I’m working on an image manipulation program that requires the Ruby ImageMagick bindings, RMagick. I was unable to install RMagick from either the gem, or the Debian package. Building RMagick from source didn’t work either.

The following worked for both a Debian Sarge box, and an Xubuntu laptop. I hope it saves someone some grief.

$ dpkg -l | grep magick […]

Javascript is pretty casual about strings and numbers. Because javascript is an untyped language, it’s easy to get used doing things like:

var aString = “kb” + 63; // results in string “kb63″

Instead of choking, javascript will treat the number 63 as a string and concatenate them together for you.

Sometimes, you really need a string or a number. […]