I just ran into a situation where I had a Ruby on Rails plugin (Substruct) that I am using for a site release a new version. One big disadvantage of plugins vs. gems in the rails world is versioning because you can modify plugin code. Anyhow, I needed to know what changes were made across the entire plugin directory structure, so that i could easily merge the changes I’ve made to the code changes that were released with the update.

Enter Kdiff, an Free, Open Source, Platform agnostic tool for comparing files and directories.

http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe -clean -vargs -vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Every once in a while i come across a pretty sweet flash/flex application…and what makes TitleViewer really cool is that it’s free and configurable.

Overview:

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/tiltviewer/ 

Demo:

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/tiltviewer/app/

Recently i had to search within a couple of hundred JAR files to locate which Java package needed to be included in my build path. Fortunately this isn’t too difficult with the help of Cygwin and a little command line script.

export search="search string"; for file in 'find . -name "*.jar"'; do echo $file; jar -tvf $file|grep $search; done

I recently migrated one of my rails apps from 1.2.6 to 2.0.2. I found that several things have changed or are no longer supported.

For example:

<%start_form_tag%>
...
<%end_form_tag%>

<%form_tag do %>
...
<%end%>

Pagination:

I got the error: undefined method `paginate’ … this is because pagination was ripped out.

The fix is to install the following plugin:

ruby script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/classic_pagination 

Auto_Complete:

I got the error: Undefined method `auto_complete_field’ for #
The fix is to install the following plugin:

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/plugins/auto_complete