If you just purchased a T-Mobile G2x phone, you may have been shocked when you realized that it does not have an LED light for notifications! It is hard to believe that such an expensive and powerful phone lacks a basic usability function like this. Luckily, there is an app called NoLED that will help [...]

One of the most important factors when troubleshooting the performance of an application or website, is the performance of the database. Improper indexing or inefficient SQL queries can kill the performance of your application rendering it useless. It is amazing what a simple tweak or change to a SQL statement can do. I have seen [...]

If you have tried installing PostgreSQL database on CentOS 5.5 using yum, you will notice that you an old, outdated version! There are several ways to get the 8.4.x version of Postgres installed on this OS, but here is the quick and easy method! Installing PostgreSQL 8.4.x on CentOS 5.5 Download the PostgreSQL 8.4 repository [...]

Have you tried doing yum install ruby in CentOS 5.5? If you have the default repositories configured, you will notice that it installs the ancient Ruby 1.8.5. Not ready to move up to Ruby 1.9, but would like to install Ruby 1.8.7 – well here is how to do it! Install Ruby 1.8.7 on CentOS [...]

When you login (via SSH or other method), to a Linux box, you will see a Welcome message that displays your Last Login time and date as well as other general information regarding the system. Here is an example: Linux sp-ubuntu 2.6.35-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 01:41:57 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux Ubuntu 10.10 Welcome [...]

This seems like a pretty simple piece of information to ask for, but then why is there no intuitive way for Linux novices to accomplish this? In Windows command-line, the output of the dir command includes the number of files and the number of folders in the current directory. Well, here are some ways you [...]

Are you attempting to install the sqlite3-ruby gem and you are receiving this error? Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: Error installing sqlite3-ruby: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb extconf.rb:3:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError) from extconf.rb:3 Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/sqlite3-1.3.3 for [...]

RubyGems is a package management application for Ruby that is used to quickly and easily distribute Ruby/Rails applications and libraries. If you are planning on doing any development in Ruby, this is a must have. RubyGems is for Ruby as apt-get and yum are to Linux operating systems. This article will show you various ways [...]

Welcome to Part II of how to SSH to a server using Ruby.  In Part I of this article, we gave you a simple example of how to SSH to a server and run a command. The hostname, username, password, and the command to execute were hardcoded in the example. In this article, we will [...]

Welcome to Part I of how to SSH to a Linux, Windows, etc. server using Ruby. This post will give you a complete code example to get you up and running right away! The code below will connect to the server specific and run the ls -al command. Be sure to change the values in [...]