The Rails Testing Practices Interviews are back, brought to you by Rails Prescriptions. This time, it's Mike Gunderloy, author of the new Rails Rescue Handbook. Read the interview. You can buy Rails Rescue Handbook or Rails Test Prescriptions. Read past interviews in the series.
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RubyFlow
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Rails Testing Practices Interview with Mike Gunderloy
2 Jul 2009 | 5:13 am -
5 Ruby-related blogs for July
1 Jul 2009 | 4:04 amLast month, I posted my first set of five Ruby-related blogs for your delectation. Here’s five more for your RSS reader... -
6 Reasons to use Webbynode
30 Jun 2009 | 11:14 amThere's a newcomer on the block for VPS hosting called Webbynode. It's nice to see more hosting options in the middle-ground between shared hosting on Dreamhost and managed hosting on Engine Yard. I put up a short video going over Six Reasons to use Webbynode. If you're looking for a VPS, maybe check it out. -
An alternative to monkey patching
30 Jun 2009 | 6:18 amYet another RBP Blog Article, this time offering a potential alternative to core extensions. Please check it out and share your thoughts. -
Yehuda Katz Shares 6 Steps to Refactoring Rails
29 Jun 2009 | 10:30 amRails has been undergoing a *lot* of change lately, and there's even more on the way; Learn more about how the Core Team is making it happen, and how you can refactor your code.
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The ADS Blog
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Rock the Job Episode #5: Get Noticed
2 Jul 2009 | 6:30 am -
Talking Transparency with Steve Spalding
30 Jun 2009 | 6:30 amSteve Spalding of Crossing Gaps interviewed me a short time ago for his Really Great Stories podcast. We had a great conversation that revolved around transparency and social media. Listen to the podcast and let me know your take on the subjects we covered. -
Rock the Job: Episode 4
25 Jun 2009 | 12:58 pmIn episode 4 of Rock the Job, Nick and I show you how to get off the Internet and out into the real world. -
Calling Shennanigans on Squarespace
18 Jun 2009 | 6:30 amThe headline reads: Starting June 8th, we’re giving away 30 iPhones in 30 days via Twitter. The fine print says: Winning prize will include a $199 gift certificate to the Apple store, which may be used toward the purchase of an 8GB iPhone, or toward any other official Apple products or services. I’m calling shenanigans Squarespace and what is misleading marketing. I’m happy to see that Mashable jumped on this last week. Unfortunately,as usual, a lot of people didn’t read the fine print, and tweeted Squarespace in the hopes of winning an iPhone, not a gift certificate. -
Rock the Job Episode 3: Become a Celebrity [Video]
16 Jun 2009 | 6:30 amIn episode 3 of Rock the Job, Nick and Rob talk about how to turn yourself into a celebrity.
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Ruby Inside
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Easy Web Spidering in Ruby with Anemone
2 Jul 2009 | 1:40 pmAnemone is a free, multi-threaded Ruby web spider framework from Chris Kite, which is useful for collecting information about websites. With Anemone you can write tasks to generate some interesting statistics on a site just by giving it the URL. Its only dependency is Nokogiri (an HTML and XML parser). Other than that, you just need to install the gem to get started using Anemone's simple syntax which, among other things, allows you to tell it which pages to include (based on regular expressions) or define callbacks. This example taken from Anemone's homepage prints out the URL of every page… -
Integrity: A Fun And Easy Continuous Integration Server
1 Jul 2009 | 8:10 amIntegrity is a simple and lightweight Continuous Integration server written in Sinatra (a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby). When commits are pushed to a Git repository, Integrity builds, runs tests, and reports the build status to each team member. It supports a variety of notifiers including Email, IRC, and Twitter. When it comes to developing large projects with multiple team members, it’s common nowadays to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) server. CI is a development practice where developers combine their work frequently and run tests over the whole project in… -
Getting Started with MongoDB and Ruby
30 Jun 2009 | 4:45 pmMongoDB a is a high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database written in C++. It's sort of a cross between scalable key/value stores and traditional functionality-rich relational databases. MongoDB might be useful as a fast, simple, non-transactional data store for a web application, or as a caching mechanism. You don't ever need to worry about migrations due to Mongo's schema-less nature. Getting started with MongoDB using Ruby is now fairly straightforward thanks to the Mongo Ruby driver. This provides access to the core Mongo database operations, and natively… -
Hirb: An Easy-to-Use View Framework for irb
28 Jun 2009 | 12:23 pmThe Interactive Ruby Shell (irb) and the Rails console are great for interacting and experimenting with your ruby application code, but sometimes it's hard to visualize the output. Gabriel Horner has come to the rescue with Hirb: a 'mini view framework' for irb which is designed to improve the default output to make it more human-readable. Hirb does this by formatting console output according to its type, and paging if there's more than a screenful to display. For example, Hirb will automatically display ActiveRecord model instances in a non-wrapping, table-like view. irb>> Tag.last… -
Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #26
22 Jun 2009 | 10:40 amThe latest installment of the series of posts crammed with random Ruby links, articles, and resources to kick off your week! 17 High Quality Videos from GoGaRuCo Earlier this month, the videos from the GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference) conference that took place back in April went online. The talks are all available in MPEG 4 video and MP3 audio formats. Video and audio quality are really good overall (no annoying humming or reverb that often plague such undertakings). Talks include Using Ruby to Fight AIDS, MacRuby and HotCocoa, Building Custom Web Proxies in Ruby, and Sinatra: The…
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Railscasts
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Episode 168: Feed Parsing
29 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amLearn two different techniques for parsing an RSS feed using Feedzirra in this episode! -
Episode 167: More on Virtual Attributes
22 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amUse a virtual attribute to implement a simple tagging feature. In this episode I show you how to assign virtual attributes through a callback instead of a setter method. -
Episode 166: Metric Fu
15 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amMetric Fu is a compilation of several tools to help find areas of code that could be improved. In this episode I show you how to setup this tool on the railscasts.com source code. -
Episode 165: Edit Multiple
8 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amUse checkboxes to select multiple records and edit them all in one form as shown in this episode. With virtual attributes you can even edit values relatively! -
Episode 164: Cron in Ruby
1 Jun 2009 | 12:00 amCron is great for handling recurring tasks, but it is an external dependency with a crazy syntax. In this episode I show you how to use Whenever to create cron jobs with Ruby.
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Dr Nic
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Refer us a client for fun and profit
29 Jun 2009 | 5:10 pmThere’s only so many hours in the day and only so many technologies people can be awesome at. So sometimes there are projects that developers can’t do themselves. Either the scope is too big, the timeframe to urgent, or it falls outside their areas of expertise. Or you’ve already got yourself a sexy job and you just don’t need the work. If this situation ever happens to you I would love for you to ask me if I can help with the work you can’t do or don’t want. Hopefully you can find good reasons to refer clients to myself and the crack-squad at Mocra. For… -
TDD for Greasemonkey scripts; and introducing Ninja Search JS
6 Jun 2009 | 4:00 pm“this article shows how I used test-driven development tools and processes on a Greasemonkey script.” Though it also includes free ninjas. When I do online banking I need to select from a large list of other people’s bank accounts to which I might like to transfer money too. It is the massive drop down list that I must scroll through that I wish to raise issue with today. The problem of having to give other people money is probably a different discussion. And take those time-zone selector drop down lists, for example, the massively long list rendered by Rails’… -
Cucumber: building a better World (object)
14 Apr 2009 | 7:48 pmHow to write helper libraries for your Cucumber step definitions and how to upgrade your support libraries from Cucumber 0.2 to 0.3 (released today). In cucumber, each scenario step in a .feature file matches to a Given, When, Then step definition. The step definitions are normal Ruby code. First class, bonnified, honky-tonk Ruby code. And what’s the one thing we love to do to Ruby code on a rainy Sunday afternoon? Refactor it. Turn messy code into readable “return in 50 years, on the time capsule, and get back to work quickly” code. In Cucumber we use a special, until-now… -
Easy scheduling by location, tasks and people – a case study of a client application from Mocra
6 Apr 2009 | 12:02 amUPDATE: Orchestrate was reported in TechCrunch Several years ago Andy Wright uncovered a problem. Small and large businesses can have the same problem: orchestrating to get a qualified person to perform a job. Who’s got the skills? Who’s available? What tasks have you offered/sold to your customers? Its hard enough getting customers and finding great staff/contractors, but then you might spend many nervous hours juggling demand against availability. Then you need to keep a history of jobs and tasks performed. Did your staff do the work? Does anyone need to follow up? The same… -
Closing in on The Dream: “one-click-to-deploy Rails apps”
29 Mar 2009 | 11:03 pmGot a simple app you want to build? Allocate 5 minutes for initial code generation, slice setup, and initial deployment. All from the command line. In one command. Booya! How long does it take to start a new Rails project? Surely just a moment? rails new_project -m path/to/some/template.rb But your application isn’t deployed yet. The DNS isn’t ready, the remote slice doesn’t exist or the config for this new application isn’t setup. Heck, the code hasn’t even been pushed to a non-existent remote repository yet. And what if you’re going to use something like…
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techno weenie - Home
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New to the CAN: Widget, json fixes, etc
I just pushed a new version the Calendar About Nothing: mtah fixed a problem with the JSON routes. Gah, totally my fault. jqr cleaned things up a little, patching broken windows, etc. One really nice thing: he fixed a potential infinite loop in feed processing. Kalin Harvey added a capfile. kastner. And the big update: lachlanhardy wrote a jQuery widget so you can post the calendar to your site. Thanks for the updates, everyone. Also, I’ve been working with the Heroku guys on getting the weird intermittent server error on IsLOSTOnYet up and running. I think it’s fixed now. -
poetic tweets
Saul Williams’ trek through the midwest between shows sparked some musings on Twitter. Driving from Denver to Kansas City. My mind travels at a faster pace than my body. I mark my way with words. If the newest technology enhances transparancy then this is an ideal time to share your process. Share how your mind works. How do you think? Do u associate w/negative thoughts and ideas? Are u cynical? What do u profess? What would u proclaim? Are you more concerned with like-minded agreement? Are you a naysayer? Perhaps, like me, you raise questions… But who am I fooling? is this viral voice my… -
WTF does that cron do?
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great system administrator. I was a windows guy for so long, so my only exposure to linux was haggling with shared hosting accounts to run my stupid php apps. While my linux/administration skills have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, I still get caught up on something as simple as cron jobs. The syntax is very terse, and probably easy to parse for computers. For the rest of us… Well, what the hell does this mean? */6 * * * * rake ts:index:delta According to my new project, CronWTF, that “runs rake ts:index:delta at minutes :00,… -
How to get hired by ENTP
At ActiveReload, our question was “How good are you at Gears of War?” Will qualified with flying colors (he was 100th in the world). Last year as ENTP was starting, it was “How good are you at Rock Band?” Towski impressed us with his killer Chris Cornell impersonation. Now, we’re looking for that person with elite Korg Kaossilator experience. Is that someone out there? -
The Lie
“No, the problem isn’t you. Fixtures suck, and you were lied to.” – Francis Hwang That is correct. This is exactly what the Rails Core team is going for: Poor John Locke, protector of the island, pushing a damn button. I do agree with Francis on about everything else though: Fixtures do suck, and testing is really fucking hard. By the time you realize you’re getting into Fixture Hell, moving your monstrosity of an application off fixtures is a daunting task. My solution (and currently the ENTP way): Machinist. The problem I’ve had with fixtures, is that having one large set means…
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RailsTips - Home
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MongoMapper, The Rad Mongo Wrapper
27 Jun 2009 | 9:59 amIn which I formally release MongoMapper, a high level wrapper similar to ActiveRecord, but for MongoDB. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Mongo and how awesome it is. Towards the end of the article (and in the slideshow) I mentioned MongoMapper, a project I’ve been working on. Over the past few weeks my buddies at Squeejee and Collective Idea have started using MongoMapper and they’ve helped me squash a few bugs and add a few features. Despite the fact that I would call it far from finished, I’ve decided to release it in hopes that people can start playing with it, finding bugs, adding… -
JSONQuerying Your Rails Responses
22 Jun 2009 | 3:44 pmIn which I show how to use a Ruby implementation of JSONQuery to test JSON in Rails apps. I’m writing an application right now that is really JSON heavy. Some of the functional tests are cucumber and some of them are just rails functional tests using shoulda. I hit a point today where I wanted to verify that the JSON getting output was generally what I want. I could have just JSON parsed the response body and compared that with what I was looking for, but a little part of me thought this might be a cool application of JSONQuery. JSONQuery provides a comprehensive set of data querying tools… -
What Is The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work?
8 Jun 2009 | 11:31 amIn which I summarize my favorite points from an old, but awesome article. I am always amazed when I read an article from 2004 and find interesting goodies. I’m probably late to the game on a lot of these articles, as I didn’t really dive into programming as a career until 2005, but I just read The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work, a conversation with Ward Cunningham by Bill Venners. The article was published on January 19, 2004, but it is truly timeless. The Shortest Path Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution. “Shortest” doesn’t necessarily refer to lines of code or… -
What If A Key/Value Store Mated With A Relational Database System?
3 Jun 2009 | 9:22 amIn which I provide an intro to MongoDB and it’s awesomeness. Last night, the folks from the Grand Rapids ruby group were kind enough to allow me to present on MongoDB. The talk went great. I’ve been excited about Mongo for a couple weeks now, so it was cool to see that it wasn’t just me. The funny thing is, at nearly the same time, Wynn Netherland presented on MongoDB to the Dallas ruby group. We discovered that he wrote part 1 and I wrote part 2 of the presentation despite not working together on it so we ended up showing each other’s slides as well. I figured since I spent the time… -
Swine Flu and the Twitter Gem
18 May 2009 | 3:11 pmIn which I wax poetic about the trendy new addition to the Twitter gem. I had some extra time today and I’ve been spotty on open source work over the past few weeks, so I decided to add support for the Twitter trends API to my Twitter gem. Using HTTParty, the code for this turned out to be insanely simple, so short, in fact, that I’ll just put it inline here so you don’t even have to go over to Github. Aww, I’m so nice. module Twitter class Trends include HTTParty base_uri 'search.twitter.com/trends' format :json # :exclude => 'hashtags' to exclude hashtags def…
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FiveRuns Blog - Home
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Dash is ready for Public Beta, with a brand new look!
24 Jun 2009 | 9:27 amI know we have been quiet for a while, but we have been working diligently to make Dash even better. Now we are ready to show off some of those results. Those of you who have been using Dash will have seen some significant changes recently. If you’re new to Dash, keep reading for some of the highlights of our redesign effort. First of all, a couple of nomenclature changes. Applications are now Sources. A Source is anything that you want to get data out of and put into Dash. Previously, we used the term Application, but we realized with the extensibility of Dash, applications were only a… -
Join us at RailsConf/CabooseConf and we will take you to see Penn & Teller
1 May 2009 | 2:20 pmAttending RailsConf and/or CabooseConf? Join FiveRuns to see Penn & Teller perform at the Rio on Tuesday night. We’ve got transportation and 40 tickets to catch Penn & Teller at the Rio on Tuesday night. Want to join us? Drop your name in the… hat. Okay, it’s not a hat, but you get the idea. Enter your name before 8am Tuesday morning; winners will be notified by 10am via email. See you in Las Vegas! -
Dash Pricing and Feature Survey
14 Apr 2009 | 12:58 pmFor the last few days, we’ve been running a survey to get some customer validation data on our pricing and features for Dash, and the response has been great. Since it’s only been a few days, I don’t want to bias anything by giving out interim results. Instead, I wanted to encourage Dash users to take the survey – it takes most people less than 1 minute. So – please login to Dash and give us some feedback, it’ll be quick! Also – a shout-out to the folks at SurveyGizmo: we met up with them at the FiveRuns, OtherInbox and Austin on Rails SXSWi 2009 party and now I can say from… -
Fluid icons for Dash
10 Apr 2009 | 5:57 pmThere’s no denying it’s handy to have Dash up on a monitor somewhere in the office, and some of our more enterprising users have even thrown it into Fluid to give it a nice, built-in feel. To those users: We salute you… and here’s some icons. -
Friday Picks
20 Mar 2009 | 4:10 pmThe music last night was great. I didn’t get to see a lot of the bands I wanted to – the line to get into Stubb’s was far longer than I had the patience for. Tonight’s Picks: My plan is The Love Language, The Postelles, Amazing Baby, Airborne Toxic Event & New York Dolls. I would love to catch the end of Primal Scream, but not sure I can make it LZR from 5th & Trinity, but we will see. I have to miss SXSW on Saturday, so there may or may not be picks. Hope everyone is having a great time!
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Jay Fields' Thoughts
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Programmer Confidence and Arrogance
25 Jun 2009 | 4:34 amAt SpeakerConf 2009, one of the speaker's wives asked me: Why is it that most speakers are confident, and some are simply arrogant. The question was also in the context of "software is nerdy, how can you speakers be so cocky". I pondered for a minute and replied: When no one knows what's "correct", people with confidence generally win the discussion.Imagine the early days of medicine. Three different doctors give you three different surgery options. There's not enough experience in the industry to show which is the correct choice. Who do you trust? Probably the doctor who managed to be the… -
Java: Method Chain with Snippet
24 Jun 2009 | 4:45 amI've noticed a pattern pop up a few times in my Java code in the past 6 months. Maybe it's a decent pattern, or maybe I only have a hammer.The problem I'm trying to solve is setting some global state, running a test, and ensuring that the global state is set back to it's original (or correct) value. My usual solution to this problem is to remove global state, but not all global states are created equally. The two global states I've been unsuccessful at removing are the current time and system properties.In my previous post I described how I freeze time using the Joda library. The example code… -
Freezing Joda Time
23 Jun 2009 | 5:01 amOnce upon a time Mark Needham wrote about freezing Joda Time. Mark gives all the important details for freezing time (which is often helpful for testing), but I came up with some additional code that I like to add on top of his example.Two things bother me about Mark's example. First of all, I always like the last line of my test to be the assertion. It's not a law, but it is a guideline I like to follow. Secondly, I don't like having to remember that I need to reset the time back to following the system clock.I came up with the following idea. It's definitely a poor man's closure, but it… -
Developer Testing: Welcome to the Beta Test
10 Jun 2009 | 8:52 pmIn March of 2009 I gave a talk at SpeakerConf about developer testing. The presentation is available as 'desktop' and 'iPhone' m4v files.speakerconf2009.m4v ('desktop')speakerconf2009iPhone.m4v ('iPhone')Unfortunately, the Q&A session is inaudible, so I cut the end short.© Jay Fields - www.jayfields.com -
Mockito non-hamcrest any matcher
8 Jun 2009 | 4:44 pmThese days I'm using Mockito for my behavior based tests. I like Mockito's integration with Hamcrest, but I don't always like the viral matcher requirement. In particular, if I have a method that takes 3 arguments, I don't like the fact that if I use a matcher for one argument I have to use a matcher for all 3. For example, in the following verification I don't care about the callback instance, but I do care about the timeout and the async flag.verify(channel).subscribe(any(Callback.class), eq(100), eq(true))I was toying with some code the other day and it occurred to me that I should be able…
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caboose - blog.caboo.se Home
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Future Ruby!
24 Jun 2009 | 9:25 amThe very nice folks at Unspace sent me a beautiful care package today - a “handwritten” note and a huge poster. It mentioned that Future Ruby is in mid-july in Toronto, and invited me to come with my team. I’m such a sucker for this type of marketing, so take heed ye marketers. Send me posters and tshirts! I wish I could make it - Ruby Fringe had great press - but my visa ran out, and I can’t leave the US until it’s sorted out. I’ll be encouraging my team to go - but it’s a fair trek from the west coast The best thing about this is the Russian glyphs they using in the title. One… -
Rails 2.2 gotcha - inline subclasses
15 May 2009 | 2:36 amDue to the way Rails' development mode works, you need to make sure you don't define subclasses in your "concern" files like this: # status.rb class Status include "status/filtering" end and then # status/filtering.rb class Status module CustomAssociationExtension end end Instead, you should have a file app/models/status/custom_association_extension.rb so that rails can easily find it. Ticket: #1339 (note: not solved) -
Rails 2.3.2: not ready for prime time
9 May 2009 | 3:48 pmI’d strongly advise against upgrading your application to Rails 2.3.2. I’ve hit quite a few bugs that have taken a big chunk out of several of my days, including: “can’t dup nilclass”, as reported here: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/msg/787b561d166abf53 A strange bug in associations and rspec, http://groups.google.com/group/rspec/browse_thread/thread/7901db1b123eb93c Lots of upgrade issues with rspec requiring a rewrite of routing specs and erroneous missing templates (reported in their README) Anything that isn’t fixtures, but creates records in tests, will fail… -
Rails 2.3 upgrade gotcha: aggregate methods are now OrderedHash
8 May 2009 | 10:16 pmIn our open source ticket tracker xtt, we have code that looks like this: has_many :memberships do def contexts proxy_owner.memberships.sort.group_by &:context end end Basically, it lets people group their memberships to various projects by a context. So each user can have their own grouping for projects. If you don't have a context for a project, it shows that last, in an implicit 'etc' context. In the tests, we check for this behavior like it "leaves nil context for last" do @contexts = @user.memberships.contexts @contexts.last.should == [nil, [memberships(:default)]] end However, since… -
Caboose Doc Fund - still kicking ass
30 Apr 2009 | 7:11 pmRemember all those years ago when we raised a bunch of cash for Rails documentation? Still paying out, regularly. Pratik’s docrails project is chugging along with almost reckless abandon. Boy do these guides look great! Here are the most recent three articles, and wow, are they high quality! Sven Fuchs wrote this definitive guide to Rails Internationalization which is for “translating your application to a single custom language other than English or for providing multi-language support in your application.” Cássio Marques wrote the excellent ActiveRecord validations and callbacks…
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Bruce Williams
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Living without send(), or trying to
Object#send (or __send__) is a scrappy little tool we Rubyists pull out to ever-so-casually ignore method private and protected visibility, and to call methods dynamically. Maybe we’ve gotten into the habit of using it a little too often. Let’s play with alternatives. An evaluation Here’s an example from practically every monkeypatching Rails plugin init.rb you’ve ever seen: SomeRailsConstantsend:include MagicSauce Okay, so include is a private method, and we’re breaking through indiscriminately by using send. If you wanted to do away with send because it seems… -
A GitHubby config.gem hack
I love using gems from my Rails apps, and have been an outspoken proponent for gem plugins from the beginning (you won’t find any vendor/plugins in my newer apps at all). I also love GitHub, but lines like this, over and over in my environment files, just annoy me: configgem 'username-foo' :lib => 'foo' :source => 'http://gems.github.com' configgem 'username-bar' :lib => 'bar' :source => 'http://gems.github.com' So, here’s a quick little hack. It could be smarter, but it works. module GitHubbyGems def gemname options if… -
A sleep hack
A quick aside. I’m experimenting with the Everyman polyphasic sleep schedule for the next 3+ weeks. Update: The experiment ended early, but was still very successful. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in this sort of thing. -
More on super-and-extend
A few days ago I posted an article on method wrapping, and I thought I’d touch a bit more on the super-and-extend technique; I’ve had a few questions on it that warrant some clarification. Multiple Wrappers Yes, the technique works with multiple wrappers on a single class; when the class is extended with additional modules, they stack and super works as expected (wrappers are applied on the “outside,” so invocations occur in LIFO order). You can see a full example of this as a Gist. Here is a sample irb session showing that the multiple wrappers are applied correctly:… -
Wrapping a Method in Ruby
Let’s say you have a Ruby class with a method you’d like to wrap—for debugging or performance timing—and, since you don’t control where the class is instantiated (think overriding a method in Rails’ ActionPack), just creating a subclass and using super isn’t going to work. Let’s take a look at two mixin patterns; one a ubiquitous naming hack and one a bit of esoteric Ruby inheritance trickery. First, let’s set the scene. Let’s say we have a method, Widget#render_on: class Widget # Wrap this one def render_on(document, options = {})…
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Riding Rails - home
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Minor Changes to the Rails Security Policy
16 Jun 2009 | 2:37 amAfter reviewing the feedback on the two recent security announcements we’ve made a few minor changes to the Ruby on Rails security policy. The first change we’ve made is to include more information on what to do if you don’t receive a response from the security team. In general reports to the security address should receive a response within 24 hours, however the sheer volume of spam to the address can, and has, lead to messages being caught in spam filters. In the event you don’t receive a response there are now two direct-emails to the people currently looking after security… -
Community Highlights: Ruby Heroes
12 Jun 2009 | 2:12 pmThis week I’m happy to tell you about a new set of articles which will be appearing here on the Rails blog called “Community Highlights”. This new series will feature people/projects/sites from the Rails community that may deserve a little extra recognition. This week, we’re going to start with a few people who received awards on stage at Railsconf 2009, this years Ruby Heroes. Brian Helmkamp Brian has been a contributing member of the Ruby community for 4 years now, but is most well known for his testing library Webrat. He’s a contributer to Rails, RSpec, Rubinius, and is a… -
DoS Vulnerability in Ruby
9 Jun 2009 | 5:01 pmA Denial of Service vulnerability has been found and fixed in ruby. The vulnerability is due to the BigDecimal method mishandling certain large input values and can cause the interpreter to crash. This could be used by an attacker to crash any ruby program which creates BigDecimal objects based on user input, including almost every Rails application. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE name CVE-2009-1904. For upgrade instructions and information on affected ruby versions please see the ruby security team’s announcement. All users are advised to upgrade their ruby installations… -
Security Problem with authenticate_with_http_digest
3 Jun 2009 | 4:07 pmA security problem has been reported with the digest authentication code in Ruby on Rails. This vulnerability can allow users to bypass your password protection. This vulnerability has been publicly disclosed on several websites, users are advised to take the mitigating steps described below immediately. The issue comes from the handling of the block passed to authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest. This block must return the user’s password in the clear, or a sha1 hash of the user’s password. Unfortunately the documentation was unclear on this and the examples cited would return nil if… -
Community feedback for the future of Rails
21 May 2009 | 9:38 amA few months ago, we announced the creation of a "forum" to discuss the future of Rails and what the community is interested in. Since then, many important suggestions/topics were addressed, many features were completed or started. My goal in this post is to give you a quick overview on the status of the uservoice forum. Suggestions mentioned and completed: Nested Model forms This is something that was actually started before we put the forum together and this feature is now available since Rails 2.3.x Rails magazine Olimpiu Metiu already released two issues of his Rails Magazine. The PDF…
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Rails Envy
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RailsLab: Load Testing - Part 2
2 Jul 2009 | 9:18 amIf you want to know if your application can scale before it actually gets the traffic spike, then you need to learn how to do Load Testing. Thankfully I just released Load Testing – Part 2 of the Scaling Rails screencast series. If you haven’t seen the first video on Load Testing, you should probably start there. Load Testing – Part 2 Summary In this second Load Testing Screencast we pickup where we left off with the first load testing screencast and learn how to use httperf load testing with sessions, how to automate our httperf testing using autobench, how to graph the results from… -
6 Reasons to use Webbynode
30 Jun 2009 | 10:35 amRecently I put together a video for the guys over at Webbynode. Webbynode is a very affordable VPS host (256 RAM for $15) which has great support for Rails applications. Why should you consider using Webbynode? Just watch the video. Back in the early days of Rails you could find cheap hosting plans that gave you great Rails support. Since then it’s become harder to find middle ground between shared hosting on Dreamhost and managed hosting on Rails Machine or Engine Yard. A few months ago I was lucky enough to run into Carlos Taborda, who was just launching the beta of Webbynode. I decided… -
RailsLab: Load Testing - Part 1
25 Jun 2009 | 1:12 pmI’ve got another Scaling Rails screencast out today, this one the first of two episodes on learning about Load Testing. Load Testing – Part 1 Summary In this first Load Testing Screencast we learn what exactly load testing is, why it’s useful, and learn how to properly use Apache Bench and httperf. These tools are very useful to gauge how your application handles under a heavy load. Don’t forget to subscribe to the screencast RSS feed or grab it on ITunes to avoid missing any of these episodes. FYI, These videos look great on an iPhone / iPod if you want something to watch on the go. -
Rails Envy Podcast - Episode #084: 06/24/2009
24 Jun 2009 | 7:30 amEpisode 84. This week Nathan Bibler joins me to talk about bug fixes of bug fixes, new libraries, video podcasts, Duke Nukem, and Zelda. Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link. Download the podcast ~11:00 mins MP3. Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader Runway is a GTD-style action management web application made by geeks for geeks. Created by the folks at Cogent, try a free demo at http://www.runwayapp.com. NewRelic not only provides rails performance monitoring with RPM, but they also produce Rails Lab, a website dedicated to advice on tuning and optimizing Rails… -
Rails Envy Podcast - Episode #083: 06/17/2009
17 Jun 2009 | 6:30 amEpisode 83. It's a double feature this week, folks! This week, Obie Fernandez from Hashrocket (check out that snazzy new site) joins me as a co-host. This is both the longest Rails Envy podcast ever and the most bleeped out. It's also full of the usual great Ruby and Rails news and gems. Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link. Download the podcast ~39:00 mins MP3. Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader Runway is a GTD-style action management web application made by geeks for geeks. Created by the folks at Cogent, try a free demo at http://www.runwayapp.com. NewRelic…
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Slash7 with Amy Hoy - Home
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Scripty2: Scriptaculous 2.0 Alpha is Out
26 Jun 2009 | 8:57 amThis one's a quickie: Thomas, with a little help from his friends, has put out the first alpha for Scripty2 (aka Scriptaculous 2.0). While there are lots of things missing (autocompleter, etc.), it's pretty damn stable. That's what we've been using for Twistori, the various Zeitgeists, and of course, Freckle time tracking. Thomas has written a blog post about the update, to which I'd like to add: the docs are amazing! animated graphs for each easing function (check this one out) it's pretty damn stable (worth repeating) the API is even more friendly than before Major props to our friends and… -
In Memoriam: George Carlin, 7 Words You *Can* Say on Twitter
22 Jun 2009 | 9:53 amHate cuss words? Avert thine eyes! (What are you doing reading this blog, though, I'd be interested to know. Oh right. You already looked away. I'm just holding a conversation with myself. Ladeeda... George Carlin is one of my heroes: hilarious, self-deprecating, edgy without being bitter, envelope-pushing without resorting to valueless shock, remarkably poetic, a dancer with dirty words, and, of course, in possession of an amazing voice I could listen to all day. He's also dead. Goddamnit. Carlin passed away a year ago yesterday. Yesterday was a Sunday, so we're celebrating today... with 7… -
Keep digging deeper.
11 Jun 2009 | 8:39 amThe same thrill, the same awe and mystery, comes again and again when we look at any question deeply enough. With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries -- certainly a grand adventure!— Richard Feynman, 1955 address to the National Academy of Sciences (full text) -
Are you thinking, or are you farting?
10 Jun 2009 | 4:53 amThinking is supposed to be a question mark. But most people treat it like a period. Headology vs First Sight, Second Thoughts Terry Pratchett's always written about witches and, by extension, the essence of humanity. But his Wee Free Men trilogy is the best yet, and the most true to life. He names the fundamentals that separate a fearsome, clever, Headology-wielding, seldom-magic-using witch from a superstitious, ignorant normal person: "First Sight and Second Thoughts." First Sight is the ability to see what's really there. Most people see things that aren't there, or miss things that are. -
What I'm reading this weekend
6 Jun 2009 | 9:26 amI almost never link blog, but these tabs have been sitting open in my browser for ages because I thought they were truly worth sharing: The art of Up I haven't seen Up yet, what with the whole Being In Austria thing and whatnot, but this post from one of the principal artists, Lou Romano, is amazing and inspiring and tantalizing. And it's really long. Full of artistic noodling and explanations of how they came up with the look and feel they came up with. Right now? I love the fact that blogs exist. Thank you, internet! The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate - no great revelation,…
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Softies on Rails - Home
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Join Us at Windy City Rails 2009
16 Jun 2009 | 8:27 pmI’m glad to announce that I’ll be conducting the morning tutorial session at the upcoming Windy City Rails Conference. It’s a 3-hour tutorial called REST 101: Best Practices for Rails Developers. If you’re relatively new to Rails, especially if you’re currently a .NET or Java developer who’s trying to figure out how to really get started with Rails, this tutorial is for you. If you’re a more seasoned developer, then you should still attend the conference. There’s a great lineup of speakers, all-day coding sessions, and more. The conference will be held on September 12, 2009 in… -
Making Git Commands A Little Shorter
10 Jun 2009 | 5:13 pmMost of you git geeks probably already knew this, but recently I learned how to make git a little more usable for me. One of the things I appreciate about Subversion’s command line interface is that, usually, you don’t have to type the entire command name. As long as you enter enough of the command so it can’t be confused with another subversion command, it will work. For example, instead of doing: svn status I always do svn st (i know, I know, you can go even further and create shell aliases that are even further, or shell scripts, or whatever…) Anyway, now that I’m using git for… -
I Don't Use RSpec
28 May 2009 | 6:47 amIt seems I’m in a super-minority among Rails developers. First of all, I write tests. My unscientific guess is that less than half of people who call themselves Rails developers actually write tests. Second, I write tests first. Of those that write tests, I would guess that less than half write them before writing the implementation code. So already I’m in the group of “those crazy TDD developers”. But you know what’s even worse? In that very group of “crazy TDD developers”, I bet more than half use RSpec. But I don’t. Instead, I use a combination of shoulda, webrat, and… -
RailsBridge
4 May 2009 | 2:18 pmI’m glad to help announce RailsBridge, a great idea put forth by Mike Gunderloy. Mike invited me (and many others) last week to join his concept for a positive approach inside the Rails community, and so far things look promising. I hope to help out by donating time and energy toward any public workshops the group may choose to host, as well do any writing and mentoring that may be needed. The group will do many other things, but for now those are the two that I feel most qualified to do (see here and here if you’re a new reader and don’t know what I’m talking about). I wasn’t able… -
An Essential Rails success story (and win a free book)
3 Mar 2009 | 7:38 amDan Woolley writes: I took your course in Chicago a couple of years ago – I think it was your first one. I finally left my comfy corporate job and went full time on Rails in July 2008. I recently released my first Rails app – Dwellicious (http://dwellicious.com). That is our free site for consumers that helps you organize, share, and discuss the search for homes for sale on the internet. Congrats, Dan. Dwellicious is beautifully designed, well executed, and yes, has a real business model. Are you a .NET developer who's turned to Rails? What's your success story? Link it up in the…
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Polishing Ruby
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hoe version 2.3.2 has been released!
30 Jun 2009 | 9:12 pmHoe is a rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles. It helps generate rubygems and includes a dynamic plug-in system allowing for easy extensibility. Hoe ships with plug-ins for all your usual project tasks including rdoc generation, testing, packaging, and deployment. Plug-ins Provided: Hoe::Clean Hoe::Debug Hoe::Deps Hoe::Flay Hoe::Flog Hoe::Inline Hoe::Package Hoe::Publish Hoe::RCov Hoe::Signing Hoe::Test See class rdoc for help. Hint: ri Hoe Changes: 2.3.2 / 2009-06-30 1 minor enhancement: splat all gems on release. (luis lavena) 3 bug fixes: Fix File.read_utf on ruby 1.9 for UTF-8 files… -
a nice quote
29 Jun 2009 | 4:02 pm"The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague." -- Dijkstra -
minitest version 1.4.2 has been released!
25 Jun 2009 | 2:30 amminitest/unit is a small and fast replacement for ruby's huge and slow test/unit. This is meant to be clean and easy to use both as a regular test writer and for language implementors that need a minimal set of methods to bootstrap a working unit test suite. mini/spec is a functionally complete spec engine. mini/mock, by Steven Baker, is a beautifully tiny mock object framework. (This package was called miniunit once upon a time) Changes: 1.4.2 / 2009-06-25 1 bug fix: Fixed info handler for systems that don't have siginfo. http://rubyforge.org/projects/bfts -
Releasing with Hoe
24 Jun 2009 | 3:56 pmhoe_release.mov (2054 Kb) I've got other movies up there too from all my presentations and demos. ETA: I should add, not only is that releasing a new gem, it is also posting news to rubyforge, my blog, and the seattle.rb and ruby-talk mailing lists. I don't have to do anything afterwards. -
hoe-seattlerb version 1.2.0 has been released!
24 Jun 2009 | 2:39 pmHoe plugins providing tasks used by seattle.rb including minitest, perforce, and email providing full front-to-back release/annouce automation. Changes: 1.2.0 / 2009-06-24 1 minor enhancement: Add support for TLS servers like gmail via smtp_tls gem http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/hoe-seattlerb
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Citrusbyte Blog | Web Development & Web Strategy
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Sharespost Launches!
19 Jun 2009 | 1:51 pmOk we’re a few days late, but http://www.sharespost.com has just launched. Citrusbyte helped the company get to an internal beta in only 6 weeks with a lean team of two. We then ramped in their new internal developer who pushed the site to live. Check out more about the company here: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sharespost And the press: http://www.sharespost.com/pages/press SharesPost makes private equity liquid by efficiently matching buyers, sellers of private company stock and giving them the information, tools and process to make transactions easy and safe. At SharesPost you… -
Long time no see, RubyForge
3 Jun 2009 | 12:22 pmSo, you are a good citizen in the Ruby community. You like to find patterns, extract them to a gem and make everyone benefit from it. You release early and release often. But you’re only releasing to GitHub, and suddenly you realize why: releasing to RubyForge is a huge pain, completely outside of your workflow. Meet Joe, the gem publisher Joe builds on top of Thor’s awesomeness to take you from a gem specification to world domination in a single step: $ thor joe:release Given that you have a gemspec in place, Joe will build your gem and release it to RubyForge right away. The necessary… -
Stories
20 May 2009 | 6:38 pmWith Cucumber, you write stories and user acceptance tests in plain English, something a lot of people seem to like. Feature: Search As a user I want to find information So I can learn more Scenario: Find what I'm looking for Given I am on the Google search page When I search for "rspec" Then I should see a link to RSpec-1.2.4: Home Then you need to write your “step” files, where you add blocks with regular expressions that must match your plain English user stories and user acceptance tests. Inside those blocks you add your actual Ruby code. If you are using Cucumber for testing Rails or… -
Introducing Contest
19 May 2009 | 6:46 pmAt Citrusbyte we’ve launched production websites with the major three Ruby testing frameworks: Test::Unit, RSpec, and Shoulda. In our experience using these libraries, we never felt like we found our ideal framework. We wanted to move the company toward a single testing platform, so we looked at what was out there realized none of the current offerings fit what we needed and ended up creating Contest. Test::Unit Test::Unit is old and well tested, comes with the standard library ,and is easy to pick. The downside is that after using Shoulda and RSpec we fell in love with nested contexts… -
Citrusbyte turns up the volume with MusiKontrol
5 May 2009 | 6:27 pmLeft to right: Will Jessup (Citrusbyte CEO), Eric Galen (MusiKontrol CEO), David Appelbaum (Citrusbyte Project Manager) Created by music industry professionals in Los Angeles, CA, MusiKontrol.com will soon launch a new artist development platform to help independent artists, writers and musicians succeed in the new music business. Eric Galen, its founder and CEO, says “We’re really excited to be working with Citrusbyte as our technology partner. We needed the best, and we found them.” And in true Citrusbyte style, Eric and Will duked it out on their motorcycles in the Malibu canyons to…
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BuildingWebApps Articles
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Web 2.0 Expo: TV and Radio with an API
National Public Radio (NPR) is changing what it means to be a news organization. While traditional news organizations want to keep their content close, NPR has taken the approach of making content widely available via an API – an approach they call “brand and release.” They’ve made 250,000 stories, going back 13 years, available through their API. Zack Brand from NPR said that the NPR API is getting about 2 million requests per month, and there are 1,300 registrants (you have to register to get access to the API). Content is available in a variety of formats; so far,… -
Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools
Ben Galbraith and Dio Almaer of Ajaxian and the developer tools group at Mozilla gave a wide-ranging talk on web developer tools. They noted that the web often seems more like a hack than a platform — it’s amazing that developers are able to make web apps do the things they do. This is especially true with Ajax raising the bar for interactivity, and sites turning into applications instead of documents. They’re out to make the web a better platform. Some future technologies that have them excited: HTML5 canvas Fast JavaScript — kicked off by Chrome, Firefox’s… -
Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media
The conference sessions at Web 2.0 Expo had a major emphasis on social media. I only attended a couple of these talks, about which I have brief comments below; at the end of the article, I have links to several others. Social Media Marketing – why it fails and how to fix it This one felt somewhat remedial to me, with the essential points being: Be authentic. You need to be a person, not just a representative of a company. It’s hard to change the marketing culture in an organization to deal well with social media. (A point that I was glad to gloss over, being in my tiny… -
Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Spring 2009
March 31 – April 3, San Francisco Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo seemed like a successful event, with a good-sized crowd despite the economic malaise – due in part, no doubt, to unusually aggressive discounting and promotion. With multiple tracks across four days (one day of workshops and three of conference sessions) there was much more to see than any one person could possibly attend. Here’s a few articles that we’ve written about talks at the conference: Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools TV and Radio with an API Many of the presentations are… -
Enhancing Conditional Routing in Rails
Rails’ routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP method checking, which is of some use but rather limited. What I needed was to be able to limit certain routes to only trigger when a particular host-name was used to access the application. I thought I’d have to write messy additional logic until a little comment tucked away in ActionController::Routing::RouteSet and ActionController::Routing::Routing caught my eye. Here I briefly…
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jarin udom's tumblelog
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New booth at The Local yeahhh
2 Jul 2009 | 7:47 pmSent from my iPhone Posted via email from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
Google Testing Blog: The 7 Plagues of Software Testing
30 Jun 2009 | 11:52 amThe software testing industry is infected with the plague of aimlessness. We lack lore; we lack a body of knowledge that is passed from wizard to apprentice and written down in spell books for the industrious to study. Our apprentices are without their masters. We must all reinvent the wheel in the privacy of our offices only to have other testers the world over reinvent it in theirs. via googletesting.blogspot.com Posted via web from jarin’s posterous | Comment » -
mholling's paged_scopes at master - GitHub
29 Jun 2009 | 7:04 ammholling's paged_scopes at master - GitHub -
jnunemaker's mongomapper at master - GitHub
29 Jun 2009 | 7:04 amjnunemaker's mongomapper at master - GitHub -
wayneeseguin's dynamic_reports at master - GitHub
29 Jun 2009 | 5:24 amwayneeseguin's dynamic_reports at master - GitHub
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Rail Spikes - Home
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Testing HTTP Authentication
30 Jun 2009 | 6:44 pmIf you ever need to test HTTP Authentication in your functional tests, here is how you do it: 123456 def test_http_auth @request.env[HTTP_AUTHORIZATION] = ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic.encode_credentials("quentin", "password") get :show, :id => @foobar.id assert_response :successend This is much like testing SSL. Hat tip: Philipp Führer for Functional test for HTTP Basic Authentication in Rails 2. -
Adding Routes for Tests
22 Jun 2009 | 3:25 pmI like to be extremely judicious with use of routes. Fewer routes means less memory consumption and fewer confusing magical methods. I always delete the default route map.connect ':controller/:action/:id' (you should too, otherwise all your pretty RESTful routing is easily circumvented). Since Rails now has the ability to remove unneeded RESTful routes, I’ve been removing those, too. However, this judiciousness recently painted me into a corner. I have a controller action that I would like to test and it’s wired up like this: map.logout '/logout', :controller => 'user_sessions',… -
JavaScript gotcha: storing objects in an associative array
17 Jun 2009 | 1:51 pmI just ran into a tricky gotcha in JavaScript. I was trying to store some objects in an associative array. Based on my experience with Java, Ruby, and other languages, I expected that given code like this: 1234567 var dictionary = {};var obj1 = {}; var obj2 = {};dictionary[obj1] = foodictionary[obj2] = bar The result of dictionary[obj1] would be ‘foo’ and dictionary[obj2] would be ‘bar’. This is not the case! The problem is that JavaScript objects are not really hash tables. They’re associative arrays, and the key can only be a String. When you insert an object into a associative… -
Sprinkle: the provisioning tool for people who don't have huge server clusters
4 Jun 2009 | 9:39 amI’ve recently been trying to find a good server automation tool that meets my needs. I looked at Chef and Puppet. They are both awesome for what they do, but what I don’t like is all the infrastructure I have to maintain to run Chef or Puppet. You need a server to host your server configuration on. But I only have one server![1] Chef does have a solo version which can download configuration from a web server and run it. That’s cool, but I don’t want to have a web server just for putting server configuration on. When the time commitment to set up one of these tools up greatly exceeds… -
Estimating software: a rule of thumb
2 Jun 2009 | 9:06 amEstimating software is hard, but most of us have to do it – whether we’re estimating an entire project for a client, or a new feature for a boss, or a change to one of our own projects. I’ve found the following rule helpful when estimating software. This comes from about four years of estimating Rails projects to consulting clients, and moving from bad – dramatically underestimating fixed-bid projects – to pretty good – usually overestimating time & materials projects slightly. (And more importantly, knowing when I can’t estimate, because the scope is too vague or too large.)…
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redemption in a blog
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Upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0 and running out of battery fast?
22 Jun 2009 | 7:31 amAfter upgrading my girlfriend’s iPhone 3G to OS 3.0 recently, I noticed that the iPhone’s battery was getting depleted really quickly. I’d left it overnight with Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, Push Notifications all off, and the battery went from 80% to a jaw-dropping OMGWTFBBQ 10%. I attributed it to the recent jailbreak (I’ve already removed the jailbreak trying to figure out this problem) at first. I only realized something was really wrong when the iPhone’s battery started draining while it was charging via USB! Looking around on teh interwebs, I managed to solve it… -
A curl-ier Curb – better cookie support in Curb
17 Jun 2009 | 6:42 pmAs of Curb 0.3.7, Curb comes with slightly better cookie support that makes it more “curl-like”. It probably sounds like shameless self-promotion that I’m blogging about these changes since I’d contributed them. Well, yeah that’s true, but I’m also doing so because I doubt these changes will ever be made known since Curb doesn’t publicize any updates or changelogs. Curb is my current number 1 HTTP client for Ruby so the more love it gets, the better. Passing cookies as a string in Curb requests Curl veterans will probably know how to do this with the… -
Don’t kill your app when using ActiveRecord in Rails Metal, release your database connections
14 Jun 2009 | 11:49 pmRails Metal has been available on Rails since version 2.3 – it’s old news. But if you haven’t used it or heard about it, you can find out more about Rails Metal on the RoR weblog and on Jesse Newland’s blog. So anyway, I am one of those laggards and only wrote a Rails Metal piece not too long ago for a Rails app on Wego.com in an effort to optimize some high volume requests. It looked something like this: class Adamantine def self.call(env) if env['PATH_INFO'] =~ ROUTE_REGEX location = Location.find(1) # Use ActiveRecord. [200, { 'Content-Type' => 'text/html' },… -
I’m still alive, and on FriendFeed and Twitter
24 Mar 2009 | 7:48 amWow, it seems like I haven’t posted anything this year. Don’t worry, you aren’t rid of me yet. I’m still alive and posting updates to FriendFeed and (less often) to Twitter. If you belong to what I imagine must be now the microscopic population of loyal readers of my blog, please do hook up with me on FriendFeed or Twitter. I’ll follow you back if you’re a reader! -
Dragging tab to a new window coming to Firefox
16 Nov 2008 | 6:15 amCompletely by accident, I discovered that you can now drag a tab out from its current window to a new window in a recent Firefox nightly. A short video 24-second better explains what I’m talking about: This tab tearing capability is a pretty neat feature – I know you can already do this in Safari, Opera and Galeon. It’s really well done in Safari, which I think is what Firefox is emulating. Nice to see Firefox follow suit! If you can’t wait for Firefox 3.1, try it out in a recent Firefox nighty build (remember to use a new profile unless you are willing to risk…
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Intridea - Company Blog
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Sketchnotes from the UIE Roadshow
1 Jul 2009 | 6:20 amI recently had the pleasure of attending the User Interface Engineering Roadshow in Washington, DC. The day was chock-full of insight and wisdom from usability guru Jared Spool, founder of UIE.com. In taking notes during the workshop, I decided to take my first official shot at sketchnoting. The results are as follows: Overall, I found this experience to be wholly satisfying. Putting key ideas into sketches required an interesting use of my attention span: in addition to listening intently to the ideas being communicated, I was simultaneously forced to employ creative sketching solutions that… -
Built For Speed: Using the AssetPackager Plugin
26 Jun 2009 | 11:42 amInspired by the recent launch of code.google.com/speed, I decided to sit down and see how I could apply their guidelines. This is the first in a series of posts on improving front-end performance for your Rails applications. First of all, we need to create our sample application. Recently, I’ve been using Beet, a gem for generating Ruby projects, but you can create your local version however works for you. Using Beet, the following command tells the Rails generator to use MySQL, remove unused files (public/index.html, etc.) and initialize a Git repository: beet -g built_for_speed… -
Quick Tip: Railsy Array Checks in jQuery
19 Jun 2009 | 6:11 pmI love the any? and empty? convenience methods that Rails and Ruby provide, they make conditional statements much easier to read. I also really dislike the default method of checking this behavior in jQuery: if ($('some.element').length > 0) { // ...do something } Well, luckily jQuery is ridiculously easy to extend, so why not just mix that functionality in with a couple of quick shot plugin methods? Just add this javascript sometime after you include jQuery: jQuery.fn.any = function() { return (this.length > 0); } jQuery.fn.none = function() { return (this.length == 0); } That’s… -
Intridea's Hackon in Portland, Maine
12 Jun 2009 | 10:01 amI’m pleased to announce Intridea’s Hackon, a 3-day co-working and unconference event we’ve organized at the Portland Harbor Hotel in Portland, Maine June 18-20th. Thursday and Friday (17/18th) will be for informal hacking, coworking, and discussion and as we attempt to backfill interesting talks for Saturday (20th). The Hackon is intended to bring local software craftsman together to work on projects, exchange ideas, hack on open source, or just get some work done. There will be wifi, projection, food, and valet parking at the hotel. And because we love developers and the community so… -
Present.ly Mentioned as a Best-Bet Collaboration Tool by Inc. Magazine
10 Jun 2009 | 7:12 amIn the June 2009 issue of Inc. Magazine, Present.ly was mentioned as one of the best-bet collaboration tools for mobile users. It's becoming more apparent that companies need online collaboration tools that help alleviate the hassle of back-and-forth e-mail conversations and allow users to share information and documents. The article states that 22 percent of companies use real-time collaboration software and around 24 percent use document-sharing software, which Present.ly supports out of the box. It goes into detail on how to choose the right collaboration software for your company and…
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ELC Code Feed
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Ruby FreshBooks Integration
28 Jun 2009 | 7:06 pmHaving trouble integrating FreshBooks? So were we. Some gotchas: The README is often incorrect. Update doesn't work. Use our gem. Status for estimates is an integer, not string: 1 draft, 2 sent, 3 viewed, 4 replied 5 accepted, 6 invoiced Check the result for invoice.update. If it's false, there's an error. Edit the gem to turn on debug statements around lib/freshbooks/connection.rb:call_api To download the pdf, you must set the status to 'sent' for a draft (remember to set it back!). Install it: gem install elc-freshbooks.rb --source http://gems.github.com Full code to download an invoice or… -
Auto delta parent records in ThinkingSphinx
26 Jun 2009 | 10:44 amAuto updating sphinx delta on child record updates Thinking Sphinx is quickly becoming the de-facto rails search plugin. In the past there have been a few other plugins that gained popularity and lost it almost as quickly by either being orphaned, outdated, etc. Thinking Sphinx has a clear path and a very involved/attentive maintainer. Thinking Sphinx is quickly becoming the de-facto rails search plugin. In the past there have been a few other plugins that gained popularity and lost it almost as quickly by either being orphaned, outdated, etc. Thinking Sphinx has a clear path and a very… -
Scraping Images from Twitpics
25 Jun 2009 | 5:15 pmRecently, I've been scraping Images and videos from Twitter and one site that has not been too easy to grab pics from is Twitpics. Here's a snippet of code that I've been using to grab the image from Twitpic with Hpricot: require net/http require hpricot def rip_twitpic(url) begin codeurl.match(\w+$).to_s unless code.blank? uriURI.parse(url) respNet::HTTP.get_response(uri) htmlHpricot(resp.body) html.at("#photo-display")[src] end rescue Exception => e puts "Error extracting twitpic: e" url end end Note: Thanks to Stephen Boisvert for showing my typo. That's what I get… -
Coworking Visas: Offices Without Borders
25 Jun 2009 | 10:19 amListen up, Señor T is talking to you. If you have ever tried to spend 8 hours working from a coffee shop, then I don't have to tell you that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. Yes, its a fun dynamic working environment, where people will make you coffee and tasty snacks. However, spotty internet connections, loud music, chatty patrons and lack of power outlets get old quick. But for a cybernomad like me, plopping down a monitor on a desk just isn't an option. Shared Workspaces In recent years, shared community orientated workspaces have been growing in numbers. Places like Souk, which… -
ReCSS - AJAX friendly CSS testing
24 Jun 2009 | 4:02 pmBack in the days when the web didn't yet have a version number, David from dojotoolkit.org came up with a neat solution to reload your css without the need of reloading your page: ReCSS. It's just a simple bookmarklet that walks through all linked stylesheets and reloads them. This omits page reloads in order to test your CSS changes, very helpful for AJAX heavy sites. Here is what the code looks like: javascript: void(function() { var i, a, s; a document.getElementsByTagName(link); for (i 0; i < a.length; i) { s a[i]; if (s.rel.toLowerCase().indexOf(stylesheet) >= 0 && s.href)…
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Kai Richard Knig
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Hot chocolate #30 …
2 Jul 2009 | 1:00 pmMistaeks I Hav Made: What do Programmers Feel About their Software? -
Hot chocolate #29 …
1 Jul 2009 | 1:00 pmUIE ROADSHOW - sketches How a programmer reads your resume Big Trends -
Hot chocolate #28 …
30 Jun 2009 | 1:06 pm35 Awesome Augmented Reality Examples on BannerBlog News Free Icon Pack: Web Injection - Tutorial9 Particletree » PHP Quick Profiler html5doctor, helping you implement html5 today -
Hot chocolate #27 …
29 Jun 2009 | 1:48 pmNithyananda Newsletter: Serving others is leadership 99 Amazing Widescreen Wallpapers To Spice Up Your Desktop | Showcases | instantShift -
Hot chocolate #26 …
27 Jun 2009 | 2:14 pmtext shadow bow - awesome Ruby Best Practices - The Decorator Delegator Disco Drinking Bird - Sixty Symbols #
