Ruby and Memcached tricks

I love Ruby. It's a great language. I love almost everything about it (maybe besides the symbol syntax... but that's just me I guess).

Today I fell in love with the alias method :)

require 'memcached'
cache = Memcached.new "localhost:11211"
cache.set "message", "Hello, world!"
puts cache.get "message"

All is nice up to the get and set methods. Wouldn't it be nice to use the cache["message"] syntax?

class Memcached
  alias :"[]" :get
  alias :"[]=" :set
end

And then:

cache["message"] = "Hello"
puts cache["message"]

And live is good again :)

Error installing memcached gem

I've been struggling to install memcached gem on my Ubuntu 12.04 box. Some error came out when installing native extensions:

rlibmemcached_wrap.c: In function ‘Init_rlibmemcached’:
rlibmemcached_wrap.c:13736:3: error: implicit declaration of function ‘sasl_client_init’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
rlibmemcached_wrap.c:13736:33: error: ‘SASL_OK’ undeclared (first use in this function)
cc1: some warnings being treated as errors
make: *** [rlibmemcached_wrap.o] Error 1

A quick look at what uncle Google has to say about it didn't reveal anything at first glance. A deeper search gave me the following address:

https://github.com/evan/memcached/issues/17

Basically the problem is that one needs to install libsasl2-dev package for this to work.

And live is good again :)