, you can use Vim:

vim file.txt
:set ff=unix
:wq

We regularly need to connect to the server in order to e.g. access the production console. Guessing the Capistrano deploy user and then again guessing the right directory on the server is awkward, so we wrote a script that parses config/deploy and gives you the handy command shell-for.

Run it from any project directory like this, passing a Capistrano multistage deployment target:

shell-for staging

Now it also supports commands to be remotely executed before loading the bash. Use --no-bash to only execute the command and load no ba...

If you’re a Mac user and want to increase the security of your data, check out the attached paper.

Encrypt your drive with PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

Encrypt your Time Machine backup like this.

Internet Explorer 5+ is aware of conditional comments that let you target HTML for selected versions of IE. For example the HTML below would ask users of IE 6 and IE 7 to install Firefox:

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
  <a href='http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/'>Get a real browser</a>
<![endif]-->

You might wonder how to express such a conditional comment in your favorite templating language, Haml. You might even have converted a template back to ERB just for this ...

When you simply want to get to know Puppet, follow puppetlabs’ Learning Puppet Docs. They give you a handy introduction inside a virtual machine they provide. You can watch the talk by Garrett Honeycutt 'Expanded Introduction to Puppet'.

Do not miss their cheatsheat and their [learn-puppet virtual machine](http://info.puppetl...

Although regular expression syntax is 99% interchangeable between languages, keep this in mind:

• By default, the dot character (".") does not match a line feed (newline, line break, "\n") in any language.
• Some languages allow you to modify the behavior of a regular expression by appending a modifier to the pattern expression. E.g. /foo/i makes the pattern case-insensitive in many languages. Note however that some of these modifiers may not exist or mean entirely different things in different languages.
• Some languages have a m...

We recently decided to put static content for HouseTrip.com to Amazon Cloudfront for a faster user experience. This happens fully automatically on deploy and is transparent in development. Together with a heavy use of sprites this sped up page load time quite nicely.

These are a couple of the problems you need to solve in order to do this:

• There is no good way to invalidate Cloudfront cached assets, and Cloudfront will ignor...