New Features, SSH Completion, and the Dangers of Overloading the Core Library

Site Updates, SSH Completion, and a Rational Gotcha

The personal site gained new syndication options: ATOM feeds now cover journals, photographs, and a combined blog feed. Photograph pages were also upgraded with EXIF support, so recent images—those carrying EXIF headers from about the past year—show basic shot details alongside the picture.

Bash Delivers a Surprise Over SSH

A pleasant discovery came while copying a file from a laptop to a remote server: bash's programmable completion handled a remote directory path over SSH. Hitting tab to complete a directory on the server side worked without issue—an ordinarily useless request that actually got carried out, much to the author's surprise.

Overloading the Core Library Backfires

Last night brought significant confusion when tested, supposedly working code from a development machine began throwing strange exceptions on the production box. The server reported NoMethodError for Rational.reduce and Rational.to_f, both seemingly standard library methods. The culprit turned out to be a custom Rational class with a very different interface than the standard library's version. Adjusting RUBYLIB to skip the custom libraries resolved the issue immediately.