Making my own Rails way

Ezgraphix update.

2010-04-05T22:10:00.003-05:00

Ezgraphix has been updated,

Main changes:

The ezgraphixdemo also was updated. check it out! live @ Heroku

Adding tags to Mongoid Documents

2010-03-30T21:12:00.004-05:00

In our latest project at Martian Interactive we are using Mongoid to support some document-based models instead of a relational approach like ActiveRecord models. As many applications, this one needed a tagging system (nothing magic, we all know there are a lot of gems/plugins out there that works pretty fine with AR) for Mongoid documents, so I ended up writting a really basic and simple tagging system that's working pretty well, since we are using a document-based schema each document has it's own set of embedded tags that are loaded when the document is required allowing us to save some queries, with a relational schema this solution wouldn't be an option due to the redundance it introduces.

Here's the code.

employees-directory a new Radiant CMS extension

2009-11-17T11:20:00.003-05:00

Martian Interactive has created a new Radiant CMS extension to support large number of employees information. A more detailed information about the extension can be found in the company's blog or the project repository.

Simple Rake task for dumps on SQLite

2009-11-05T22:40:00.004-05:00

In previous posts I showed you some Rake tasks that I constantly use to make dumps and dump import operations on a database, these scripts were designed to work with MySQL.

Even when SQLite has become the default Rails DB (since Rails 2.0.2), I preffer to work with MySQL, but in the last days I had to make some work using SQLite, and since dump tasks save you a lot of time, here's the simple script I wrote to make this work with SQLite. I hope you find this useful.

Migrating ezgraphixdemo from HerokuGarden to Heroku

2009-09-15T23:10:00.005-05:00

HerokuGarden is not longer supported, so I had to migrate the ezgraphix demo to Heroku, that process was really simple and elegant, the guys behind Heroku have done a great work, I still remember the first days of Heroku (when we needed a beta account), deployment and performance weren't as good as they are today, there is a big enhancement since these days and this will help people to easily deploy Rails apps, so keep up the good work!

So here's where you can find the new demo http://ezgraphixdemo.heroku.com/

Simple Rake task for dumps

2009-08-30T21:01:00.005-05:00

Rails ships with a lot of rake tasks, you can check the defaults by typing rake -T from your project's root, many of them make operations over the database, like; create, drop, reset, clone among others, but we wanted a simple rake task to generate dumps and import them into the current environment's db, Rails include a dump task that generates your current db schema, in our case we dump everything, data and schema in a sql file. You can find a LOT of rake tasks for dumps out there, but I like this simplicity!

Overriding RAILS_ASSET_ID based on the last git commit number

2009-05-05T14:26:00.005-05:00

Lately I've been working with some 3D contents made in Unity3D and having Rails as web support in order to visualize those contents. I had to override the ENV["RAILS_ASSET_ID"] variable value in order to make the contents cacheables between commits changes, I'm using Git as scm, so I wanted to use the last commit number as value for the asset id, (there is another similar post for svn), this is exactly what I did:

The first line gets the last commit number and stores it in the variable, then it can be used to make objects cacheables.

Stylesheets, javascripts, etc ... also will get this asset id as default.

Deploying Sinatra applications with Capi, nginx and Thin.

2009-02-17T08:10:00.010-05:00

I've been working with Sinatra for less than a month and there are some things I have to say about it;

Sinatra is an awesome framework to build tiny web applications that helps you a lot to understand how a framework works, but the documentation it's almost reduced to the Sinatra Book and some blog's posts, I didn't find a full guide in how to deploy a Sinatra app + Capi + Thin + nginx, just clues from different sites that I had to link in order to make it work, and I'm gonna show you how I did it.

I assume you have everything installed, sinatra, rack, thin, nginx and capistrano, also I'm using Git as scm and github as hosting.

Another consideration, my user and application name is: 'acoplet', change it according to your situation, this is the application structure:


project_root
==Capfile
==config.ru
==public
 ==javascripts
 ==stylesheets
==thin
 ==production_config.yml
==tmp
 ==pids
   ==thin.pid
==views
==log

Step 1, create and configure the thin config file, usually for production purposes, this is how your production_config.yml file should looks like,

Change the chdir value with the location of your application, also for pid, rackup, and log according to the application structure, please note the /current/ it's capistrano!

Step 2, Create manually the Capfile, you can't use capify here since this is not a Rails app!

Again, change the repository, application, user, deploy_to and host variables according to your project, in my case I'm using a github repository, usually I put my application under ~/www/#{application}/ where each application has a related user with the same name (make things easy for me), in this case /acoplet/www/acoplet/ and then let capistrano make it's stuff.

Step 3, Create the config.ru file

At the moment of writting this post, this is the right way to edit the config.ru file, things like:

Are deprecated now, you have to replace the require 'acoplet', with your main file, the file when you put all the sexy code.

At this moment, you should be able to upload (if you want) your repository and start the deployment process, when done setting up the repository, let's start with the capistrano tasks!, run:

cap deploy:setup
cap deploy:check
cap deploy:cold

If everything went fine, the backend server for the sinatra application should be up and running in the remote host (in the port 8000 for the example) to check it, ssh the remote host and run:

curl -v localhost:8000

step 4, Nginx front server configuration, you have to create vhost for the application, do it unter the the sites-available directory in your nginx main nginx folder (probably /etc/ngninx/ depending in how you installed nginx). and then enable it through a symbolic link under the sites-available folder

The Nginx vhost file should looks like:

I don't have any domain registered for this, but if you have, you should setup your dns configuration and just change the server_name variable with your domain name, again change the location according to your needs, restarting nginx should be enough to let you see the nice Sinatra App up and running!

Hope this little guide help you with the deployment process with Sinatra!

Queries with created_at and time zones.

2009-02-11T10:35:00.007-05:00

Time zones support in Rails is a great feature that simplifies and makes easy a task that would take too much time in other frameworks, but there are some situations in which we should take care about queries regarding utc convertions, for example, for my last rails app, I'm working with 'Americas/Bogota' (UTC -5) as default time zone to parse the time from the server time to Colombian zone and then print information about the records (created_at or updated_at) Rails makes this pretty well, but you should notify that in the database the time fields are created and saved with the current SERVER time, so in order to make queries relating the current time zone and the server time, you have to parse again the current time zone to the server time using the TZinfo local_to_utc method, otherwise, the queries eventually will not return the expected results.

Full example:

MySql has gone away error using daemon generator.

2009-01-28T09:51:00.006-05:00

I've been working with daemon generator in my last rails application, everything works fine but there's just a little issue I had to fix when using ActiveRecord tasks inside the daemon, when the daemon went to sleep for a time greather than the MySql variable wait_timeout, the next time the daemon awakes an error will appear killing the daemon, the full error output can be found in the daemong.rb.log:

There are many ways to fix this, first you can set the monitor option to true in your daemons config file(daemons.yml file), the only bad thing about this is that it consumes additional memory, in my case memory is a resource I can't spend since my slice server just has 256mb.

What I did to fix this was, everytime Im gonna make a query the database connection is checked, if it's down the daemon has to reconnect it by using:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.reconnect!

Another thing you can do is set a bigger value in the wait_timeout variable in the MySql config file, depending on what you have to do and your available resources, you should try one of these ways.

Ezgraphix online demo!

2009-01-19T14:56:00.003-05:00

The online demo for Ezgraphix has been released! this is a basic demo where you can find two simple charts and its rails code using the plugin! the demo will be expanded as the plugin grows.

Online demo. Hosted by HerokuGarden.

Code for the online demo. Hosted by GitHub

Ezgraphix docs. Hosted by RubyForge

Ezgraphix. Hosted by GitHub.

May te source be with you ;)

Ezgraphix documentation released!

2009-01-14T17:20:00.004-05:00

Finally the first version of ezgraphix documentation is ready! new charts support have been added and are specified in the API, in the nexts days I'll write and upload and application using the plugin and showing how powerful and easy to use it is.

---

The online demo is now available! check it out:

http://ezgraphixdemo.herokugarden.com/

Full deatils in this blog entry!

Ezgraphix a Rails plugin to easily render flash based charts!

2009-01-08T12:34:00.003-05:00

I'm happy to announce the release of my first rails plugin, it's called ezgraphix, and basically it will let you render cool flash graphics in your rails applications, maybe the most important thing about the plugin is how easy is to render a graphic! instructions are listed here, and soon more support will be added, including a published rdoc!

If you follow the instructions listed in the repository, you will be able to render graphix like these!

You can customize background colors, caption, axis names, what ever you want, a more detailed instructions will be published soon, as well the rdoc for the plugin.

Ezgraphix also will be released as a ruby/gem!

Credits:

Ezgraphix uses FusionCharts Free.

If you have any doubt, idea or something feel free to post a comment below or send me a mail to: jpemberthy at gmail dot com

If you appreciate this work feel free to fork and contribute, also you could support us (making a donation for the tequila!) through this button:

Documentation ready! details in this entry.

Don't break the chain.

2009-01-06T21:28:00.002-05:00

Time for productivity, my friends below:

mate the killer.

GitHub the inkeeper.

my repos the quests.

And finally, the goal: do not break the fucking chain! (except maybe on holydays :S)

Full time doing what I like!

Ignorando archivos en Git.

2009-01-05T17:41:00.006-05:00

Generalmente utilizo .gitignore para ignorar los archivos sobre los que no quiero mantener control de cambios, ahora bién, .gitignore sólo ignora archivos que no esten siendo actualmente monitoreados por Git, pero que pasa si queremos ignorar un archivo que actualmente esta siendo monitoreado?(aquellos que ya han sido agregados usando git-add), la solución consiste en actualizar el index de Git en el directorio de trabajo utilizando:

git-update-index --asume-unchanged [filename]*

De esta manera, se permite ignorar archivos, sin importar que los mismos fueran monitoreados anteriormente.

jpemberthy.github.com

2008-12-31T12:43:00.002-05:00

Ahora me encuentro también en GitHub pages.

Disable keys using JQuery

2008-12-15T21:37:00.004-05:00

Disabling keys with JQuery is extremely easy, for example the next code will accept only digits for the specified elements, another set of keys will be missed!

where 48 is the decimal ascii representation for zero (0) and 57 for nine (9). Here the table.

Internet Explorer for Development in Leopard!

2008-12-09T15:03:00.002-05:00

Good news for those who need to test how an application is rendered in Internet Explorer 6 while using Mac OS X, ies4osx is a great application that lets you emulate the browser without installing Windows in your Mac!!

mysql gem on debian

2008-12-05T16:01:00.006-05:00

This post will show you how to install the mysql ruby gem on Debian Sarge.

First try:

sudo gem install mysql

problems?

ok,

2nd try:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config

Maybe you'll get the following output:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql -- --with-mysql-config
extconf.rb:1: command not found: mysql_config --cflags
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Don't panic that means you don't have the libmysqlclient-dev package that contains the mysql_config file, ok let's install it!

apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev

We're almost done, the final step is to install the gem telling the compiler where to find the mysql_config file, it should be under the /usr/bin/ directory (check it!)

ok, finally let's install the gem!

gem install gem mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config

You can check if the gem is propertly installed using irb:

irb

require 'rubygems'
=>true
require 'mysql'
=>true
exit

CSS propiedades de color

2008-11-26T13:51:00.005-05:00

Internet Explorer no es un browser, (intenten visualizar este blog ahí), hoy por ejemplo, tenía el siguiente código:


#topheader hr{ 
  height:5px;
  background-color:#EE6100;
  margin-top:20px;
}

El cuál se ve perfecto en Safari, Firefox y Opera, pero en IE la propiedad de color-background es omitida, van en contra de todo el mundo, y para ellos la propiedad es color. Así que para que esta porción de código genere un color compatible para todos, se debe añadir dicha propiedad:


#topheader hr{ 
  height:5px;
  background-color:#EE6100;
  color:#EE6100;
  margin-top:20px;
}

PD: Varias cosas para resaltar que no tienen nada que ver con el tema del post, primero, debo reconocer que antes no me gustaba javascript y me sentia escribiendo algo que no entendia del todo, conocí jquery, y todo cambió, ahora escribir javascript para mi es mas entretenido, segundo para aquellos que no somos unos guros utilizando CSS, Blueprintcss es un framework que facilita mucho las cosas.

Buscando en una hash utilizando expresiones regulares

2008-11-24T09:47:00.006-05:00

Un pequeño truco que puede ser útil, súpongamos que tenemos una tabla hash de la siguiente manera:

my_hash =  { "foo1" => 666,

              "foo2" => "the number of the beast",

              "name" => "Satan"}

Ahora, para obtener las llaves "foo1" y "foo2" utilizamos la función grep del modulo Enumerable:

my_hash.keys.grep /foo/

#["foo1", "foo2"]

Para obtener los valores, de cada entrada de forma rapida:

my_hash.keys.grep(/foo/).each{|f| puts my_hash[f]}

#666

#the number of the beast

Hey! Stormrage!

2008-11-11T21:43:00.005-05:00

Yesterday night I had the honor of fight against Illidan Stormrage, the burning crusade's bad guy! after more than a year of playing Ahalam finally got a lovely date, unfourtenly we couldn't defeat him, but I ejoyed the moment.

some pics!

Face to Face, Ahalam and Illidan!

Warglaive of Azzinoth & The Cursed Vision of Sargeras

2008-10-16T12:23:00.007-05:00

Ya ésto parece también un blog de WoW, creo que deberia cambiar, 'programming, ruby & ruby on rails' por algo que también incluya a WoW, probablemente en los próximos días cambie la frase, pero bueno, llevo algún tiempo jugando, (sólo para comentar, bastantes cosas han cambiado desde ese día, por ejemplo, jugaba en Windows y mi editor era Eclipse ... improductivo) y ayer por primera vez tuve la oportunidad de un tipo con las armas más difíciles de conseguir en el juego; The Warglaive of Azzinoth x2 & un 'headset' muy decente The Cursed Vision of Sargeras, ambas 'dropeadas' por Illidan Stormrage.

En las imagénes aparece un personaje mio alterno (paladin lvl 60).

Roarasaur (rogue), Balian (paladin) - Smolderthorn USA.

Welcome 3.0.2

2008-10-14T14:39:00.004-05:00

Primera Impresión del parche pre-expansión de WoW, muy ambientada en Northrend, algo parecida al que fuera el inicio de The Frozen Throne, al fondo la banda sonora suena muy bién, algo así como la de el señor de los anillos, almenos en la portada la gente de blizzard ha hecho un gran trabajo, veremos que tal resultan los nuevos cambios.

Want to Buy MOAR space or what?

2008-10-09T22:12:00.005-05:00

I'm not a Facebook's Big Fan, I just like the form it finds and communicates people, they have an application that acts like a blog plataform; 'Notes', in my case I feed that application from blogger (this blog) and after my last post I got the following 'Facebook's Advice':

I really don't care if they block my account, but they should be more serious, come on, they let people to upload up to 60 pictures per album, sometimes each of those picture has a bigger weight than a simple note, please if you can't offer a properly service, then don't do it, I will no close the feed and let's see what happens.