State Of Flux

I wanted to know if a class was an Active Record class. I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Ruby so I monkey patches the Class object like so (assuming Person is an active record model object).

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class Class
  def inherits_from?(klass, me=self)
    return false if me.nil?
    return true if me == klass
    inherits_from? klass, me.superclass
  end
end

>> Person.inherits_from? ActiveRecord::Base
=> true

activerecord, inheritance, metaprogramming, ruby

I wanted a nice looking 404, 500 and maintenance pages for my Rails app and I couldn’t serve them from Rails.

• I didn’t want to hand code the pages – I’m using a web framework for a reason!
• I wanted to use the application’s layout
• I needed that pages to be static so I could serve them when the Rails app was either down or when it had ‘issues’

1. create a controller for the purpose of rendering the static pages
2. tailor your views so you have nice 404, 500 and maintenance pages
3. modify the layout so that signin and register were not longer present
4. create a rake task to render the pages and write them out to a file

Items 1 & 2 are just standard Rails stuff – so go nutz young coders.

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  <% unless controller.controller_name == "errors" %>
     put your sign-in code here
  <% end %>

Item 4 was a bit trickier, but this rake task should get you up and running.

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  namespace :generate do
    task :pages => :environment do
      require 'action_controller/integration'
      app = ActionController::Integration::Session.new
      app.host! "stateofflux.com"
      [['/errors/error_404', 'public/40 4.html'],
       ['/errors/error_500', 'public/500.html']].each do |url, file|
        begin
          app.get url
          File.open(file, "w") { |f| f.write app.response.body }
        rescue Exception => e
          puts "Could not write file #{e}"
        end
      end
    end
  end

We run the rake task in the development environment then check it in, but you could run it in production if there was production data that you needed to create the page.

404, 500, apache, errorpages, layout, nginx, rails, rake, static

Please install the postgresql adapter: `gem install activerecord-postgresql-adapter` 

sudo gem install pg

activerecord, pg, postgres, postgresql, rails

My OS X lovin’ buddies love to point out how easy it is to manipulate columns in TextMate . But I’m old skool and I still love emacs . So to prove that column editing mode is a cinch I’ve put together my first screencast to demonstrate column editing mode in Emacs. Emacs ships with CUA mode which you need to turn on and then let the good times begin. Enjoy…

column, cua, cua-mode, editing, emacs, textmate

I have a database with duplicate records in it and I want to know how many records I should have if I clean out the duplicates. Boy is this thing dirty! The dataset I’m working with a mid sized (approximately 2 million records) and it’s a dump from another system. One of the problems is that the data in the dump has been denormalized. The second part of the problem is that some data has been entered multiple times in the source system¹.

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blog_example=# \d
              List of relations
 Schema |     Name      | Type  |    Owner    
--------+---------------+-------+-------------
 public | addresses     | table | markmansour
 public | users         | table | markmansour
(2 rows)

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blog_example=# select count(*) from users;
 count 
-------
     3
(1 row)

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blog_example=# select * from users;
 id | name  
----+-------
  1 | Korny
  2 | Tim
  3 | Korny
(3 rows)

blog_example=# select * from phone_numbers;
 id | user_id |  number  
----+---------+----------
  1 |       1 | 11111111
  2 |       1 | 22222222
  3 |       2 | 33333333
  4 |       3 | 11111111
  5 |       3 | 22222222
(5 rows)

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blog_example=# magic select name, number but put the numbers on the same line
 name  |  number  
-------+----------
 Korny | 11111111, 22222222
 Tim   | 33333333
(2 rows)

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CREATE AGGREGATE array_accum_text (
    basetype = text,
    sfunc = array_append,
    stype = text[],
    initcond = '{}',
    sortop = >);

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blog_example=# select u.*, array_to_string(array_accum_text(cast(ph.number as text)), ',') as all_phone_numbers
blog_example=#   from users as u
blog_example=#   inner join phone_numbers as ph on u.id = ph.user_id
blog_example=#   group by u.id, u.name;
 id | name  | all_phone_numbers 
----+-------+-------------------
  3 | Korny | 11111111,22222222
  1 | Korny | 11111111,22222222
  2 | Tim   | 33333333
(3 rows)

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blog_example=# create view extended_users as
blog_example-#   select u.id as user_id,
blog_example-#          u.name as name, 
blog_example-#          array_to_string(array_accum_text(cast(ph.number as text)), ',') as all_phone_numbers
blog_example-#     from users as u
blog_example-#     inner join phone_numbers as ph on u.id = ph.user_id
blog_example-#     group by u.id, u.name;
CREATE VIEW

blog_example=# select name, all_phone_numbers from extended_users
blog_example-#   group by name, all_phone_numbers;
 name  | all_phone_numbers 
-------+-------------------
 Korny | 11111111,22222222
 Tim   | 33333333
(2 rows)

Footnotes

¹ I want to talk about a technical solution so let ignore the politics of the situation (i.e. let’s presume that I can’t get the data keyed in a better way or have the data delivered in a more normalized format).

² Some SQL:

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blog_example=# select u.name, ph.number from users as u
blog_example-#        inner join phone_numbers as ph on u.id = ph.user_id
blog_example-#        group by u.name, ph.number;
 name  |  number  
-------+----------
 Korny | 11111111
 Korny | 22222222
 Tim   | 33333333
(3 rows)

aggregate, denormalize, postgres, postgresql, sql

Rubinius is a reimplementation of the Ruby interpreter initiated by Evan Phoenix who has recently been hired by Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a hosting company that is positioning itself as the hosting provider of choice for Ruby applications by a variety of developer focused strategies. In an effort to raise their profile and gain credibility in the Ruby community they’ve hired Evan to work full-time on the development of Rubinius. They’ve also hired the excellent Ezra Zygmuntowicz of camping fame which gives them huge cred in the developer community. Not only are they just latching onto established efforts, they are creating new markets by going after the shared hosting crew by developing mod_rubinius . I would guess that the benefits are twofold – they look like nice guys by giving back to the community, but they also create a very easy path for them to upsell shared hosting into VPS. Everyone wins when this kind of effort is put into a business model.

Evan and Eric Hodel are out in Australia for the Rubinius Sprint set up by Marcus Crafter and fellow Engine Yarder Dylan Egan . In a side trip Evan came to Melbourne and spent three hours explaining how Rubinius worked and answering a heap of really interesting technical questions from the Melbourne crew before heading out for a few quiet (5am) drinks.

australia, engineyard, evanphoneix, ezra, melbourne, rubinius, ruby

I’ve been a bit absent with my blogging so I’ve got a few retrospective entries for you.

BarCamp Melbourne : 60 people, 25 talks and an amazing day of interdisciplinary cahoots unorganized by Ben Balbo ! What I loved about BarCamp:http://barcamp.org/ was the range of presentations – everything from programming, databases and information modelling through to media centers, industrial relations, social activities and a hell of a lot of fun.

I’d like to give special mention to Paul Fenwick’s hilarious and poignant talk on “An Illustrated History of Failure”. He managed to show why testing costs – and quantified it. It was a showcase of brilliant execution on a topic which would, with an average presenter, make you groan.

Other outstanding talks where Andy G’s “OpenLazlo GUI, jiggy itouch GUI, openmaji” and Brent Snook’s “Lowering Usability Hurdles with the Wii”. Very, very cool stuff. In reality all the talks were excellent and had a lot to offer. I can’t wait to see the what the next BarCamp has to offer.

I was lucky enough to win a copy of The CSS Anthology from SitePoint:http://sitepoint.com/ for my talk on Monkey Patching (which I’d given previously as the Ruby Nuby night a few months ago). The after event drinks were in North Melbourne, with the suds provided by Microsoft

You can keep up with the activities on by checking out the BarCampMelbourne2008 tag on da internets .

barcamp, barcampmelbourne2008, sitepoint

agile, markmansour, people, process, shipit, tools, wds07

I’m pumped. I’ve just arrived in Sydney from my one hour flight from Melbourne. I’ve checked in and hooked up to my $30 per day internet connection and I’m putting the finishing touches on my presentation. I haven’t spent much time in Sydney but from what I can see it is a beautiful place. Tonight there is an industry meet and greet which I look forward to downing a few brews and meeting the locals. Sounds awesome.

During the process of writing my talk it has occured to me how much there is to writing software. My talk is targeted at Web Applications, but when all said and done, the same disciplines are required for web work as they are for all other application development. I was going to talk about RedBubble and why it was cool, but it was just a bit too specific – there wasn’t going to be anything concrete to take away. I concluded that a more valuable approach would be to convey (in a compressed timeframe) the a collectin of practices that make a group successful. I assume that the hard skills (HTML, CSS, coding, design) are being worked on because they are the most obvious, but the softer skill and the management practices are the skills that are harder to learn. So, in 50 minutes, I’m going to spew forth a collection of good practices with examples with a compresensive set of references. My hope is that I pique some interest and that the motived ones in the audience will pick up the battern and Go, Go, Go!

If you are at Web Directions please come up and say hello and tell me that you’re reading my blog!

wds07 presentation webapp sydney

Surprisingly, we are not perfect. Shocking. Even after our testing, we sometime release code into production with errors. We try to be good boys by not just ignoring these errors but we get the system to log them and send the info to our tech mailing list. In the Rails world, the excellent Exception Notifier plugin, from the prolific Jamis Buck, makes this a breeze. If you’ve got a Rails project and your not using it, then you should. Go on, get it!

But now what? You’ve got the emails but with the constant pressure to get things done it becomes easy for everyone to just think “Oh, I’m a bit busy, I’ll let one of the other guys do it.” But they don’t, because we’re all busy. Introducing, the Exceptional Cow!

The Exceptional Cow (a Tucows squigy toy)

At our end of iteration review, like all good agile shops, we go through what’s good, what could be done better, what still puzzles us and what we are going to do next time (but details on this are for another post). We also have The Exceptional Cow™.

Whoever has the cow is responsible for triaging all incoming exceptions for that iteration. At the end of each iteration The Exceptional Cow is ceremoniously passed to the next bovine herder. As the cow herder, you have the responsibility of examining all incoming exceptions and fixing it if it is a no brainer or writing it up as a bug for someone else to fix if you don’t have the time or if someone else has a much better grasp on the issue. Quite often all exceptions for the week are attacked in the final hours before we close off the iteration as we don’t want to start new functionality at that point.

What it has done for RedbBubble is make our code more robust which means our customers have a better experience. It also makes everyone just a bit more careful and tolerant of exceptions. It is also a great way to get everyone across parts of the code base they wouldn’t normally look at including the systems side of things. The cow is our friend…

Edit: The Tucows developer blog picked up on my post – Thanks!

exception_notification rails agile team

The Melbourne Ruby User’s Group held it’s first ever Nuby night last week. It was somewhat inspired by the RailsConf 2007 RejectConf that Marcus Crafter and I attended earlier in the year with the idea of many short talks presented by many speakings being preferred over a few ‘experts’ presenting on a wider range of issues. It also acted like a gong show – you had a hard limit of 5 minutes and when the gong went off you could imagine a walking stick wrapped around your neck pulling you off the stage. No pressure… Really…

I spoke about the animals of the Ruby world – monkey patching and duck typing. After researching my talk I realized that I only had a cursory knowledge of both topics but preparing for this talk gave me the reason to learn more. I enjoyed the experience and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to practice their presentation skills.

A big thank you to Pete Yandell for continuing to organize the Melbourne Ruby community and to Marty Andrews for recording and editing the presentations.

• Monkey Patching (Open Classes) – slides and movie
• Duck Typing – slides and movie
• Photos of the night too

Big props to Justin French also from RedBubble who presented and to Xavier Shay who didn’t present due to time constraints.

ruby usergroup ducktyping monkeypatch openclasses slides nuby

I often want to grep for a word recursively within a directory. That is easy! But quite often I know there are a bunch of directories that I can ignore. For instance, in my rails apps I don’t want to hear about subversion directories and I don’t want to search the vendor tree.

I also don’t want to look at files that are really big – they are usually log files or binaries of some sort that I just don’t care about. So I put together the monster find and grep string that works for me.

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find . -path '*/.svn' -prune \
    -o -path '*/vendor' -prune \
    -o -path '*/log' -o -path '*~' -prune \
    -o \( -size -100000c -type f \) \
    -print0 | xargs -0 grep -ne "SEARCH"

Let’s break it down.

find .

-path '*/.svn' -prune

-o -path '*/vendor'

-o -path '*~'

-o -path '*/log' -prune

-o \( -size -100000c -type f \)

-print0

|

xargs -0

grep -ne

The easiest way to use this is to put it into a shell file – I’ve put it into s.sh.

My s.sh file looks like this

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#!/bin/sh

if  [ ${#1} -gt 0  ]
then
    find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -path '*/vendor' -prune -o -path '*/log' -o -path '*~' -prune -o \( -size -100000c -type f \) -print0 | xargs -0 grep -ne  $1
else
    echo "Not enough parameters.  Usage: ./$0 searchstring"
fi

Then I make it executable by

chmod 755 s.sh

If you want to find all of the before filters you would do this

s.sh "before_filter"

and enjoy you super fast find command.

find, grep, rails