Tag archives: Rails

Rails on the menu(bar)

06Sep09
The Rails API in your Mac's menu bar

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:

Filed under OS X, Rails| Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Rails, Postgres, Snow Leopard and 64bit: a word of warning

31Aug09

After 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:

  1. Postgres is a fifteen year old project, crafted in ten thousands of man hours by countless programmers all smarter than me
  2. Next time it tells me it does not want to compile in 64bit, I’ll listen.
Filed under OS X, Rails| Tagged , , | 3 Comments

How to change the output directory of metric_fu

15Aug09

I 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  = { :o 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!

Filed under Rails| Tagged , , | No Comments