Fixtures outside of rails

Hi,
Is anyone using fixtures in unit tests for applications using
ActiveRecord outside of rails? I found an example to do this from some
old threads. They cite as an example:
http://opensvn.csie.org/ezra/rails/ez_where_two/test/test_helper.rb

However, I copied this exactly and can still not get fixtures to work by
putting ‘fixtures :my_model’ at the top of my test class. They do work
however if I create them explicitely in each test method through the
create_fixtures method.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ray.