A little code snippet to let you remove HTML from any string in Ruby:
[source:ruby]
class String

# remove all HTML tags from the source string
def strip_html
self.gsub(/< \/?[^>]*>/, "")
end

end
[/source]
Then to run the code just do this:
[source:ruby]
blurb_html = "

Thanks for visiting our site.

"
blurb_text = blurb_html.strip_html
[/source]

Note: I'm not going to finish this article as ultimately I ran into problems with Cygwin so migrated to running all Windows-native tasks. Still, in its raw state someone might find some use out of it.

I came across this today when trying to find an easier way to present a six-part form in a Rails project - a tabbed interface system built upon Prototype (an integral part of Rails). Called Control.Tabs it makes tabbed interfaces a synch to do: simply add an unordered list containing links to the blocks containing your to-be-tabbed content, and add a line of JavaScript to start the ball rolling - that's it!

Just a quick reminder for myself: if you're doing a form that is uploading files, remember to add :multipart => true to the form tag, e.g.:
[source:ruby]
< % form_for(:product, :url => products_path(@product), :html => {:multipart => true, :method => :put }) do |f| %>

< % end %>
[/source]

Last night when I went to bed my new (to me anyway) Powerbook G4 was working fine. This morning when I got up it was severely misbehaving - there was 9.5gb of RAM in use and nothing was responding. I started shutting everything down and at one point tried to turn off the local ColdFusion 8 server using sudo, only to have an error that my account wasn't in the sudoers list; given that my account was an administrator, this was not good. I left it to continue rebooting but when I got back, a half hour later, it had pretty much frozen up trying to load a few starter apps. This, along with the noise coming from the drive, told me what I already knew - the drive was dead.