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Restarting Rails
12Dec10I’ve been in my comfort zone for far too long now. Over roughly the last one and a half years, I’ve acquired a lot of cruft. Physical cruft. Mental cruft. Things I should have adopted a while ago but didn’t. Stuff I should have stopped doing but still do. Ugly hacks and workarounds I’ve gotten used to. Small to medium pains I’ve ignored too long.
A few examples:
- not using Rails 3, Bundler and Ruby 1.9
- proper integration testing
- copy and pasting stuff from old projects into new ones
- new project setup in general
- still using Apache, Passenger 2 and system-wide RVM for deployment
- setting up new Rails projects takes me about an hour by
- and so on, and so on …
It’s time for all this to change. I’ve already spent around three days reading up on various topics, and boy, it’s a lot to take in. So in order to help me remember what I’ve learned and what’s still on the list, I will accompany this process with a series of articles.
Some of these will not be much more than a list of hand-filtered and commented links, or a bunch of free-form notes. I had originally hoped to get away from WordPress before starting this, but I haven’t. In the end it’s just a tool, it will suffice, and putting off writing because of it would be nothing but an excuse for more procrastination.
So on with it! The rough outline of the series will be as follows:
- Rails 3, Ruby 1.9 and Bundler
- architecture
- what’s new
- gotchas
- Rails application templates
- Improving my testing habits
- Hosting and deployment
- Passenger 3, custom RVM gemsets and Capistrano
- Better code reuse
- Writing and publishing my own gems
- Frontend
- Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate
- Improving my asset management: better JS and CSS delivery
- HAML: worth it?
- Development, workflow and good practises
Ruby Enterprise Edition on OS X – a Quick Caveat
22Sep09The gist: when trying to install RubyEE, remove all gems installed to ~/.gem first. Otherwise you will encounter exceptions like
[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()
Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition on OS X is pretty easy and straight forward; it installs itself to /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>, along with its own copy of RubyGems.
RubyGems installed with the standard MRI Ruby do not work with RubyEE and have to be installed a second time using /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>/bin/gem.
The caveat: both /usr/bin/gem and /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>/bin/gem try to load gems from your personal gem path at ~/.gem first before looking in their respective gem paths. For example, if you have bluecloth installed to ~/.gem using the standard MRI ruby, RubyEE will try to load it and throw exceptions like
[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()
To solve this, you can either remove ~/.gem from your GEM_PATH environment variable, or simply uninstall all gems from there and reinstall them properly to /usr/lib/ruby using sudo gem install.
SpriteMe: A One-Click CSS Sprite Generator
15Sep09Steve Souders from High Performance Web Sites gifts us SpriteMe, a bookmarklet that greatly simplifies the usage of CSS sprites.
When invoked, SpriteMe automatically identifies potential images to be grouped into a sprite, gives you one-click sprite creation through csscoolrunnings.com and re-inserts the new sprite into your site on the fly for testing.
Rails on the menu(bar)
06Sep09
The Rails API in your Mac's menu bar
Today I learned that Fluid, the Mac app that lets you create Single-Site Browsers, has the ability to create custom menu bar items as well — sweet!
So, how does “ajax-powered Rails API documentation in your menu bar, complete with keyboard shortcut” sound? Take a look at this short screencast, courtesy of yours truly:
Five Hidden Preferences for Quicktime X
02Sep09Apple’s latest movie player is quite the looker with its no-window, all-video design, but when it comes to making it bow to your will, you seem to be out of luck. It does not even have a preference menu — okay, we get it Apple: it’s take it or leave it.
Not so! Here’s five hidden preferences to remove some common annoyances and make Quicktime Player X more pleasant to use:
Make the controller bar hide more quickly
This is actually the first secret preference for a mac app I’ve found on my own — yay strings!
The controller — the little bar containing the play/pause/forward/rewind buttons — sticks around a bit too long after you have stopped moving your mouse, obscuring the movie you’re trying to watch. Luckily,
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGUIVisibilityTimeout 1
makes it fade out after one only second.
Thanks to rorschach from the MacRumors forums for these other four tips:
Play movies automatically on open
This one drove me nuts, and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default: to have your movies playing automatically right after opening them, enter
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1
Disable the rounded corners
If you prefer to see every last pixel of your video clip, down to the corners, enter
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 1
Show subtitles and closed captions automatically
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGEnableCCAndSubtitlesOnOpen 1
Allow multiple screen recordings at the same time
If you need to capture your desktop into multiple videos in parallel, this is for you:
defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGAllowMultipleSimultaneousRecordings 1
Rails, Postgres, Snow Leopard and 64bit: a word of warning
31Aug09After zipping through a painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on both my Macs, I found myself banging my head against the wall trying to get my Rails + Postgres stack running again.
There is a lot of great information out there on how to get everything up to 64bit goodness, and I merrily began the uninstall/recompile/reinstall dance. What followed was an excruciating eight hours of trying to get Postgres to compile to 64bit, and the pg gem — or any Postgres adapter for that matter — to link against it.
Long story short: make sure you actually have a 64bit Mac. Let me say that again: make sure your Mac is actually running Snow Leopard in 64bit.
As embarrassing as this, at some point I finally realized that both my Macs used Core Duo chips, not Core 2 Duos – which makes my Snow Leopard a plain-old 32bit installation. Markus Winter on A hat full of sky has a lot of great information on the subject matter, as well as a program that shows you exactly what mode your system is running in, and why.
So, us 32bit cat owners still have to compile pg with
sudo env ARCHFLAGS='i386' gem install pg -- --with-pgsql-dir=/usr/local/pgsql
- just as we had to on 10.5 Leopard.
What I hope to have learned from this:
- Postgres is a fifteen year old project, crafted in ten thousands of man hours by countless programmers all smarter than me
- Next time it tells me it does not want to compile in 64bit, I’ll listen.
How to fix your 3G USB stick in Snow Leopard
31Aug09I bough a UMTS stick from O2 / Tchibo mobil just two weeks ago, and so far it’s been great – love the new-found freedom. Alas, it didn’t survive my otherwise smooth and painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard – its ugly “Mobile Partner” application kept crashing on me.
This is how I got my Huawei E160 (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) UMTS stick back to work:
- forget about the crashing software – the dialer included in Snow Leopard is all you need
- open Terminal.app and login as root user by typing
sudo -sand entering your user account password - as the user root, open a text editor to create a new file by typing
nano /etc/ppp/options - put these two lines in the file:
+pap
-chap
then save by pressing CTRL-O and exit with CTRL-X. You can now close Terminal.app - open Snow Leopards network preferences pane. There should already be an entry in there for your 3G USB stick named HUAWEI… – select it to see its settings
- “Telephone number” should be *99#, “Account name” and “Password” should be blank:
- Click “Advanced” and make sure Other / Huawei Mobile Connect 3G is the selected modem:
That’s it! If you’ve fiddled around before trying this, you might want unplug and replug the stick once, but after that, you should be able to connect just fine.
Thanks to horrie66 from the Whirlpool user forums for the info!
flotsam & jetsam: listing .gitignore files in the Textmate project drawer
17Aug09Or, you could modify the Textmate File Pattern. Its not as tricky as it seems, in Textmate, goto Preferences -> Advanced. Then change the beginning of the File Pattern from:
(?!htaccess)To:
(?!(htaccess|git*))
How to change the output directory of metric_fu
15Aug09I would like to treat the great reports generated by metric_fu as documentation and keep them in my repository. So how do we convince it to save its output in doc/ instead of tmp/ ?
Stew Welbourne has the answer:
MetricFu::Configuration.run do |config|
config.base_directory = 'doc/metrics'
config.scratch_directory = File.join(config.base_directory, 'scratch')
config.output_directory = File.join(config.base_directory, 'output')
config.data_directory = File.join(config.base_directory, '_data')
config.saikuro = { 
utput_directory => File.join(config.scratch_directory, 'saikuro'),
# the rest of your configuration goes here
end
Just make sure that your new target directory is two folders deep, as the original tmp/metric_fu is, or you may get in trouble with the graphing part of metric_fu. Voilà!
