However, I hit snag when I upgraded my Mac to Snow Leopard this weekend -- RubyMine was showing gibberish for any file I opened:

Apparently, RubyMine is trying to use a font which doesn't exist on my upgraded Snow Leopard system. A quick fix is to go into RubyMine's preferences->fonts:

And change it to another monospaced font of your choosing. Hope this helps someone who encounters the same issue.

We've documented two big lessons learned on the Scout blog. The main points:

• You will underestimate the ongoing cost of complexity in your product
• Cool new capabilities don't sell themselves

Give it a read! We will have more hard-earned business lessons coming, so stay tuned.

If you like the post, feel free to upvote on hacker news!

$ grb create branch_name [origin_server]

Create a new local branch as well as a corresponding remote branch based on the branch you currently have checked out. Track the new remote branch. Checkout the new branch.

$ grb publish branch_name [origin_server]

Publish an existing local branch to the remote server. Set up the local branch to track the new remote branch.

And an additional nice touch: grb "prints all commands it runs on your behalf in red, so you eventually learn them." Nice! The link again: git_remote_branch.

An easy solution that worked for me: adding a Rails.logger.flush to my script/runner call in cron.

Before:

*/1 * * * * deploy PATH_TO_APP/script/runner -e production 'MyClass.do_it'

After:

*/1 * * * * deploy PATH_TO_APP/script/runner -e production 'MyClass.do_it; Rails.logger.flush'

Bonus tip: to capture any other output from the cron task, use this:

*/1 * * * * deploy PATH_TO_APP/script/runner -e production 'MyClass.do_it; Rails.logger.flush' >> PATH_TO_APP/log/my.log 2>&1

Happy logging!

Also some specifics on running tests for the gem and the plugin there.

Ruby 1.8.6:

Completed in 3368ms (View: 2256, DB: 8) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 3668ms (View: 2420, DB: 8) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 3312ms (View: 1964, DB: 12) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 3296ms (View: 1896, DB: 8) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]

Ruby 1.9.1

Completed in 989ms (View: 593, DB: 7) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 1035ms (View: 591, DB: 6) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 1055ms (View: 588, DB: 7) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]
Completed in 985ms (View: 592, DB: 7) | 200 OK [http://hotspotr.com/wifi/list/14-austin-tx]

1. MySQL encoding.

How to check it: I use Sequel Pro ... just click on a table name for the metadata:

How to change it if it's wrong:

I had a bunch of UTF content living in a latin1 table (MySQL calls it ISO-5589-1 latin1). To fix this, export your database and re- import as UTF Details are here, but the gist of it is:

mysqldump -uUSER -pPASSWORD --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME | sed 's/latin1/utf8/' > temp.sql 
mysql -uUSER -pPASSWORD DBNAME  < temp.sql

Why not just run the conversions in-place (ALTER TABLE table_XXX CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_ci;)? That's a different operation -- CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET is appropriate when your content and your DB's encoding already match, and you want to convert it to another encoding. If you have a mismatch in content and encoding, the export/import trick is just what you need. Discussion on additional techniques are here.

2. The charset defined in your HTML headers

How to check it: use curl

~ $ curl -I http://hotspotr.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
...
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Rails uses utf-8 by default, so unless you've consciously changed it you should be good.

3. The charset specified in your HTML metatags.

How to check it: just view your source and look for something along the lines of <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />. Yes, this is different from the charset in the headers. Mine didn't match on one site. Fortunately, browsers pretty much ignore the metatags in favor of the value given in the header. Still, if you've got a mismatch, it's trivial to fix.

How to fix: open up your application.html.erb and make the change.

4. Your database.yml

Just make sure you have the line encoding: utf8 in your database configuration blocks in database.yml.

5. One more thing to look at...

if you're doing static html caching, then Apache (or whatever web server you're using) probably controls the charset when it serves up the cached page. Make sure it's setting the right charset. More details here

And here is my graph for Ruby 1.9:

• Adding GeoPluginGeocoder for IP geocoding (thanks github/xjunior)
• Ruby 1.9.1 compatibility and Unicode fixes (thanks github/Nielsomat)
• thanks other githubbers who fixed bugs/submitted patches

Since I don't like typing, I automated the process in a very simple Ruby script: http://gist.github.com/64519

What it does for you

1. adds the remote repo
2. checks out the remote repo as a local branch
3. pulls from the remote master or specific commit you provided
4. switches back to master
5. (with your confirmation) merges the just-checked out branch
6. (with your confirmation) deletes your just-checked out branch

To use

• put the contents of the gist into ~/mergefrom.rb (or anywhere in your path)
• make sure it's executable
• (inside a git repo): mergefrom git://github.com/foo/bar.git

Thanks to everyone on github who made updates and sent me pull requests. The reverse geocoding is from FloWi.

• Gem released: Geokit is now separated into a Gem (geokit-gem) and a Rails plugin (geokit-rails). You can use the gem separately. The plugin requires the gem.
• Rails 2.2.2 compatible: the plugin is all updated for Rails 2.2.2
• Many bug fixes/updates:
  • Improved Geocoder.us support -- respects authentication, and can geocode city names or zipcodes alone
  • cross-meridian finds work correctly with bounds conditions
  • fixed a problem with columns with "distance" in their name
  • added Geonames geocoder
  • the gem and plugin are now hosted at Github. The overall site is still athttp://geokit.rubyforge.org

Geokit makes it easy to build location-based apps. It provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation in an easy-to-use API.

There were a couple projects I wanted to take for a spin: Sinatra, Datamapper, HAML, and SASS. I decided to roll them all up into one proof-of-concept project. I don't go into a lot of depth on each, just enough to know that I can get it all up and running.

Also, since I'm running Passenger on some production boxes now, I wanted to deploy my Sinatra/Datamapper app through Passenger's Rack support.

Hotspotr, my community-driven hotspot finder, is a finalist in the Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards in the Lifestyle category. It's up against some stiff competition from well-known sites. Help us out by voting for Hotspotr!

From the Industry Standard:

We're now at the voting stage, which is also decided by the community. The more votes you get, the more likely you'll become a winner in one of the ten categories. Voting will run from now (August 4th) through October 3, 2008.

Go here to vote for Hotspotr: http://www.thestandard.com/awards/tis100/show_category/5741