planet jerry! - Home

Class of 90? Let's Reunite

2008-04-25T17:28:00Z

Members of the Warsaw Community High School Class of 1990: Planning has begun on our 20-year reunion.

So far, we have a group on facebook (since that is free) where some of the discussions are taking place.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26729364664

The first date we’ve discussed is June 19th, 2010. Anybody have any problems with that right now?

How different are McCain and Hillary?

2008-03-11T14:48:00Z

Would a Hillary presidency be substantially different from a McCain White House?

Will she succeed in bringing health care to the uninsured? She didn’t the first time she tried. The bumbling Clinton administration set back the cause of universal coverage by a generation.

Will she reign in the power of the presidency and roll back the unconstitutional pattern of behavior blazed by the Bush administration? This is not a cause that I have heard her take up. Her inability to take a stand against torture is an implicit endorsement of its use. In this area, I think McCain may scratch my anti-torture itch more effectively than Clinton.

Will she take up the cause of the poor and fight poverty? Welfare reform under Clinton the 1st was a pure capitulation to Republican interests after taking a beating in 1994.

Will gay and lesbian Americans be made whole citizens under the law under Clinton the 2nd? “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a politician’s answer to a moral question.

We support Obama because he will change America and Americans for the better. For Barack, becoming President is a means to an end. The end we seek is a better nation.

Winning the White House as an end in itself, exclusively for the sake of beating the Republican party, is insufficient. Winning without conscience is losing.

Merlin Mann Inbox Zero Video - Notes

2007-10-18T17:35:00Z

build walls where none existed

knowledge workers – add value to information

time and attention are finite, most vital resources

multitasking is a myth

honor where your time and attention go

demands on time and attention are infinite

ultimately – make sure stupid blocks don’t get in the box

Manage Actions – map time and attention to the things you consider important

Prior Art: GTD concept of processing – advanced common sense

Email is just a medium
one place for anything
process to zero – every time you check your email
convert to actions

Processing

more than checking
deal with the problem
less than responding

Answer the question: So What? What actions do I have to take as a result of this email?

Don’t just take orders – Make Sandwiches

Limited Number of Options – 5 Verbs (in order of desirability):

delete (or archive)
- a single folder
delegate (horizontally or vertically)
- with a follow-up tickler (2 week reminder, @waiting_on)
respond
- 1 or 2 line replies
defer – respond, but outside work first
- to_respond folder
- inbox is for stuff you haven’t read
do
- or add to a to-do list or calendar

The Processing Habit

“We are what we frequently do.” – Aristotle

Do Email Less – once per hour for 10 minutes or less

Cheat

filtering
templates

No fiddling

East Coast Ethics

2007-09-19T19:22:11Z

As an Indiana resident and longtime fan of the Indianapolis Colts, it has been gratifying to watch the New England Patriots sweat while under investigation for taping the defensive coaches of the New York Jets.

Unfortunately, fans of the Patriots have been less than crestfallen at the ethical breech. This absence of outrage originates in a fundamental east coast world view that rewards cheating and laughs off ethical constraints.

To me, Belicheck and Patriots quarterback Brady are the embodiment of “east coast ethics.” For the average fan of the Patriots, Bill Belichick must be commended for taping the opposing sidelines – he would be a “sucker” if he didn’t push the envelope.

Brady, the playboy, impregnates supermodels at lightning speed, but can’t seem to figure out why deliberately breaking a written rule of the NFL might be considered cheating.

Since he can’t deal with adults but still finds success in his occupation, Belichick is called a genius. Instead of genius, he instead gets by on cheating and intimidation. Ask brain-damaged former Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson about Belichick’s commitment to his players. It ends the second you’re no longer useful to him. Belichick abstains from morality, in favor of expediency.

Picking up a well-known, team-splitting troublemaker like Randy Moss is no problem for the Patriots. As long as he produces on the field, his personality and his behavior are irrelevant. Adding one more spoiled apple to the oily, soulless bunch has no obvious effect.

The integrity-free exploits of Belichick and Brady stand in sharp contrast to the personas of Colts’ coach Tony Dungee and quarterback Peyton Manning. Regarded for their earnestness, ethics and work ethics, Dungee and Manning bring an old-school, midwestern personality to their team and to their state. That’s a personality that I can root for.

Dick Lugar: Hoosier Statesman

2007-09-19T17:37:28Z

I am consistently impressed, but never surprised, by the wisdom and leadership exhibited by Indiana’s senior senator, Dick Lugar. According to restore-habeas.org, he supports the Leahy-Specter-Dodd Amendment to restore habeas corpus. Between this stance and his recent “outside the party line” take on Iraq, it is a wonder the rest of the Republican senate even lets this guy in the clubhouse anymore.

Revered for his foreign policy acumen, Lugar should be commended for having the courage to step out of line and take on his own party, and put nation above partisanship on the real issues of the day.

At another level, though, Lugar is reflecting a state that is only solidly red in the eyes of national commentators on presidential election nights. Casual observers note Indiana’s track record of supporting Republicans in presidential races (LBJ was the last Democrat to collect our electoral college votes), but fail to note the generally-functional two party system that prevails in most of our other races.

Hoosiers routinely split the statehouse, abhorring the leadership vacuum that a one-party system inevitably creates.
After a pair of Democrats, our current Republican governor is thought to be in jeopardy in his bid for re-election.
Between Lugar and Evan Bayh, we’ve elected two senators who are moderates in the positive sense of the word, building consensus in Indiana and in Washington instead of exploiting easy class, social and political divisions.

Coming at the call of a moderate populace, the actions of Dick Lugar should be a source of pride for all of Indiana.

190 over 130 is bad?

2007-09-13T21:16:00Z

It turns out my experimental “Fast Food Only” diet of the past 5 years was not as well-designed as I had originally thought.

Wacky blood pressure. It turns out my experimental “Fast Food Only” diet of the past 5 years was not as well-designed as I had originally thought. Luckily I’ve ducked hospitalization twice. Nitroglycerin brings the blood pressure down out of the “imminent stroke” range and into the “prolonged suffering preceding the eventual stroke” range with just a raging migraine as the side-effect.

I’ve cut out a ton of sodium that I had been eating (OK, literally 2-3 grams per day) and I hope to be in the “might eventually be healthy” and then the “healthy” range soon. Hopefully last week was my “rock bottom” to be followed by a precipitous improvement.

Rove Heading Home? I don't buy it.

2007-08-14T05:03:00Z

Karl Rove said Monday that he would resign his position as a deputy White House chief of staff at the end of the month. I would love to accept this as good news, but until I see a house on top of him, I won’t believe the wicked witch is gone for good.

Isn’t this the perfect time to slither to a new campaign and weasel back into the ruling class for four more years? Be on the lookout for slime trails leading to New Hampshire, Iowa or South Carolina.

The Comcast Channel-Adder Guy

2007-07-08T01:50:00Z

Comcast channel-adder guy has been reading my mind again. I first noticed this phenomenon last summer during the world cup. The day before the first game was to be shown on ESPN2, we magically got ESPN2 in HD. That fall was the second instance, this time the local Fox affiliate’s HD hit our lineup, just in time for the first NFL broadcast of the season. Thanksgiving night, the CCAG struck again, sneaking the NFL Network’s HD feed over the top of a previously assigned HD channel in time for the first NFL-N regular season broadcast.

Today, he’s back, adding the Universal HD Channel in time for its coverage of the Live Earth concerts today. Allegiances can change, love can fade, but I always know that the Comcast channel-adder guy has my back.

South Bend Ruby Group Meeting

2007-05-30T13:46:00Z

Last night, John Nunemaker and I presented information we gleaned from RailsConf earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. Below are notes from my test-heavy track of RailsConf 2007 sessions, as presented to the SouthBend.rb ruby and rails user group on May 29, 2007.

Here’s a MacBook’s view of John’s Presentation.

Two crowd reaction shots are in my sbrb flickr set.

RailsConf 2007: Intro to TDD for Rails

2007-05-24T02:51:00Z

TDD and Refactoring, with a dash of Extreme Ping Pong…

Intro to Test-Driven Development for Rails – David Chelimsky

We all love to hack, deep in our holes. – David Chelimsky

Description

Test-Driven Development is a design and testing practice in which the developer writes the test before the code being tested. Practiced with discipline, TDD can lead to cleaner, more flexible designs that are implicitly testable and, consequently, more easily maintained over the lifetime of an application.

In this hands-on tutorial, we’ll go through the basics of TDD, beginning with a simple Ruby program and then moving onto a Rails application. This is intended for Rails developers of any level (but with at least some novice Ruby and Rails experience) who have little or no previous TDD experience.

Extreme Programming Practices

User Stories => expressing simple requirements from the perspective of a user in the system. forces developers and users to talk about the details during the development process (versus documenting the whole thing up front)
Customer Acceptance Tests
Test Driven Development
Pair Programming (increases the bus number)
Refactoring => change the structure of the code without changing the behavior of the code
- assumes you have the right tests and enough tests => not infallible

“Clean Code That Works” => The Goals of Test-Driven Development

What the hell was I thinking earlier today? - David Chelimsky

It’s cheaper to do something right than to do it over.
Will feel slower initially.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. - Martin Fowler

code should tell its own story
tests tell how the code fits together.

TDD Demo

Ping Pong => one programmer writes a failing test, the other programmer makes the test pass
what is the error and how do I make it go away?
test/unit ships with ruby => looks for method names starting with test, catalogs them and reinitializes the test class, creating a new instance for each method
assert asserts the existence of an object (nil makes it fail, 0 is an object, so it would pass)
try to have 1 assertion per method
“tell, don’t ask” => instead of asking an object for stuff, tell it to do stuff. results in more loosely coupled systems.
read fowler’s refactoring book
TDD is about design
don’t write any code except to make a test pass => sometimes seems counter-intuitive
code is a liability, not an asset
clarity is king in tests, not DRY
DRY is about objects, not typing
weigh duplication against clarity
setup comes from test/unit, runs before each method
good names are vital
reduces the number of up-front decisions you have to make. postponing decisions is a competitive advantage.
test collections for 0, 1 and 3
code dojos
rspec and bdd

TDD Cycle

write a small test (one assertion per test)
watch it fail (compilation errors count)
make the test pass doing the simplest thing that will possibly work
refactor to remove duplication
repeat

Refactoring

Improving the structure of code without changing its behavior

run all of the tests
- they all must pass
make a change
run all of the tests
- they all must pass

Must be green (passing all tests) before refactoring. Comment out a failing test to get green if you must.
Refactoring should never take you into the red (failing tests).

Mock Objects

mocha can do mock objects in test/unit; rspec has its own mock objects

RailsConf 2007: Testing Legacy Rails Applications

2007-05-23T20:27:00Z

Looking through my notes, I really made my own “Testing” track at RailsConf. Obviously the product of real-world experience, Rabble’s session on testing “legacy” rails apps was instructive, measured and to the point, laying out a step-by-step path to full test coverage.

Adding Tests to Legacy Rails Apps – Evan (Rabble) Henshaw-Plath

Description

Most first-time Rails apps are built before a developer understands their importance. Testing is painful in many frameworks and ignored when many people switch to using rails.

Ruby on Rails encourages regression testing in the framework by making it easy and creating the tests out of the box. Despite the encouragement, many Rails developers jumped ahead to the coding and left testing to languish for months or years untouched.

This talk will provide a pragmatic approach to adding testing to your existing Rails application. Built on real-world experience adding test coverage to large Rails applications. The talk will cover the benefits of adding incremental test coverage to an existing app and techniques for getting started on testing a legacy app.

Techniques for testing a legacy app:

Steps to adding tests
How to get on the path of writing and using tests
Using tests in deployment
Adjusting release cycles with expanded test coverage
Integrating testing in to the developer’s workflow

Tools for testing a legacy app:

Building tests from the logs
Evaluating test coverage using rake and rcov
Using zentest to build out tests quickly
Autotest for setting up cia and continuous_builder
RIG: Rails Integration Generator

Even a few tests with the right setup can help improve a project if they are integrated into, and run as part of, the development process. There is hope for the legacy Rails app without tests.

Do we have legacy apps already?

No, but we do have test-less apps.
Testing != Health Food
- Who has time for tests?
Testing == Debugging

Starting

Don’t do it all at once. It won’t work.
first, run rake
- mysqladmin -u root create chq2_test
Use Migrations
Scaffolding is broken => those tests don’t work.

Now, let’s get going. One step at a time, literally:

find a bug, write a test
refactor a method, write a test
treat each method as a box – don’t get pulled in to testing everything
test one thing at a time
Test: what goes in? what comes out? (returning something in the method)

rake or direct testing

rake testing: rake test:uncommitted
direct: -n test_name to run one test in a file

build tests from logs

parameters => reproduce actual requests

what to test:

right response code
correct template
variable assignment
assignment of desired object

test coverage

rcov test coverage => what needs to be tested

autotest

sometimes our tests can run themselves
continuous integration only runs when you check-in

fixtures == ugliness

ar_fixtures
use mocks
fixture scenarios

RailsConf 2007 Sessions: Clean Code

2007-05-23T19:41:00Z

Robert Martin’s session on clean code has already reshaped my development practices. Bob provided an excellent overview of the use of Test-First practices and nailed down many of the gaps in my understanding. His demonstration of TDD without making breaking changes was especially interesting, serving to affirm the mantra “I am not allowed to make a change that breaks the system.”

Clean Code – Robert Martin, Object Mentor

Description: Ward Cunningham once said that Smalltalk failed because it was too easy to make a mess. Professionals don’t make messes. This talk demonstrates the techniques and heuristics for keeping Ruby code clean and stresses the attitude of professionalism and craftsmanship that can keep Ruby from Smalltalk’s fate.

What are we going to do about bad code?

The grand redesign in the sky
- 10 years to develop the new system
incremental improvement
- always check code in better than you checked it out
- never let the sun set on bad code
- test first => “test obsessed”
  - provides the necessary flexibility
understand the open closed principle => open for extension, closed for modification
Time to refactor => things are about to get smelly.
started out clean,
- built up over time
- initial structure didn’t scale well
- the more it grew the worse it got
- eventually I had to stop
iterating is where its at

TDD => Keep the system running at all times!

I am not allowed to make a change that breaks the system. Every tiny change I make will keep that system working.

Let’s refactor

Principle of least surprise
tiny steps => change each variable type, then run the tests
shrink the granularity of your development
meta-programming to build marshallers only when you need them
create a barrier between things that change and things that don’t

Is it worth it?

crafting good solutions
clean it up as soon as it gets messy
the dinner parable: get up and walk away from the dinner table or keep your dishes clean all the time
bad schedules, requirements, team dynamics can all be fixed
bad code rots ferments and becomes an inexorable weight that drags the team down.

Professional Behavior

The “Green Band” on his wrist that says “Test Obsessed”
Professionals write their tests first
Professionals keep their code clean
Professionals know that the only way to go fast is to go well.
making things a little bit nicer => the check-in rule

Contact

Fitnesse

RailsConf 2007: Doing REST Right

2007-05-23T18:39:00Z

Scott Raymond’s “Doing REST Right” session was a highlight for me at the just-concluded RailsConf. An experienced creator of REST-based solutions, Raymond shared an overview of REST, outside the context of rails, and an invaluable FAQ. Here are my notes from that session.

Doing REST Right – Scott Raymond, Firewheel Design

Description: Rails helps developers build REST-style web services in many ways, but important design decisions remain for each application. In this talk, we’ll go beyond the basics and tackle the practical questions that arise when implementing a modern web service in Rails.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you REST – God

Recognize rest principles in what you’re already doing. Apply them to your whole process.

Orthodoxy (right teaching, right beliefs, right thoughts) versus Orthopraxy (right practice)

Orthodoxy

Roy Fielding’s Thesis defined REST (Representational State Transfer)

All models are wrong but some are useful. George Box

Leaky abstractions.

Diagrams are wrong but useful in representing complex, real-world systems. Same thing with abstractions.

REST Isn’t

Pretty URLs

CRUD

http crud sql

post create insert

get retrieve select

put update update

delete destroy delete

tools for organizing your application code
- respond_to
- map.resources

http
a protocol
an architecture

REST is…

the architectural style of the web

Roy Fielding’s Hierarchy

Abstract Communication Theory

— REST

— Web Architecture

Concrete Implementation

A resource is anything that can be named
A resource is an object with a couple of contraints – can only implement a very small number of methods, same for all resources
you don’t access a resource—you access a representation of it. (respond_to with format.xml, format.txt, etc.)

Orthopraxy

Identification (Address)
- My name is URL.
Interaction (Method or Verb) – the uniform interface, uniform small set of methods
- safety—has no side effects, incurs no obligations (get is the only method that is safe by definition)
- idempotent—applying a function once returns the same value as applying it multiple times (get, put and delete)
- post is neither safe nor idempotent => reserve it for when you need it
Content (Data, Body of Request)
- REST pushes all of the complexity into content, out of identification and interaction
- standards
  - messages should be self-descriptive, like html
  - look for content types that map to your application domain
    - instead of to_xml, use an established type.
    - for users do vcard instead of your arbitrary user xml

Questions in SCO’s Experience

How do I update several resources at once? Like a to-do list application with a bunch of “finished” checkboxes…
- Scope this request to a set of resources, using the URL
- create a url that names that superset, then update them all (one resource) with one request

How can I do partial updates? Like a person resource, changing just the name…
- Scope in the url => give names a url (“people/5/name”), then post to that resource

I’m special; I need more than GET/POST/PUT/DELETE semantics.
- You’re wrong. You can model any problem in REST. The uniform interface is sufficiently general.

How should I do authentication?
- cookies force application state into the server
- how about HTTP Basic? Makes each request self sufficient. Guards against restart, but UI sucks. Password is in cleartext with every request.
- HTTP-Digest => eh, not quite.
- use cookies, but make each request self-sufficient with its own session information

Should I include content-type info in the URL?
- Opinions have changed over the past year.
- Previously => No, and you get network effects. But you can’t link to a specific representation, only the default representation.
- URLs are UI, don’t let rails force your hand.
- Now => Yes. gets you better page caching.

What about reliability?
- with posts, you divide them into 2 phases
  - Post to a factory method that creates a new url
  - Post (commit) to that fancy url.

What about concurrency?
- Use entity tags

What about transactions?
- Still a scope question => make a new URL that represents the full transaction.

I need more than one representation with the same media type.
- avoid using a generic media type, make your own

RailsConf 2007 Keynote Notes

2007-05-23T16:10:00Z

RailsConf 2007

May 17-20, 2007, Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE MLK Jr. Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97232

Chad Fowler

setting the agenda for the year ahead
coming together as a community
arrogant bastards
guidebook sessions raised $12,000 for charity.
1600 in attendance
then what?
success so far has been impact on the way people think
we have power, passion and intelligence => do something with it, instead of just pissing people off.

DHH

celebrating what we have – an economic ecosystem

stretching out the release cycle
rails has participants, contributors, not just users.
license to try things out
600+ plugins
10,000+ on rubyonrails-talk
job activity => 3 years of ROR experience required ;)
Publishing Industry
6 ROR books from Japan plus French, German, Portuguese
Much broader than just the U.S. —65 countries on “Working with Rails”
Surpassed book sales of visual basic, python, perl and equal to sql.
IDE’s => Aptana, JetBrains, NetBeans

Rails 2.0—Not a Unicorn

Unicorn solves every problem you’ve ever had.
It will be released. A humble release. Not a complete rewrite.
The experiment worked!
The world of resources is a better, greener place.
REST is the default in Rails 2.0—now a convention
REST flows through the entire framework
Already in edge rails, already works => not a unicorn.
associations in routes.rb (has_many, has_one)

Demo

scaffold is resource-based by default => .xml is automatic
rendering format.csv or format.text needs only the :text being returned
require ‘active_resource’ and set a site to treat a web resource like an active_record object
adding search across html and xml and csv in our swoop
gem install—source http://gems.rubyonrails.org rails => its in there already
22 of 24 controllers in highrise are REST
action_web_service is no longer preferred, no longer bundled but not taken out back and burned.

Friends and Allies

Ajax
REST
Atom
OpenID—open_id_authentication

9 things i like about rails 2

breakpoints are back => 1.8.5 broke them
1. ruby-debugger => debugging in console
HTTP Performance => it really matters, biggest performance inhibitor
1. bundle and gzip javascripts => 200 kb goes to 35 kb
  1. javascript_include_tag :all, :cache => true
  2. stylesheet_link_tag :all, :cache => true
2. add multiple hosts to maximize performance
  1. add config.action_controller.asset_host = “asset%d.hostname.com” to the controller
Query Cache in ActiveRecord => free on repeating queries
action.mimetype_renderer
1. index.html.erb
2. index.xml.builder
3. index.rss.erb
4. index.atom.builder
config/initializers => config/environment is simplified, and split into multiple initializer files
sexy migrations => example of show a good idea in real working code
1. t.integer :account_id
2. t.string :first_name, :last_name
3. t.timestamps
HTTP Authentication => great fit for an api
1. authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic
The MIT assumption => MIT license by default
Spring cleaning
1. executing the deprecations indicated in 1.2
2. moving in-place-editor to a plugin, other poor fits

Future History: Ruby at 30 Years – Avi Bryant, Dabble DB, Seaside

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay

Smalltalk and ruby are the same.

smalltalk: (1 to: 10) collect: [:x| x * 2] 
ruby: (1..10).collect { |x| x * 2 }

Alien Technology – Squeak 0% market share

All the Best Stuff is Made in Japan – Marty McFly, Back to the Future

Does performance matter? At twitter it does
Scary core methods… implementation should be in ruby code.

What if your ruby object space were…?

transactional and persistent
transparently distributed
terabyte-scale
no restrictions on what objects blocks classes or threads could be running on them

GemStone => Up to a couple of thousand smalltalk vms sharing hundreds of gigs of persistent object memory with billions of indexed and queryable objects… Free, as in beer, up to 4GB

Object Lifecycle => Creating (hard), Using (useful), Saving (hard)

Embracing Statefulness

Acceleration Anxiety – Ze Frank

recursion => infinite fear

Tim Bray, Web Guy, Sun Microsystems

This keynote is going to mix code-slinging and business arm-waving. Tim has some real concerns about the future of big applications, and while Rails solves some of them, it ignores some and makes others worse. Tim will discuss what he sees as the pain points and offer some ideas about which directions we should be heading to get around them. He will also talk a bit at the business level, about why it’s a complete no-brainer for a big mainstream company like Sun to suddenly start investing in Ruby and Rails.

Missing ETags – needed in ruby for REST

The Atom Project – Atom Publishing Protocol

“Everything should have a Publish button.”

...Every E-mail client, spreadsheet, phone, camera, everything.

Retrieve those collection, page at a time if they’re big POST an atom entry to a collection. Get back its URI (in an http header) POST a picture (in binary), get back a uri for the bits and another for an atom entry with metadata PUT or DELETE an existing atom entry

Is REST all there is?

SOAP
WS-* – 36 specs, ~1000 pages total

The Rails Way – Jamis Buck, Michael Koziarski

models are more than a database table
fat models are easier to test than fat controllers
form_for
with_scope, often abused => can create an instance variable for the :current_organization
before_create macro makes intent clearer than merely defining a before_create
Time.now.beginning_of_day
acts_as_taggable is not-for-production

@cool.documents.find_by_user_id(@john.id) => 
         @cool.documents_authored_by(@john)

Don’t Forget:

send method, variable

Dave Thomas

more people contributing in the community
facilitate conversation => people can help each other
we are a cargo cult of the browser – must find a new interface for our users.
OOP

Have fun, do good.

Fixing Autotest on my Macbook

2007-05-22T16:40:00Z

In building my rails stack on my new black macbook, I managed to disable my “autotest”. Hitting “autotest -rails” from my app’s root directory spewed forth a litany of warnings, culminating in a fatal error.

$ autotest -rails
loading rails_autotest
[ various and sundry warning messages ]
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:
in `gem_original_require': 
no such file to load -- osx/cocoa (LoadError)

I did not have rubycocoa properly installed – I had used the .dmg file for this installation, but should not have.

If you’ve compiled ruby (as I did, using the instructions found in Dan Benjamin’s canonical mac osx rails configuration article on hivelogic.com), you must also configure and install rubycocoa from the command line. However, when I tried that, it failed too. It seems I did not include the “—enabled-shared” option when I originally installed ruby.

So, backtracking even further, I reinstalled ruby 1.8.6 from the .gzip on ruby-lang.org...

$ cd ruby-1.8.6
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread \
--with-readline-dir=/usr/local --enable-shared
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-doc
$ cd ..

After successfully completing the ruby reinstall, I plowed back into rubycocoa, this time with much better results.

$ cd rubycocoa-0.10.1
$ ruby install.rb config --prefix=/usr/local/
$ ruby install.rb setup
$ sudo ruby install.rb install

Upon return to my application, autotest swept through my unit, functional and integration tests, returning to me a favorable growl message and an edifying green line...

http	crud	sql
post	create	insert
get	retrieve	select
put	update	update
delete	destroy	delete

Abstract	Communication Theory
—	REST
—	Web Architecture
Concrete	Implementation