Rha7DotCom

Firefox, the Web browser that changed the way we use the internet

2009-12-08T18:28:00.001-07:00

Firefox, the Web browser that changed the way we use the internet.

Trend Setting Events

There have been actually several times I've seen new things arriving to the IT scene, sometimes I recognize them as a trend-setting event, sometimes I don't (like facebook).

Firefox was one of those things that were easy to spot, as always when installing some new program, and knowing it was a mozilla-based browser, my expectations were .. well, low.

Then I saw the light... extensions, that was it... I immediately realized the power that this new browser had, and the sort of things that could be done by community improvement.

5 years later, it's all there, you can do everything, anything and more with it.

It set a trend and changed the way we use the Internet, today.

Firefox reached it's five years birthday.

Happy Birthday Firefox!

Ruby on Rails, Shoulda, RSpec and The Damned AutoTest ...

2009-09-15T03:43:00.002-06:00

Ruby on Rails, Shoulda, RSpec and The Damned AutoTest ... And blankly staring idiots.

New Project ...

Once again, i got to the point where i'm starting a new project and setting up all the de-facto gems and plugins and generators and stuff... among them... yeah... rspec+shoulda+autotest ....

config.gems

Having nicely setup haml --rails ., and script/generate rspec, I type at the prompt "autotest", and there I stare stupidly blankly waiting for something to happen, and then it hits me... Oh damn! I have to add that environment variable for autotest to work with rspec, but, what the hell was it? was it "RAILS=true autotest"?, or was it "SPEC=true autotest"....?

RSPEC=true autotest

As always this post is just a self reminder and an ode to my ever-repeating never-DRY mind:

RSPEC=true autotest

There it is.

Thanks for reading.

Make GMail Navigation Pane Wider

2009-09-09T03:21:00.006-06:00

Make GMail Navigation Pane Wider

Love GMail

The only damned thing I hate is the too narrow navigation pane they chose to give us.

Since in that left pane I have the calendar, google docs, and other stuff, and I as a lot of other people, have a Widescreen monitor in my laptop and at home, it's a waste of space.

GreaseMonkey

This is a GreaseMonkey Firefox Extension (which you have to install first) user script, to make that possible, it adds 180 pixels of screen real estate to the left column, while correctly resizing the view pane.

The User Script

You can download the script from http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1109388/gmail_navigation_pane_wi.user.js.

The Code

As always, below is a pastie of the code, if you wanna check it out.

Enable SQUID Rules Debug

2009-07-10T12:45:00.004-06:00

Enable SQUID Rules Debug

Nightmare

Have you ever tried to debug SQUID rules? It's a real PITA. This post, which is as usual a self-reminder, shows you how to enable SQUID rules debug by showing the last rule processed in your cache.log.

The Configuration Line(s)

There are two lines, one that will show you debug information and the second one, which will be more verbose, I haven't needed the second one, it just helped me get even more confused with all the extra log text.

Just add one of the two above lines, at the top of your squid.conf file, reload squid, et voilá, you'll see clearly what's going on at the acl's level in your squid processing.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading

SubDivX - Spanish Subtitles Downloader for Movies and TV Series

2009-06-09T01:16:00.003-06:00

SubDivX - Spanish Subtitles Downloader for Movies and TV Series

What Is It?

A simple GUI program to search and download spanish subtitles for movies and tv series downloaded from usenet and torrents, very simple, ruby Gtk+, specifically programmed in/for Ubuntu, but should work on any Linux distro with GNOME and Ruby support.

How to get it

Just clone/download and copy it to your /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, or your appropriate directory, and run it.

Thanks

As always thanks for reading and if you have any questions, go ahead and ask them in the comments.

Rha7 - Gabriel Medina

UPDATE:

Since the project started as a command line utility, I've made a lot of changes, among them the switch to python to make the project easier to install and deploy (I like to use ruby from source, and packaging the project in ruby got somewhat messed up).

So, this project is now made in PYTHON., that be told, go get it at GitHub Rha7dotCom SubDivX Git Repository, in the Downloads section you can find a *.deb file you can use to install it in Ubuntu. Thanks for reading!

How to write a simple C++ Project using Autotools - FREE Download

2009-06-04T14:47:00.006-06:00

How to write a simple C++ Project using Autotools

My first hit at writing

This little booklet is more of an experiment than a real book, although some people might find it useful, it describes the use of the autotools tools, like aclocal, autoconf and automake, in a very hands-on way, by making a simple directory listing (like a simple ls command) application.

It is not pretty.

It wasn't supposed to be. I had known about Lulu.com for a while, and I was learning Lyx/Latex at the time, and it just came naturally, I tried writing something a little more complicated, and thus, this booklet was born.

Is it useful?

Yeah, it is. Just because it is an experiment, doesn't mean it delivers what it is supopsed to deliver, if you ever wanted to write a C++ and make a source package like the big boys, but never knew where that ./configure script came from, or what the make && sudo make install, was doing, this booklet will give you a head start.

Then why are you selling it?

I am not. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE, at the linked Lulu.com page. I also wanted to learn about how Lulu.com works and actually the download version is free, the print version, is a bit over $4 bucks, but thats just Lulu.com's expenses. I take nothing. So, just go ahead and get it while it's hot, and if you can leave me a comment.

Thanks

As always, thanks for reading.

How To Make A C++ Project The GNU Style With Autotools

RhegExp, Ruby Regular Expression Tester

2009-06-04T01:28:00.002-06:00

RhegExp, Ruby Regular Expression Tester

What is it?

Have you ever been at Rubular?, I love it. Just that there have been some times I have been --oh god-- off-line. No internet, at all, almost 24 hours. I remember that day the water pipe broke, well, this was almost like that time. This project is just that. Only, off-line. It's a classic desktop tiny-app to quickly test ruby regular expressions ala-rubular.

You need ...

You'll need to have ruby-gnome2, you can get it with apt-get or aptitude, but if you compiled ruby from source, you'll need this : How to install Ruby-GNOME2 from Source in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04.

Get it

The project is, where else?, at GitHub, go clone it.

RhegExp at GitHub.com

Thanks

As always, thanks for reading.

How to install Ruby-GNOME2 from Source in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

2009-06-04T01:07:00.002-06:00

Install Ubuntu Packages

The Story ...

I had quite some trouble compiling Ruby-GNOME2 0.19.0, and although I'm not all that dumb, I spent just too much time compiling it, then I spent actually programming the tiny little project I was developing.

So, I just went down a notch, and compiled Ruby-GNOME2 0.18.1, which for my really humble needs, was more than enough.

Although this was a bit easier, for several reasons, I use ruby compiled from source, and so, couldn't/didn't want to, use pre-compiled binaries. This is a log of everything I did to compile it and make it work in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04, along with a patch file I had to make to get it to compile.

The "How-To"

The "Patch"

Thanks

Thanks for reading, and if anyone follows me out there, sorry for not being much active lately, but I'm just too busy, and when not busy, I'm just too lazy.

How to Crop a Video using ffmpeg

2009-04-16T02:36:00.007-06:00

As usual, this post is just a self reminder, this time about how to crop a video top and bottom 'black bars' and leave it in a 16:9 format, ready for mythtv ;)

ffmpeg -i In_Movie.avi -croptop 74 -cropbottom 74 -sameq -aspect 16:9 -y Out_Movie.avi

-i In_Movie.avi
Sets the input file

-croptop
Sets the top cropping size in pixels, this value must be a multiple of 2

-cropbottom
Sets the bottom cropping size in pixels, this value must be a multiple of 2

-sameq
Keeps the video's quality as original

-aspect 16:9
Sets the output format to 16:9, widescreen, use 4:3 if your video is letterbox.

-y
Makes ffmpeg stop complaining about overwriting the output file (be careful)

Out_Movie.avi
The output file, which will be a cropped version of the In_Movie.avi

Hope this is useful for someone out there.

Greetings,

Gabriel.

Web App Theme Plugin And HAML

2009-03-09T20:30:00.006-07:00

Web App Theme Plugin And HAML

Quick post, I have been using the Web App Theme plugin from github, and since I love haml, I converted the default generated theme from erb to haml, also made a sample action's view so you can test it out, and see how it is composed.

Hope this is useful for somebody out there.

Pastie is Here

Mexico States and Cities Listing in YAML format

2009-03-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

The Purpose

I usually find myself looking for the list of states and cities of Mexico, however, in almost every software available for use as open source, the mentiones list is not included, usually the only pre-loaded one is the USA listings of states and cities (very rarely but sometimes they include the cities).

The Source

At the SEPOMEX (Mexican Post Service, by it’s spanish acronym), there is a web page Descarga Códigos Postales Mexicanos that allows you to download a full listing in several formats, including CSV and TXT (pipe ‘|’ separated). Unfortunately CSV format is damaged (not properly formatted), but the TXT one is pristine. Fields 3 and 4 are the city and state respectively. The original file you download is in iso-8859-1 format, while the script works with utf-8, so it’s probably wise to do something like this before (the file you download from SEPOMEX is named CPdescarga.txt):

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 CPdescarga.txt > mexico.txt

The Extractor

The extractor.rb file is a ruby script that takes this files you download from SEPOMEX, in TXT format, and parses and extracts a listing of mexican states and cities, over 2800 different cities and locations are extracted by the script. The output is to standard out, and in YAML format, so you can easily incorporate it in your own projects.

The extractor.rb script expects to find the list of cities in the TXT format from SEPOMEX, but in utf-8 formatting. You don’t pass any parameters to extractor, and probably will need to pipe the output to a yaml file:

./extractor.rb > mexico.yml

Progress text is output to standard error, so it doesn’t interfer with the yaml output.

Other Things in Project

The textilize.rb program is just a snippet converted to a command line utility to transform a .textile file to .html.

Happy 1234567890 Epoch Time

2009-02-13T14:53:00.005-07:00

Happy 1234567890 Epoch Time

Happy 1234567890 Epoch Time, today Friday 13th at 2009 23:31:30 UTC, that is within the next two hours.

Enjoy the epoch

Cool Epoch Countdown

Wikipedia UNIX Time

Rails Tests, MySQL Tests and Collations

2008-10-18T03:02:00.000-06:00

Rails Tests, MySQL Tests and Collations

Today I was trying to checkout Rails code to fix a bug and contribute it to Rails using git. I git-cloned the Rails code, and went on to rake test it, I created the databases activerecord_unittest and activerecord_unittest2, granted permissions and went on to run the tests.

One of the ActiveRecord tests failed, but this was expected, ran rake a second time (this time not expecting failures), but I was greeted with the following error:

  1) Error:
test_validate_case_insensitive_uniqueness(ValidationsTest):
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql::Error: Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_c
i,COERCIBLE) for operation '=': SELECT `title` FROM `topics`     WHERE (LOWER(`topics`.title) = '? ???? ??????????!')

This was in the ActiveRecord tests also, after a little check I noticed that actually, the databases were created with latin1_swedish_ci collation.

This is easy to correct, just go into your MySQL client, and do the following:

mysql> alter database activerecord_unittest character set utf8;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> alter database activerecord_unittest2 character set utf8;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> use activerecord_unittest;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_database';
+------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name          | Value |
+------------------------+-------+
| character_set_database | utf8  |
+------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> use activerecord_unittest2;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_database';
+------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name          | Value |
+------------------------+-------+
| character_set_database | utf8  |
+------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Actually the last two commands are just to verify the change, you can just use the first two ones:

alter database activerecord_unittest character set utf8;
alter database activerecord_unittest2 character set utf8;

Et Voila! All tests pass now. As most of my posts, this is to keep as a self reminder, since I found no info on this error on the 'Net.

Thanks for reading, and please comment!

Gabriel Medina

Paypal Ruby Gem and custom/invoice methods errors

2008-10-14T23:13:00.008-06:00

Paypal Gem and custom/invoice methods missing+errors

Errors in ruby/rails paypal gem

I noticed a little error in ruby paypal gem, there was no 'custom' method. Also, erroneously, the 'invoice' method returned the data from the custom field.

I corrected this and pushed it to http://github.com/rha7dotcom/paypal/tree/master.

Already made a pull request from openhood, but in the mean time, it is available there.

Added also the pending_reason, reason_code, memo, payment_type, exchange_rate methods to notification.

Hope this is useful for you out there.

Gabriel Medina

UPDATE

Changes have been integrated. You can get this changes now directly from:

http://github.com/openhood/paypal/tree/master.

RMagick2.so - shared object cannot be dlopen()ed

2008-10-04T06:27:00.002-06:00

RMagick2.so - shared object cannot be dlopen()ed

More than a full how to it's just a self-reminder

I ran upon this problem today, I was trying to use ImageMagick(source)+RMagick(gem) and found an annoying error saying that shared object cannot be dlopen()ed referring to RMagick2.so.

Magick command line

Making story short, if you find this error in the recipe Ubuntu+ImageMagick from source+RMagick gem, you reconfigure ImageMagick with the following options:

./configure --with-png=yes --with-jpeg=yes --disable-openmp --enable-shared

After that, make && make install as usual, and then uninstall and reinstall RMagick gem. That's all.

SASS jEdit Syntax Highlighting Mode

2008-10-02T05:21:00.011-06:00

SASS jEdit Syntax Highlighting Mode

Files

catalog - jEdit SAMPLE catalog file

sass.xml - jEdit SASS mode file

haml.xml - jEdit HAML mode file from Wolfmans Howlings

What is this?

This two files provide syntax highlighting for HAML/SASS in jEdit.

What for?

Well, jEdit happens to be my favorite RoR editor, and I stumbled upon Wolfman's Howlings Post about a HAML syntax highlighting mode for jEdit.

This got me interested, and obviously googled to find a jEdit mode for SASS (CSS companion for HAML), but apparently there's none available, so I decided to write my own. This post is to share it with the world.

How to use it

Just drop the sass.xml file in your jEdit's mode directory (in Windows it's C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USER NAME\.jEdit\modes, and in Linux it's ~/.jedit/modes), and modify your existing catalog file to include the line from the provided catalog file.

Thanks and Bye

As always, I hope this is useful for you people out there.

Gabriel Medina

UPDATE:

There is an existing SASS.xml file at HAML Google Group - Files Section, I tried it, but didn't like it much... So, I joined what I liked about that one, and merged it with mine. Use mine or HAML Google Group's one, Open Source is all about choice.

rubyscript2exe.rb and 623 Can't modify frozen string (Type Error)

2008-09-28T04:00:00.005-06:00

rubyscript2exe.rb and Frozen String error

A tiny bug

Today I bumped into this error in rubyscript2exe.rb:

rubyscript2exe.rb:623:in `replace': can't modify frozen string (TypeError)

I'm using ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-08 patchlevel 286) [i686-linux] and rubyscript2exe.rb version 0.5.3 (29.05.2007) which is the latest to this date. However the forementioned error occurs when trying to run rubyscript2exe.rb.

Ungoogled

I quickly googled for an answer but was out of luck, so I just jumped in and found the line, just rephrased the line and here is the change, just edit the rubyscript2exe.rb file at line 623, it looks like this:


$0.replace(File.expand_path("./init.rb"))


  $_0 = File.expand_path("./init.rb")
  alias $__0 $0
  alias $0 $_0

This was fixed from a simple '=' assignment I had proposed to the above solution, based on a comment from cowlibob (thanks), he has the modified version up in github, and you can Get it at http://github.com/cowlibob/rubyscript2exe.

Bye!

Hope this works for you, good luck.

Gabriel Medina.

Flash Alerts Plugin : flash_alerts_helper

2008-09-27T11:59:00.007-06:00

A Helper for Flash Alerts

flash_alerts_helper

I find myself doing this over and again in every rails project I start.

Put flash alerts inside nice div boxes, and obviously not displaying anything at all if there's nothing to display, you know, if you display a div for the flash messages, but the message is empty, there's an empty blank line that moves everything down.

How to install

It's extremely simple, but it's easier to just install a plugin.

Do this:

git clone git://github.com/rha7dotcom/flash_alerts_helper.git vendor/plugins/flash_alerts_helper

Do that at the root of your rails project.

How to Use

Even simpler, just add the following at the approriate position in your rails layout.

<%= flash_alerts %>

And that's all, that will generate something like this:


    
        Error Flash Message
    
    
        Notice Flash Message

Git Repo

http://github.com/rha7dotcom/flash_alerts_helper/tree/master

Hope this is useful for someone out there, I really appreciate comments, so, reward me with yours.

Thanks and see you next time

How to install ImageMagick and RMagick on CEntOS

2008-09-11T14:58:00.002-06:00

How to install ImageMagick and RMagick on CEntOS

Yum, yum, yummi

Install dependencies first.

yum install tcl-devel -y
yum install libpng-devel -y
yum install libjpeg-devel -y
yum install ghostscript-devel -y
yum install bzip2-devel -y
yum install freetype-devel -y
yum install libtiff-devel -y

Download and Install ImageMagick

As root, do the following:

cd /usr/local/src
wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick*
./configure
make
make install

This downloads and installs the latest stable ImageMaick package, but you can go to http://www.imagemagick.org/www/download.html and download the specific version you (might) need.

Add /usr/local/lib to ld.so.conf and reload

[ `grep /usr/local/lib /etc/ld.so.conf | wc -l` -eq 0 ] && echo "/usr/local/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf
ldconfig

Install RMagick ...

Finally install the ruby RMagick gem

gem install rmagick -r --no-ri --no-rdoc

I use to omit RDoc and ri documentation install, it takes longer, and the gem command is by itself SLOW. Remove the --no-rdoc --no-ri if you want to install'em.

That's all

Any doubts, leave a comment, I'll try to answer it as soon as possible.

Regards

Gabriel Medina

Ubuntu's chkconfig: sysv-rc-conf and rcconf

2008-08-25T20:29:00.001-06:00

Ubuntu's chkconfig

Hi, when I'm working in Ubuntu, and happen to install some daemons, make scripts to manage them, you know you always end up needing to manage the SysV init scripts links, to automatically start and stop the daemons.

Being as procrastinative (is that a word?) as I am, I always end up searching again and again on Google, "sysv init bash command" or "chkconfig alternatives for ubuntu" and search and search until I find for the Nth time the same results.

That's the reason for this post. There are two alternatives, native to Ubuntu (you can also install an alien-ed version of chkconfig, but that's not the point), one of them is sysv-rc-conf, the second one is rcconf.

sysv-rc-conf

sysv-rc-conf has the advantage that you can script with it, a simple

sysv-rc-conf apache2 on

Turns the apache service on at start up, and

sysv-rc-conf apache2 off

Turns it off, as it can be obviuos

Besides being a command line option, if you type just sysv-rc-conf, it fires up a text based management console, quite useful. I recommend you to use TERM=linux or TERM=xterm-color, using xterm alone, makes it look awry.

TERM=xterm-color sysv-rc-conf

Not so pretty but easily usable.

rcconf

Easy to use, it's the text counterpart to Ubuntu's graphical 'bum' Boot-Up Manager GUI. Just fire it up with rcconf

rcconf

The bad news it's that although this one looks a bit prettier all blue and stuff, it's not scriptable, that means it has no switches you can use from the command line. :( So sad. But it works great when using it interactively.

How to install ...

Well, as usual use apt-get or aptitude :)

aptitude install rcconf sysv-rc-conf -y

And that's it!

Bye!

See you next time.

rorgitignore : .gitignore files specific for Ruby on Rails

2008-08-21T15:45:00.006-06:00

rorgitignore : .gitignore files specific for Ruby on Rails

What?

It's a miniscript that finds empty directories below current directory and adds empty .gitignore files to them.

It also adds a main .gitignore file at the current directory with Rails project typical contents.

Why?

Because git tracks contents, not files, it doesn't save any empty directories, since there is no content to track.

This means that when you clone your project from a git repository, it is missing the log, tmp, lib and other directories.

This small script fixes that, so git adds even empty directories.

How?

Well, it adds empty .gitignore files to any empty directories below the current one.

Additionally it creates a main .gitignore file that includes tmp, log, tmp, config/database.yml and db/*.sqlite3 (all these usually contain dynamic discardable content that we don't commonly add to a SCM repository).

Where's the script?

Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "Creating .gitignore files in empty directories ..."
for URL in `find . -type d | grep -v \.git`; do
    if [ `ls $URL | wc -l` -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "touch $URL/.gitignore"
        echo "git add -f $URL/.gitignore"
    fi
done | bash -x
echo ".gitignore files in empty directories created."
echo

echo "Creating main .gitignore file ..."
/bin/rm -f .gitignore
echo "config/database.yml" >> .gitignore
echo "db/*.sqlite3" >> .gitignore
echo "log/*.log" >> .gitignore
echo "log/*.pid" >> .gitignore
echo "tmp/**/*" >> .gitignore
echo "Created main .gitignore file."
echo


echo ".gitignore files created"
echo "=============================================================="
find . -name .gitignore
echo "=============================================================="
echo

echo "Content of ./.gitignore"
echo "=============================================================="
cat ./.gitignore
echo "=============================================================="
echo

Remember to use git add -f .

Bye!

See you next time.

Update Sep 8, 2008

Here's a simpler script for those that just want the good part, this just outputs the commands to add an empty .gitignore file to all empty directories in a git project and git add -f'em to the repo.

For this you're supposed to already have init'ed the git repo. This justs generates the commands and pipes them to bash.

for DIR in `find . -type d | sed -re 's/\.\///g' | grep -v '^\.git'`; do
    [ `ls -a $DIR | wc -l` -le 2 ] && \
    echo Creating and git-adding $DIR/.gitignore && \
    touch $DIR/.gitignore && \
    git add -f $DIR/.gitignore
done

Git and Less Colors

2008-07-26T03:32:00.008-06:00

Git and Less Colors

This is a not so technical article since it just gives a tip on how to set up your less command to display nice colors for git log, git status and other stuff.

Git Colors First

execute this commands in your console:

git config --global color.diff auto
git config --global color.status auto
git config --global color.branch auto

You need to run this commands, otherwise, git itself won't generate color codes embedded in output.

Now Less

Setting up less is easy, just add this line to your .bashrc, or you can run it directly on your console to test it right away.

export LESS="-RS#3NM~g"

R: Raw color codes in output (don't remove color codes)
S: Chop long lines, instead of wrapping.
#3: Scroll 3 columns horizontally at a time.
N: Show line numbers
M: Long prompts
~: Don't show those weird ~ symbols on lines after EOF
g: Hilite results when searching with slash key (/)

Hope this is useful for you, I added a sample so you can see how it looks.

Thanks for your visit.

Ruby and Rails - How to get pp pretty print to return a string.

2008-07-14T18:52:00.006-06:00

Last night I was searching for a blog post I usually go to to simply copy paste some code, but unfortunately the site no longer exists. Just like that. Even though I felt sorry because I never got the time to thank the author, I immediately thought about this other piece of code I'm about to copy here.

I use this code in almost every Rails site I start, and wouldn't like to lose it, like the one I mentioned before.

The code I mention is from the Blog of Graeme Mathieson, and I would like to thank him for sharing this piece of code. I duplicate the code here for redundancy:

require 'pp'
require 'stringio'

module Kernel
  private
  def pp_s(*objs)
      s = StringIO.new
      objs.each {|obj|
        PP.pp(obj, s)
      }
      s.rewind
      s.read
  end
  module_function :pp_s
end

Hope it's useful for somebody, please don't forget to visit:

http://woss.name/

for even better tips from Graemer Mathieson.

InvalidAuthenticityToken and Dojo Toolkit

2008-07-05T23:30:00.010-06:00

InvalidAuthenticityToken and Dojo Toolkit

... or how to add your authenticity token to a hand made form in Rails

Finally decided to take on Dojo

Hello again, I started playing with the Dojo Toolkit, and I really liked it, first thing I found was that it used to be incompatible with Prototype/Script.aculo.us, but that seems to have been fixed, just add a little config for dojo before loading it, and that gets the job done, also you should not forget to load dojo toolkit before loading prototype/script.aculo.us.

Googled with no luck, just Toolbocks

Well, I shall tell you that before going this path I obviously Googled for a ready made gem and/or plug in that I could use to get dojo on Rails, and found Dojo Toolbocks plug in, but reading the documentation it requires you to add the engines plug in, that I am not really fond of, and that was an immediate turn off...

I don't like the engines plug in, do you?

Also I looked for more documentation about it but it seems all it does is just load the dojo toolkit, so I went on to try and build a plug in that would do that without needing the engines plug in.

dojo_support plugin ina repository near you soon

I will publish this new plug in that will be named dojo_support, when it's ready for a beta test, and that means writing a couple of helpers for views and also a render similar to the Rails' javascript RJS render.

The InvalidAuthenticityToken Error

While developing the code for a helper to create remote form tags that work with dojo, I came into a problem creating the forms, where rails complains about an Invalid Authenticity Token. This is required by the ProtectFromForgery feature of Rails.

Disabled protection? I don't think so.

I had two choices, first, disable protect from forgery in the controllers for actions handling remote dojo forms (not a choice really), second was adding the needed authenticity token to the form, that is generate the form code and include the authenticity token as a hidden field just like regular Rails' generated forms. This is where I was stuck, I googled without luck finding only posts that told me to add

protect_from_forgery :except => :my_method

as shown in RequesForgeryProtection Class Methods to disable forgery protection for specific methods but this was something I didnt feel users should do.

The Discovery of form_authenticity_token

I finally found where this protection is in the Rails tree, and found in RequestForgeryProtection that you can reach the token with

form_authenticity_token

The discovery of request_forgery_protection_token

And looking around in options_for_ajax, I found you can get the name of the field in the form with

request_forgery_protection_token

I found it in ActionView::Helpers::PrototypeHelper (use the show source link in the options_for_ajax method).

So, how do you use them?

So to end this long post, to prevent InvalidAuthenticityToken forms created by hand just add the following line to your .html.erb form:

<input name="<%= request_forgery_protection_token.to_s %>" type="hidden" value="<%= form_authenticity_token %>" />

And you're on track again.

I hope I have the skills to make Dojo as easy as Prototype/Script.aculo.us

Hope this helps someone, of course this will be included in the helpers of the new dojo_support plugin which I expect to publish in a couple of weeks, with the target of making the use of dojo+rails+RDJS(Rails Dojo Javascript) as easy as prototype+sriptaculous+RJS.

Greetings everyone. Gabriel Medina.

Django and Python - No Multiple Heterogeneous Database Support

2008-06-25T00:39:00.008-06:00

Django and Python - No Multiple Heterogeneous Database Support

I Like Python

I really do, but can't say the same about Django. I recently had the freedom to start a new small project, and as you may remember I work with Asterisk, so the project was a report centric application where you can define the diferent parameters for your report, and save them as presets.

I had been playing with Django and even followed the tutorials on the official site, so, since I had the freedom to decide how to do it, I thought it would be a good test of the framework to see how it compared in real life to Ruby and Rails. It seemed really promising, and although I was a bit worried about the lack of official support for a specific AJAX framework, I also thought this could be beneficial, since that meant I could actually choose a different framework (like I couldn't with Rails, right?, well, that encouraged me at the time).

You mean, like plug-ins but better?

So I started building the project, then the app, that's how it's done in Django, a project, can have several applications, which are like modules, that do specific parts of a whole site, also you can use an app in several projects, kinda nice if you think about it, like plugins, but better in a sense, feels more natural).

Batteries Included

Set up the admin part, Django comes with the administration batteries included, like AjaxScaffold included, but without the AJAX, you just define -- In the model!? -- the administrative aspects.

I can't see how the administrative details (obviously more in the V part of MVC) could fit in the Model (The M in MVC), but what the heck, it came free, and although it seemed a bit odd, I carried with it.

I Like Big Buts, And I Cannot Lie

Up to this point everything was good, I had set up the models for the reports, the administrative part and was just about to set up a Controller/View to create reports, and for this I needed to interact with the Asterisk MySQL database (I didn't mention, but I was required to have this app's specific databases in SQLite3, and yet interact with MySQL to get the reports' data), But, and that's a big But (I like big Buts) Oh surprise!, I just couldn't, unless I patched django, and even if I did I wouldn't be able to use the administrative aspects of a django application with the external database.

That Sucks

It does, I usually develop small applications that get deployed to 40+ (and growing) servers, and try to automate the deployment as much as I can so I dont get nagged by the guys that actually do the deployments with silly questions, comments or complaints.

This meant that I would have to keep a private branch of Django with the patch, or have it available somewhere for our needs, or otherwise, show the config mgmt guys how to (and why) they had to patch django itself.

Besides, it didn't feel right.

No Django for Me? :(

So after a short thought about it, I decided to rm -rf it and start over in Rails.

Ruby and Rails still have to be deployed to every new server we manage, but It can be installed relatively simply with a shell script and doesn't have to be patched (the part I don't like).

Ruby and Rails can, at times be a PITA to install and get set up, specially in non-standard configurations, but at least I won't have to start all over again.

So this post was about one thing that may not be apparent when you start programming in Python on Django,

Conclusion

Python on Django DOES NOT SUPPORT Multiple Heterogeneous Databases.

That said,

I rest my case.

P.S. : I know I use to many parenthesis (I like them) and also, If I am wrong and didn't google well, please let me know if Django can interact with external databases in a NATURAL WAY (don't bother commenting that patching is not that hard and stuff like that).

Thanks everyone!.