Charles Max Wood

Ruby and Beanstalkd

Chuck — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:38:09 +0000

Recently at work, we were having some problems with our application. Most of the problems stemmed from the complicated nature of the application and some poor design that we had been trying to patch up for months. Finally, in November, we got clearance from my boss to rebuild the application as a series of mini-applications [...]

Continuous Integration and CruiseControl.rb

Chuck — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:23:55 +0000

At work, we recently got all of our spec passing and determined that we needed to stay on top of keeping the test suite updated so that we knew that the quality of our product wasn’t compromised. To solve this, we implemented continuous integration with CruiseControl.rb. Continuous Integration The idea is to provide regular checks on the [...]

New Podcast: RailsCoach.com – Your Chance to Win Camtasia (for Mac or Windows)

Chuck — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:53:49 +0000

Lately, I’ve been working on creating a podcast to help developers become better at their craft. The format will primarily be an interview with members of the Ruby and Rails communities on what they think make exceptional developers and about their contributions to the Ruby on Rails community. My first interview will be with Gregg [...]

Rails Templates: My Template

Chuck — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:43:43 +0000

I just read the article by Pratik Naik from the Rails Core Team regarding Rails Templates. Have you ever wished you could start out your Rails application with all of your gems installed and all of your standard setup items completed? Well, wait no longer. You can now do it with Rails Templates. Pratik covered it [...]

Deployment with Capistrano

Chuck — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:17 +0000

One problem that seems to face people when they’re attempting to move their applications into production is the best way to manage deployment of their application. This is where tools like capistrano comes in. Capistrano was written by Jamis Buck of 37signals. In a lot of ways it has become the defacto way to deploy [...]

Recent Outage and New Hosting

Chuck — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:43:01 +0000

I just switched my hosting from RapidVPS to SilverRack. You may have noticed the outage today as I moved the blog over. It did present a few issues, but I think I have them all figured out. Please let me know if you notice anything by emailing me at chuck@charlesmaxwood.com. I’m also trying to get this [...]

Correcting Testing Mistakes: Taking Test Suite Runtime From 3 Hours to 14 Seconds

Chuck — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:35:59 +0000

Last week, my development team and I ran across a problem with a library we had written several months before that parsed spreadsheets given to us by one of our clients and inserted the data provided into the database. At the time we weren’t sure what the problem was. We decided to run the tests [...]

Screencast: Basic Ruby on Rails Routing

Chuck — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:08:28 +0000

This is my first screencast. I’ve learned a lot about recording screencasts while doing this. The screencast was recorded using a free trial of Camtasia for Mac. The trial is up in 30 days, so I’d really appreciate donations to help me get ScreenFlow so I can continue to produce screencasts. In the meantime, here’s a [...]

CharlesMaxWood.com – A New Focus

Chuck — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:37:46 +0000

When I first set up this blog and purchased the domain, I intended to post about any technology that I came in contact with. However, after owning it for a year and not really putting anything into it, I determined that I would post about what I enjoyed the most—Ruby on Rails. Over the last year, [...]

Data Seeding in Ruby on Rails 2.3.4

Chuck — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:37:44 +0000

I just started building a new Rails application in version 2.3.4. One feature that I thought was particularly handy is the data seeding that is now built into Ruby on Rails. Before this feature, you would have to do one of two things. You could seed your data in your migrations. The problem with this approach [...]

Ruby 5 and Rails Envy Revisited

Chuck — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:04:06 +0000

About a month ago, I wrote about the splitting up of the dynamic duo—Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack—that made up the Rails Envy team. Since then, we’ve seen 7 episodes of Ruby5 and 2 episodes of Rails Envy come out. Now that we’ve gotten a good feel for what each is doing with his podcast, [...]

8 Lessons From Corey Haines’ Performance Kata

Chuck — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:52:21 +0000

Gregg Pollack posted this video to the Envy Labs Blog. It’s a terrific example of Test Driven Development. Here is the video and 8 lessons you should learn from it. 1. Performance Katas Have you ever read a book or watched a presentation and learned something really interesting only to forget it a week or two later? [...]

3 Sets of Programming Exercises to Polish Your Skills

Chuck — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:21:20 +0000

Yesterday at the last URUG meeting, one of the presenters talked to us about Ruby threading and then got us started on an exercise building a chat server using threading. The exercise was enlightening and really cemented the concepts for a lot of the people there. So, I thought I’d share three sites that provide [...]

Ruby on Rails: Nifty Generators

Chuck — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:47:45 +0000

While looking at articles and resources about authentication in Ruby on Rails I ran across a set of generators written by Ryan Bates of Railscasts. You can find the nifty generators at http://github.com/ryanb/nifty-generators/tree/master I ran the generators and have posted the resulting code at http://github.com/woody2shoes/nifty/tree/master. Authentication My favorite of the generators was actually the authentication generator. script/generate nifty_authentication The thing [...]

Ruby on Rails: 9 Articles on Rails Authentication

Chuck — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:39:31 +0000

It seems that a lot of people are confused about what to do when it comes to requiring authentication for their Ruby on Rails application. Here are a few links that helped me figure things out. 1. Authlogic Authlogic is the authentication plugin for Ruby on Rails that I use when I need one. It apparently has [...]

Ruby on Rails: What are Polymorphic Associations?

Chuck — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:22:55 +0000

One of the most powerful aspects of Ruby on Rails are the associations we can create between two classes. It is immensely convenient to be able to call person.posts rather than doing a SQL statement to find all of the posts with a person_id of X. Sometimes, we have instances where the associations could be [...]

Installing RMagick on Mac OS X

Chuck — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:42:07 +0000

RMagick is the Ruby wrapper for ImageMagick—the open source API for image manipulation. RMagick is used for graphing with the Gruff gem and many other things in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Installing RMagick on Mac OS X is pretty simple, but not as simple as typing gem install rmagick but pretty close. First, you need ImageMagick. [...]

Ruby on Rails: Testing out Edge Rails

Chuck — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:45:28 +0000

I’ve recently been hearing a lot about Edge Rails—the development version of Ruby on Rails— and decided that I wanted to try out all of the cool stuff that’s soon going to be at our fingertips. So, I checked out the source for Edge Rails and realized that other people probably will want to do [...]

Good-bye Rails Envy, Hello Ruby 5!

Chuck — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:46:26 +0000

For those that followed Rails Envy, you’re probably aware that Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer have discontinued the Rails Envy podcast. The Rails Envy website is still there, for those who are checking it out as one of the 9 Resources for New Ruby on Rails Developers. I was considering starting my own podcast to take [...]

Rails Metal Example #7: Tracking Analytics

Chuck — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:32:58 +0000

Last month, I posted 9 Ways to Use Rails Metal. This is the seventh way to use Rails Metal. A week ago, I posted Ruby on Rails: Polymorphic Associations with Mixin Modules which included an example of tracking impressions on different objects. For this Rails Metal example, we’ll use that mixin to track page impressions. 1 2 3 class Page [...]

Ruby on Rails: Polymorphic Associations with Mixin Modules

Chuck — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:15:18 +0000

I work for a lead generation company. Part of the application I’m working required us to know how many people viewed a particular item in the system. So, my co-worker and I created an Impression model that tracked each appearance of the associated object. We created a polymorphic association to allow impressions to be gathered [...]

CSS: Replacing the tag

Chuck — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:33:31 +0000

When I first started playing with HTML, the way you centered your HTML elements was to place a <center> tag around them. If you try using a <center> tag in your HTML in any type of IDE, you’ll get a deprecation warning. (If you’re new to programming, deprecation means that the functionality is slated to [...]

What are Ruby Symbols?

Chuck — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:30:00 +0000

A lot of new Ruby developers I’ve worked with have seen the symbol notation—starting with a :— and have been confused by what a symbol actually is. There is a lot of information out there that is confusing as well. Here’s a brief rundown of what symbols are and how they are used. What a Symbol [...]

Ruby on Rails: Restful Links When You Don’t Know the Class

Chuck — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:17:28 +0000

I had a friend email me a week or so ago about generating a link from your restful routes when you don’t know the class. Here’s a quick thumbnail of the scenario. You have a bunch of restful routes like these: 1 2 map.resources :users map.resources :groups And you have a model that has a polymorphic association, meaning that it has [...]

An Easy 5 Step Process for Test Driven Development

Chuck — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:53:57 +0000

A lot of people try Test Driven Development by writing the test, writing the code, and then wondering what the big deal is. Here’s the process I follow along with an explanation of why each step helps. As a quick note, all tests are written with the RSpec framework. 1. Write the test Let’s say that I need [...]

5 Reasons to do Test Driven or Behavior Driven Development

Chuck — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:10:07 +0000

I’ve had a few discussions with people under various circumstances regarding Test First or Test Driven Development (TDD). Some people swear by TDD, while other don’t see how it could possibly work because “I don’t know how my code works until I write it.” My answer to this is “That’s why you need to write [...]

RSpec vs Test::Unit

Chuck — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:28:37 +0000

Having used both Test::Unit and RSpec, I have to agree with Jim Weirich: the difference between the two is primarily semantics. It seems to me that functionally, they are both equally capable of verifying and specifying code. However, the way in which you write the tests—the semantics—is the primary difference between the two. That being [...]

Ruby on Rails: Accessing Controller Methods from Your View

Chuck — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:53:03 +0000

I’ve recently seen several requests come through from people trying to figure out how to call controller methods from their views. The answer is pretty simple. Your controller instance, which is calling your view is stored in the instance variable @controller. So, calling public methods is as simple as this: 1 @controller.public_method To call a private method you [...]

Rails Metal Example #5: Static Content

Chuck — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:28:43 +0000

Serving static pages with Rails Metal is actually very simple. Here are the assumptions we’re making. Each static page’s content is made up of valid HTML. Each static page has a path and content stored in a StaticPage object as defined by the StaticPage model. If the path browsed matches the path in a StaticPage object, the content [...]

31 Days to Build a Better Blog: Week 4

Chuck — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:24:30 +0000

This is the fourth week that I’ve been working on 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Just to recap what I saw the week before last, 9 Ways to Use Rails Metal was featured on the Rails Envy Podcast. Coverage in the podcast alone accounted for over 50% of my traffic over the next [...]

Rails Metal Example #3: Simple API’s

Chuck — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:33:45 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wrote 9 Ways to Use Rails Metal. The third way to use Rails Metal was implementing a simple API. Before I provide the code and an explanation, I’d like to cover a few things. First, this API only requires an API key. If you want an authentication token or some [...]

Print Debug Information to Its Own Log

Chuck — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:56:57 +0000

Setting up a Debug Log Have you ever been debugging your Rails application and watching the development log fly by wishing that you could put output just the information you need to its own log? There’s actually a quick and easy way to do it. First, you create your logger. 1 @debug_log = Logger.new(File.open(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../log/debug.log", "w")) Then you log [...]

31 Days to Build a Better Blog: Week 3

Chuck — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:27:39 +0000

After the third week of doing the 31 Days to Build a better blog, I’m seeing the traffic and participation on my blog increasing by leaps and bounds. This last week, the traffic increase was due primarily to being featured in the Rails Envy Podcast. The idea to email Gregg Pollack about my post [...]

Rails Metal Example #4: Redirecting Affiliate Links

Chuck — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:42:07 +0000

A week and a half ago, I posted 9 Ways to Use Rails Metal. The fourth way I listed was “Redirecting Affiliate Links.” The basic idea is that you can set up http://mydomain.com/hosting to go to the link you were given by the hosting company you have an affiliate account with. The first thing I did [...]

31 Days to Build a Better Blog: Week 2

Chuck — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:50:16 +0000

This is the second week I’ve been doing the 31 days to build a better blog. I’ve completed steps 3 through 7 this week and have seen an explosion of traffic on my blog. (See week one.) Comparing the week (Saturday to Friday) of June 7th to the week of June 14th I’ve seen my [...]

9 Resources for New Ruby on Rails Developers

Chuck — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:35:50 +0000

If you’re new to Ruby on Rails, you sometimes don’t know where to start with Ruby on Rails. Here are some resources that have helped me become familiar with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Ruby Guides The Rails Guides have been extremely useful in explaining the different parts of Ruby on Rails. There are guides for Models, [...]

Sessions in Rack and Rails Metal

Chuck — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:57:20 +0000

I’ve had a few requests on how to access the session from Rack and Rails Metal. In the Rack environment that is passed to the call method, the session is stored at the ‘rack.session’ index. You can use this to both read from and write to the session. Here are some examples: 1 2 session = env['rack.session'] User.find_by_id(session["user_id"]) 1 2 session = [...]

Quick Tip: Knowing if an Object’s Attribute is Empty or Nil

Chuck — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:34:02 +0000

I was browsing the ActiveRecord documentation and I came across notation that looks like this: User.name? When I looked more closely, I realized that it replaced all of the places where I had something like this: !User.name.blank? In other words, if the user’s name is an empty string (“”) or nil, I can call User.name? and it’ll return false. [...]

Ruby on Rails: Getting Started Part III — Models

Chuck — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:24:24 +0000

Rails Developers do it with Models I saw a t-shirt at Mountain West RubyConf this year that said “Rails Developers do it with Models.” Of course, they were talking about the classes we use to access the database. In fact, in Ruby on Rails, when you think of your data, you usually think of Models, not [...]

Rails Metal Example #1: Authentication

Chuck — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:35:22 +0000

Last week, I wrote a post listing 9 ways to use rails metal. This is an explanation of the first way to use Rails Metal: Check Authentication. We’re setting up this Rails Metal to handle two scenarios: requiring authentication, and logging the user in. First, it verifies that requests to any path beginning with /admin [...]

31 Days to Build a Better Blog: Week 1

Chuck — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:54:01 +0000

Last week I started the 31 days to build a better blog on this blog. The week before I started—May 31 through June 6—the blog got 28 visits and 34 page views. I’ve completed the first two days’ assignments. It was very helpful in a couple of ways. First, it helped me define exactly what [...]

9 Ways to Use Rails Metal

Chuck — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:32:04 +0000

I wrote a quick overview of Rails Metal earlier and started thinking that it would be nice to provide some examples of how you could use it in your Rails application. Here are 9 ways I thought of off the top of my head. I’ll provide a quick explanation of each one and then post [...]

Rails Metal: A Quick Overview

Chuck — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:34:26 +0000

Have you ever wished you could mix Rack or Sinatra into your Ruby on Rails application just to get its raw throughput on certain parts of your application? Let’s face it, sometimes, the Rails framework is overkill when we’re returning a simple string or an object in JSON as our response. Your answer for these [...]

31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Chuck — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:54:07 +0000

Upon the recommendation of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert at work, I’m going to try out 31 Days to Build a Better Blog by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. I’ve decided to make the 31 day challenge a public challenge. I’m really curious to see how well this works in making my blog better as [...]

Synchronous Ajax with jQuery

Chuck — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:52:58 +0000

Earlier, I had a problem getting the result of my Ajax call and operating on it without doing an asynchronous callback. What I wanted to do was assign the result of my ajax call to a variable so I could parse through it and return a result. After a little searching, I found this result. 1 var [...]

content_for: Multiple yields in the same layout

Chuck — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:45:32 +0000

Have you ever wished you could call yield multiple times in the same layout in order to get extra stylesheets, javascript, or a dynamic sidebar? Having worked on several projects that needed this soft of functionality, I’ve probably built this in three or four times. Then I started watching railscasts. There’s a method called content_for that [...]

Installing Phusion Passenger on Debian Etch

Chuck — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:43:15 +0000

I really have enjoyed working with phusion passenger. It’s made rails setup and deployment a breeze. I did have a little trouble getting it running on my server the other day, though. Here’s what I had to do in order to get it working. First, I had to upgrade RubyGems. gem update --system Then, I had to update [...]

What is Quality Assurance?

Chuck — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:05:37 +0000

During my time as a Quality Assurance Engineer, I would wind up explaining to curious people that what I did was more than just testing software. So, what is Quality Assurance if it’s not just software testing? Quality Assurance is an approach to developing software. It begins with software design and ends with documentation of [...]

Get Your Rails Metal in Order

Chuck — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:56:02 +0000

I’ve been playing with Rails Metal for quite some time now. Under certain circumstances, one Metal would catch something I intended for another metal deeper in the middleware stack. Reordering became the order of the day. The only problem was that the Rails Guide was in the works and I didn’t want to hack my [...]

Ruby on Rails: Getting Started Part II — Controllers

Chuck — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:24:30 +0000

When I started writing part II, I started writing about models. As I got a little further along, I realized that it would be more helpful to provide an overview of the controller, which provides the data that goes into your web page, before I showed you how to get the data out of the [...]

Ruby on Rails: Getting Started Part I

Chuck — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:08:50 +0000

Most people are fairly familiar with the basic idea of a database driven website. More specifically, they understand that data is stored in the database and somehow makes it into the web page the browser loads. Ruby on Rails provides a framework that makes the transition of information from a database to a webpage extremely [...]

Ruby on Rails Plugin: Relevance Search

Chuck — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:02:38 +0000

I recently set up a relevance search plugin for Ruby on Rails. If you want it, you can follow this link to check out the plugin. If you want to know about the plugin’s algorithm and limitations, read on. First, I’ve currently only tested this on MySQL. I’m establishing and using ActiveRecord connections, so the only [...]

Rails Metal: Rails has Mettle … or Metal

Chuck — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:37:46 +0000

One of the greatest features in Rails 2.3 is the Rails Metal piece. It’s part of the goodness that came out of the Rails/Merb merge. Metal provides a layer of functionality that is executed before or in the place of your rails application. The common term for this type of software is middleware. There is a [...]

Ruby Unit Testing

Chuck — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:37:14 +0000

I’ve been working on NORM and after a few proof of concept things, I wrote a test to test the create method for the base class. Here’s the create method: 1 2 3 4 5 6 def create(attributes) columns = attributes.keys.join(", ") values = attributes.collect {|k, v| "'#{v}'"}.join(", ") @@connection.execute("INSERT INTO base (#{columns}) VALUES (#{values});") new(attributes) end I’ve written dozens of [...]

Windows 7 Beta

Chuck — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:24:40 +0000

I’m really excited to try out the new Windows 7 that’s coming out. I’ve downloaded the beta and will be trying it out when I get a few minutes.

Ruby DBI

Chuck — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:47:23 +0000

I’m pretty sure that the Ruby DBI gem is deprecated, however, I’m writing NORM so that I can experience the pain of refactoring as well as proving out that Test Driven Design has a place in modern development. It also helps because previous to the project I’m currently working on for my job at SolutionStream [...]

class

Chuck — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:39:06 +0000

While working on NORM, I found a nice trick where you can enclose your class variables and methods inside a class << self … end block. I was aware of the ability to create class methods by using the def ClassName.method_name definition, but where I’m creating a series of class methods in NORM, I found [...]

How to Talk to Your Web Developer

Chuck — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:31:01 +0000

The interesting thing about the dealings between business people and programmers working on the same project is that they approach things from different angles. Both points of view are necessary, but sometimes making them agree is a little tricky. Here are some ideas to save time on development, which will ultimately save you money. Developers think [...]

Welcome!

Chuck — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:01:10 +0000

Welcome to my website. I’m extremely excited to have this page up where I can share my thoughts as well as tips and tricks I’ve picked up over my years as a systems administrator, technician, and engineer. I’m also hoping that some of you will take advantage of my experience and allow me to help [...]