Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Long running Threads in Rails and metaprogramming fun

Disclaimer: This post contains evil (but highly fun!) code. Proceed at your own peril…
I was recently designing an application that needed to execute some long running requests against an external host. If you’ve ever tried doing something like this in Rails, you’ll find your mongrels will block up waiting for the request to complete, bringing [...]

Testing your ActiveRecord migrations

Sometimes you have a data migration that creates or modifies records in some way, and you would like to test it in your unit tests right? Except that Rails typically just clones the structure of your dev database, not its data. So how do you test that a migration succeeded? Simple, just invoke it during [...]

Rails tagging plugins overview and comparison

span.pro, li.pro {
color: green;
}
span.con, li.con {
color: red;
}
span.maybe, li.maybe {
color: orange;
}
table.separated td {
border-bottom: 1px solid #eee;
vertical-align:top;
line-height:1.2em;
}
[...]

Twitter opens the floodgates of FUD

TechCrunch is reporting on rumors that twitter is leaving Ruby on Rails. Of course the comment threads are covered by a heated debate by people either bashing RoR, suggesting their favorite language and platform as the ‘only possible solution’, or both. Nevermind that Friends For Sale, with 630k active daily users scales just fine on [...]

Rails moves to Lighthouse

In a series of dev infrastructure changes, the Rails team is moving to Lighthouse as its bugtracking system. I wrote about Lighthouse more than a year ago as an application to watch in the bugtracking space, and now they’re coming into the limelight with official support from the Rails team.
I’m really happy to see [...]

Rails moves to GitHub; Git is the new black

Rails has officially moved to GitHub. The GitHub guys have done an awesome job capitalizing on the growing trend of git usage, especially in the Rails community, and of course getting ‘official blessing’ from the Rails core team themselves means that many more projects are sure to follow.
I’ve been using git-svn to work on a [...]

fix for TextMate Ruby tests broken with stack level too deep

If you experience problems running single unit tests in TextMate with Rails 2, it may be due to a bug. The problem has something to due with conflicting builder.rb instances in Rails and TextMate. The simplest and least intrusive fix is to add this to the top of your test_helper.rb

$LOAD_PATH.reject! { |e| e.include? ‘TextMate’ }

webcrawler bot detection

def self.bot_agent_list
[ "panscient", "larbin", "dummy", "Teoma", "alexa",
"froogle", "inktomi", "looksmart", "URL_Spider_SQL",
"Firefly", "NationalDirectory", "Ask Jeeves", "TECNOSEEK",
"InfoSeek", "WebFindBot", "crawler", "girafobot", "Scooter",
"Baidu", "bot", "Google", "SiteUptime", "Slurp",
[...]

acts_as_versioned for a set of columns

acts_as_versioned is a great plugin for versioning a set of model attributes transparently every time you save. The plugin seems to be built with exclusion in mind (version all except these) but to get it to work only on a specific set of columns, this simple trick can be applied:
class Foo [:description_t]
def [...]

Elastic Server On Demand relaunched

“We at CFT are proud to announce the latest refresh of our Elastic Server On-Demand service.
Elastic Servers(tm) are application stacks which can be dynamically constructed from component libraries and delivered in many virtualization-ready formats (VMware, Xen, Parallels). We call them “elastic” because it is just the amount of components you want for a task, [...]