I recently needed to decode/encode a string which will be used as text on one of the sites I'm syndicating to.

The problem:

The site escapes all html entities and tags. And since I'm posting to the site using Mechanize, I need to format the text so that it would come out clean and nice.

The solution:

HTMLEntities. I never really bothered what the HTMLEntities gem was. Never even wondered why it was a dependency of some gems/plugins I regularly use. Now I know. :D

I needed to use different ruby versions in one box so I looked for a good way to manage ruby versions. One google search and I've found what I'm looking for, RVM. So the first stop is Railscasts. Episode 200 shows how to install Rails 3 using RVM.

After some experimentation with the help of the screencast and the rvm documentation, I was able to make everything working after encountering errors with zlib and readlines. So as a general rule of thumb, install all available package that comes with rvm. Use the following command

rvm package install ree_dependencies

to install zlib, ncurses, readline, openssl and iconv. Then you can install any ruby version with the following command

rvm install <ruby version> -C --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr,--with-iconv-dir=$rvm_path/usr,--with-zlib-dir=$rvm_path/usr,--with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr

By the way, I'm using Ubuntu 10.10.

This is a super late discovery. I've been refactoring some code of a previous developer in a Rails 2.2.2 project. I needed to eager load some associations as well to avoid n+1 queries but I don't know how to do that if the primary key is not ID. After searching through google, I found a post somewhere (sorry, can't remember the link. But I'm sure it's in stackoverflow). All you need to do is set the primary key for that model by adding

Class Foo > ActiveRecord::Base
  set_primary_key :pkey

  has_many :bars, :foreign_key => :fkey
end

Then you can use the normal belongs_to

Class Bar > ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :foo, :foreign_key => :fkey, :class_name => 'Foo'
end