Rails 1.91 and international chars...hmmmm

So I finally installed ruby 1.9.1 on my netbook. YEA! Thanks to Mike Greenly's blog post I can safely and easily switch between any ruby install. Very cool Mike --thanks!

So I have an interesting Fraud Detection app that I am working on that has a routine function that converts international chars into their US-ascii format. I am doing this because I am trtying to normalize the string itself. What is interesting is that I can't get it to work correctly without giving me this error...


invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)

...

syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting tASSOC
'ÀÁÂÃÅĀĄĂ' => 'A',

This works just fine and dandy in 1.8.7 but breaks in 1.9.1...hmmm

A bunch of the gems I tried to install including mongrel don't seem to work correctly either. But this is just my first stab at this so more to come I'm sure. Not as easy as I had hoped though. Strange, seems like this is the overall feeling of the Ruby community. It just doesn't seem like many people are making use of 1.9.x.

Let me take your crappy site and turn it into rails

Have a site in PHPee? Let me re-phrase that.. do you have a shitty coded site written entirely in PHP and you want to convert it to Rails?

Just converting it to rails won't solve your problems just like a great director can't save a movie with a bad script.

Working for a big enterprise company is....

hmmm. Let me think of a adjective for this one. Let me start out by saying that I have been working for Oakley Inc. for the past 8 years as a tech-lead and a backend developer. In that time I have put out a gazillion fires, created webservices, set up webservers, written carts (in 3 different languages) and parsed the unparseable! The turnover here has been amazing and it seems it is me and one other guy, Rick, that are the only ones who have not left. Everyone I know who has left is SO happy they did!

It has got to the point where I am numb to pain. Sometimes I feel like the Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler as I am now working with guys like 10 years younger than me.

Maybe I just need a long vacation...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh3XDMzcdtU