Emphasized Insanity

Bag o' Links - 8/11/2009

2009-11-08T00:00:00-05:00

Timeline javascript widget – Lots of other cool stuff from the guys that did that one.
Non relational databases overview – awesome write up by Iam Thomas Varley from the University of Austin,TX.
Closure tools -The Closure tools help developers to build rich web applications with JavaScript that is both powerful and efficient. The Closure tools include a javascript optimizer, a comprehensive library and a templating system. the optimizers looks solid so far.
Extreme Javascript performance – Slides that will make you a better javascript developer.
Install Ruby on Rails stack on Karmic Koala – a fast tutorial for that. glad that’s covered.
Textmate’s missingdrawer – get Textmate a nice looking panel instead of that pesky drawer.
Crawl the web with vengeance – 80legs is a service platform for web crawling and processing web content. claims to set 50K “computers” by your side for a low cost.
bluepill server monitoring – another member to the growing family of ruby based server monitoring tools, seems easier to setup than God and to have a much more readable syntax than monit. hopefully it will live to my expectations.
BubbleTimer – track your time – i was looking the other week for a small app that will tell me how exactly i am dividing my time. I just wanted to know if i can do stuff a little better and when i found this nice little app, it helped me to create a better day schedule. 20$ per year, is kind of a down side thu.
iPlotz – Lately i came to a complete stop with Balsamiq Mockups, it came to a point where i could not use it to wireframe the layout/UI i wanted so i started hunting for a new candidate, this is one of them – nice, clean and simple. FlairBuilder is nice as well but my current fav is ProtoShare – which also allows collaboration and interactive features.
Building a twitter filter with sinatra, Redis and TweetStream – a tutorial to show the usefulness (maybe) of the new Twitter stream gem, aside from that nice tutorial, if you really want to clear some crap off your twitter stream, head over to TweetMuffler, awesome tool to set filters on your Twitter timeline, ninja follow and add searches to your timeline, i love it.
How this website uses MongoDB – real life example to that awesome non relational magic.
Scoping by locales – Ryan Bigg solves another crime.
Automated deployments with Puppet and Fabric – cool tutorial on using Puppet and fabric to automate your server setup.
Javascript 3D libraries – neat.
a Yes for NoSQL taxonomy – overview and presentation on NoSQL, current implementations and common libraries.
PayPal introduces Open API – developers gets a better interface. FINALLY!
Best practices for commonly used elements – how to design search boxes, expendable content and more in a good way.
Sinatra and Heroku on Boston.rb – This is one aweosme group they have there, this time it a first of a series of posts about Sinatra and Heroku.
UI fundamentals for programmers – awesome presentation, best practices for coding templates and helpers.

Treasures

RailsWidgets – a collection of UI widgets for rails, not sure what that means exactly.
Liquid Editor – HTML Editor for the liquid language (syntax highlighting, basic error checking etc)
effigy – Create usable views in Ruby with HTML and CSS selectors.

Handle Facebook session expiry with Facebooker

2009-11-07T00:00:00-05:00

Facebooker is the most commonly used ruby interface to the Facebook API. It is considered stable and generally is being kept up to date with the frequent-and-annoying Facebook API changes.

Facebook has some strict rules you have to consider when using their API and FacebookConnect integration, one hidden rule for example, says something like that:

“If you use Facebook Connect on your site, the cookie that we are going to use, is the same cookie we keep for our main site,
Facebook.com”

Meaning basically that if a user is connected to your application (via Connect or through FBML, doesn’t really matter if it’s FBML) and he or she logs out of the main facebook site, they will also log out from the Facebook session on your application. Basically saying, that the user’s facebook session in your application, can be reseted without an explicit action from the user on your site. epic win facebook.

In order to handle that kind of situation you’ll have to rescue the Facebooker::Session::SessionExpired and use the failsafe Rails method named rescue_from:

This will clear up all the Facebook remnants in your user’s session and will force him to reload.

Note that if the user granted you with the “offline access” permission and you saved the credentials, you will be able to restore the session without notifying the user.

Bag O' Links - 3/11/2009

2009-11-04T00:00:00-05:00

First look at Rails 3.0.pre – Dr Nic’s first attempt on the upcoming Rails 3 pre release.
Rails practices slide – this one has actually more than 2 good ideas inside.
drier gem configs – @hakunin is doing it again, now a better more readable way to specify your config.gem.
Easily create a javascript framework – obviously a lie, thu worth the read.
Javascript minifying tools – a quick set of tools for reference.
Know when to fold’em – one way to handle too many open source projects.
git-wtf – a script to display the state of your repository in a readable and easy-to-scan format.
using the new gem bundler – this will be an integrated part into Rails 3, better start now.
method aliasing in Ruby – and why chaining is potentially evil.
web design with pixelmator – meh, but i like pixel mator.
simple_importer tutorial – how to import csv into your Rails app.
w3c gets a new home – navigation totally changed, not sure if it’s right or not.
Using MongoMapper – a brief tutorial on how to use this MongoDB OM gem.

Treasures

spork – A DRb server for testing frameworks (RSpec / Cucumber currently) that forks before each run to ensure a clean testing state.
resque – A simple Redis-based queue.
autoMySQLBackup – A script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump.
trap_door – lure those spam bots into oblivion.
fluid_grid_system – A lightwieght XHTML/CSS framework that follows both the typographic grid, and also baseline grid
faketwitter – a fakeweb extension to fake twitter responses.

Bag O' Links - 30/10/2009

2009-10-30T00:00:00-04:00

sammy – super awesome javascript MVC framework, based on jQuery and feels like sinatra. looking good.
underscore.js – a functional javascript library, based on jQuery too with some cool extends to javascript objects. pay attention to the discussion on Reddit
intro to Ruby – by Brian Hogan – awesome slides by @bphogan, bare through the “Programming is fun” slide and enjoy :)
Explorer Exposed – common bugs and fixes for IE hell.
Git Magic – another new Git book for all of you infidels/
Atlas – an Xcode style Interface builder for web applications, coming soon.
cache_counter gotachs – a warning from Ryan Bigg.
300 rails links – i don’t know how updated it is, use at your own risk.
pig – an Hadoop high level abstraction of parallel processing, super neat.
ThinkingSphinx RSpec matchers – test Thinking Spinx’s setup block.
imporving your code with Metric_fu – a good article from Devver.
Building an iPhone Application – a good post by DeveloperZen, covering the creation of a new application and the tools they used.
Off github – a solution by @hakunin to help in migrating your gems from github to gemcutter.

Treasures

nanite – scalable message queueing.
yUMLmeRails – Use yUML to generate Rails diagrams using RailRoad and Shoes
quick_serve – a super-simple way of serving static files for development. It was made mainly for javascript and css development, but might have other uses.

Using BlackBird javascript console in Rails

2009-10-28T00:00:00-04:00

BlackBird offers a dead-simple way to log messages in JavaScript and an attractive console to view and filter them. Although most of us are already familiar with the FireBug console, BlackBird supplies us with an easy, simple and Cross Browser live console that is available upfront anytime you’d like.

BlackBird_rails is a plugin i created to simplify the integration of BlackBird into your rails applications, simply install it by invoking:



> script/plugin install git://github.com/eladmeidar/blackbird_rails.git

and the required javascripts, stylesheets and images will be copied into your public/ folder. Next thing you’ll probably want to do is adding the include_black_bird snippet into your <head> block:





  

    <%= include_black_bird %>

    …

Which will add the blackbird javascript and CSS tags. It’s also important to point out, that the helper will only generate these tags when running the development environment, so you are hassle free regarding that matter.
you’ll still be required to remove all log.something calls in your javascript source, otherwise IE is going to be mad at you.

From this point on, you can use BlackBird exactly as the home page explains.

Quick Tip

Drag this bookmartlets into your favorites toolbar and you’ll be able to:

your BlackBird window anytime you’d like.

Bag O' Links - 27/10/2009

2009-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

Juice – Juice is a javascript server-side web framework, i am not a fan of server side javascript, but i keep the options open.
Dr Nic’s install-theme – import any HTML template to your rails projects, a brief tutorial.
Foreui – a mockup design application, looks a bit more packed than Balsamiq Mockups.
Good Ruby Times – some advices and practice ideas for a bunch of code reviews, good stuff to read and learn.
Amazon’s RDS – Amazon recently released their new MySQL Relational Database Service, this is a good post on the aspects, usage and observations of using RDS.
1K grid – a small neat CSS grid layout generator.
BigRecord – Column-oriented Data Mapping for Ruby on Rails, not that i have any idea what that is.
RubyGems.org – GemCutter becomes the #1 source for Ruby gems.
and on that note move your gems to gemcutter – a gem from hakunin that helps in the process.
BluePrint CSS tutorials – a brief tutorial.
eCSStender – subdue browsers to your CSS.
Flash like jQuery – games, effects and other fun-ness.
CodeRack – a Rack Middleware competition, those of you who care about Rack existence, will find some cool stuff in the projects list.
jsbin – live javascript debugging.
NoSQL misconceptions – some explaining done by the guys at viget.
Ruby Metaprogramming first steps – How, when, where and why.
Google’s attention to RDF and Microformats – a small change in attitude.
Better jQuery and JS coding – nice tips. i didn’t know about $(selector).data.

Treasures

Ancestry – Organise ActiveRecord model into a tree structure, extra methods included.
ActiveHash – A readonly ActiveRecord-esque base class that lets you use a hash, a Yaml file or a custom file as the datasource.
ROMA – key value store for Ruby (among others).
Irwi – Wiki plugin for ruby on rails.
jquery.concrete – Concrete UI programming library for jQuery
geo_mere_laal – integrate browser locationing in rails.
interfacelift – a collection of templates for rails applications.

fields_for nested attributes - current child index

2009-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

i created a better version of this fix as a patch for Rails 2.3.x (2-3-stable branch on github)

Recently (2 hours ago) i started working on a complex form for one of our applications, it came to the point where i had to use the current child index in an accepts_nested_attributes_for form packed with javascript ninja maneuvers.

Surprisingly, i didn’t find anyway to do it. ( Another patch is waiting to the next BugMash festival).

Trying to find some ways to access it, i turned to the rails code (always a good idea to have a frozen rails in your vendor/) and tracked down the method that is responsible for rendering the fields_for nested attributes in the ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder class, surprisingly, again, it was named fields_for_with_nested_attributes

“Way to go, Sherlock”.

A short read indicated that the current child index is determined by either being specified by the developer (:child_index => something in your fields_for options) or by an automatic value (0 and up) assigned by an auto incremented instance variable named nested_child_index.

My first attempt was to access it with the doomsday device, #send and snatch it, but the inevitable failure arrived when the infamous @lifo pointed me to the fact that when accessing the nested_child_index method, i am actually incrementing the index value.

As a last resort i turned to my (seriously neglected) metaprogramming skills to try and add an unobtrusive getter method for the current child index in a fields_for nested attribute block.

i created fields_for_child_index.rb in my config/initializers folder:

Kind of messy i know, and i am sure that there’s a better way to have store the current association name without going into alias_method_chain, but this is working and will work until i’ll create the core patch for that.

Of course, in the meantime, i am open to improvement suggestions, anyway, this is how you use it:

#current_child_index will return the current child index for every element in the fields_for block.

Important note

unless you use it EXACTLY as i said, i can’t assure it’s working.. it’s just a simple bypass until the patch will be ready. use at your own risk.

GitProductive: See how productive exactly are you

2009-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

Productivity is subjective, Everyone has their own tools that help them to remain productive, focused and on target. I for example try to use DailyGoals to get my daily todo lists on track, but i can’t keep up with updating as i should.

One of the best ways to measure how much work was done, is to actually see how much did you code, thinking about that, i turned to git log for some help and found out that you can get a list of changed/added lines in on your commits, git is so damn powerful that it even lets you to bound your search to a specific, natural language time frames (ex: “2 weeks ago”).

Now, the fun part. i created this tiny little Ruby program that displays exactly how much did you code, showing the number of commits and LOC inserted, and even shows a simple rate stat of your LOC/commits.

Here it is:

simply run ruby git_productive.rb <path_to_project_root>, might be nice to run is a rake task or a commit hook that sends you and your boss and email with your current code rate.

well, mine shows 120 lines since this morning, considering half of it is probably a plugin, i’d better get back to work and stop blogging.

as always, forks and suggestions are welcome.

Bag O' Links - 20/10/2009

2009-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

Time tracking apps for freelancers – and for others that can’t keep track of anything.
Nginx monitoring – seems like a nice tool, but i can’t get myself to drop Apache for nginx just for syntax.
extending self with a module – another short tip from this guy.
Fresh useful dosage of jQuery plugins – some stuff i didn’t know in there.
Mysql + memcached or nosql + tyrant? – if you are not reading this blog you are missing an important aspect of that thing you do and is called “professional web development”.
kill your signup form with rails – a way to enhance your signup forms, Rails oriented.
RIA gallery – a nice collection of Rich internet applications.
Nice drop down menu in jQuery – i like it.
Drag to Share – that awesome feature from Mashable, turn to bits.
Setup your EC2 instance – updated tutorial, written well.
jQuery Navigation and menu plugins – kind of keeping me busy lately.
Ways to start up subprocesses in Ruby – a serious of posts by @avdi about ruby subprocess running.
GitHub and Unicorn – how switching to unicorn worked for GitHub.
startuptodo – Twitter for startups, wonder if that will work.
System administrator cheatsheet – all, and i mean ALL you ever needed.
jQuery UI themes are on Google too – it appears that Google’s AJAX libraries include jQueri UI’s themes too, epic win for performance.
my RailsIndexes on RailsSummit in Brazil – my very own RailsIndexes plugin was named by @GreggPollack of envylabs as a useful plugin for practicing scaling in rails, there are other good stuff on that list too. :)
Using Forms in HTML emails – no, and why.

GitHub Treasures

Probably for the last time, till i convince @qrush to setup me up with a “recently updated” paginated list on gemcutter :)

htto_status_exceptions – A Rails plugin to use exceptions for generating HTTP status responses.
rbdbgr – Ruby 1.9 dubugger.
ActiveDocument – Active models in Berkeley DB.
NotificationSystem – event notification system for Rails.

STI best practices in Rails

2009-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

Single Table inheritance. Lot’s of developers i talk to seem to hate the concept of STI and claim that it’s “java-ish” and something that should be avoided on all costs.
Generally i would spend me time explaining to that person why STI is a legitimate design pattern which can be useful and correct when being used in the right place and not as a “super solution for everything”, but a recent post named The Rails Code Quality Checklist recently bashed STI and surprisingly (imo, at least) got pretty good responses from people around.

Any case of a misused design pattern can be tagged as a “bad practice”, and the one to blame for it is usually the developer/programmer, and not the design pattern. I thought i might take a swing at this mayhem and maybe try to clear out some stuff about STI and best usage practices in rails:

Using STI

STI is a design pattern that is aimed to allow multiple ORM classes to share the same database table in case they share a large base of common attributes (columns) and to represent an inheritance functionality in a relational DBMS. The main plus of this design pattern is that you don’t have to create several tables that have common columns, you just use a single table to host all your models and by that, DRYing up your database infrastructure.

Good example

Let’s say we have a `Cat` and a `Lion` classes. It would make perfect sense to use a single table inheritance in this case since we all (should) know that a lion is a kind of a cat.

Since there is almost a complete overlapping between those 2 models’ attributes (although they still differ in concept and may have different methods), it will be a smart choice to use STI in this case.

Bad example

This is a bad example of an STI implementation:

Although Cat and Human can both be considered as Animals, they overlap each other in a very small number of attirbutes. As you can see `highschool_name` and `married_since` are both attributes that has no meaning when we are referring to a Cat instance, on the other hand `last_visit_at_the_vet` and `fur_color` are useless to a Human instance. Those attributes, although unnecessary, are also populated when you access the table.

If you have too many of those unnecessary fields, this may lead to bulky queries and lousy database performance, and of course, blaming STI.

Stuff to pay attention to and countermeasures to take

Every time you think about creating an STI implementation or adding a column to an STI parent table, check that the amount of fields that don’t apply to all of the children classes, is relatively small or zero.
Add indexes, usually for an STI table you’ll need to add an joint index on both `:id` and your inheritance column name (defaults to `:type`). You can use my RailsIndexes plugin to see if there are other places you may need to add indexes in.
If your STI table is going to host a big/huge amount of data, indexes may not be enough. Using memcached, Sphinx, cassandra or any other memory resident storage might boost your application performance.
pay attention to your design, don’t treat any kind of inheritance as an STI implementation de-facto, consider the fact and the other players in your infrastructure to maximize the relevancy of your decision.

Of course both of my examples could have been solved easily in other ways as you suggests (if one prefers that).

Point is, that STI is not more “evil” than overusing plugins, super-sized controllers, no cacheing or no testing. It’s yet another thing you need to know when and how to use.