Helicoid Insider

Riot: Ruby Unit Tests

Alex Young — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:23:04 GMT

Riot is a unit testing library that I’ve been using on a few new Helicoid products/features, and some of my open source projects. It has incredibly concise syntax, and I liked it so much that I wrote a JavaScript version.

Read my overview of Riot here and download my JavaScript version on github.com/alexyoung/riotjs.

Rails Apps and Server Logs

Alex Young — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:43:49 BST

We build and maintain Rails apps at Helicoid, and use Linux servers. By default Rails apps generate a lot of logging, even when logging is set to :warn. However, these logs are useful because they contain information that can help fix bugs, or ensure proper operation of long running or background processes.

It’s a good idea to take some time out to properly manage your log files. This post discusses two tools for this: logrotate and logcheck.

Logrotate

It’s worth taking some time to manage server logs. Most Linux distros install logrotate which gradually expire old files. You can set logrotate up to rotate your Rails app logs too. Have a look at the examples in /etc/logrotate.d/ and make one for each of your Rails apps. No more 100 MB log files!

Logcheck

Another great tool is logcheck. This runs through lists of regular expressions to report anything unusual. If you’re installing in Debian or Ubuntu, make sure you grab the logcheck-database to filter out some of the noise from popular daemons on your system.

Logcheck can be set to email you reports, so you should have some interesting reading every Monday morning after a weekend away from work email.

A similar tool is swatch

Agile Deployment

Alex Young — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:17:39 BST

I’m working on a series of articles about deploying Rails apps. It’s based on things I’ve learned at Helicoid, and it’s called Agile Deployment. Read it over at my personal blog.

Open Source: JsChat

Alex Young — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:38:15 BST

As well as Loom, I’ve been working on a few other open source projects funded by Helicoid. The biggest so far is JsChat which is an MIT-licensed JSON-based chat system with a nifty web interface:

People have called it an “open source Campfire”, but it’s not really meant to be a Campfire competitor. It’s actually a response to these questions:

Can we make a chat system like IRC without the legacy and bloated protocol?
Can it work naturally on the web, desktop and console?

The “Js” in JsChat refers to JSON rather than JavaScript. It’s very easy to build bots and clients. For more information, see the JsChat site and JsChat blog.

Loom: Open Source Edition

Alex Young — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:09:10 BST

Loom is our issue tracking system. It evolved from Bugtagger, which I created for internal use in 2006. Loom has a few nifty features: the bug report form automatically snoops browser and OS details (to help designers), and it has exception tracking for developers. You can sign up to try it for free right now.

But the future of Loom is open source. I’ve set up a private GitHub repo to prepare it for release. It will be MIT licensed, and easy to set up for use within your company. I’ll continue to develop the server-based “closed” version, but features will be pushed back into the open source edition. The only major difference will be that Loomapp.com will be integrated into Helicoid’s single sign-on system that Helipad and Deadline use.

If you’re interested in helping prepare Loom for the public, contact us and I’ll add you to the private GitHub repo. The repository will become public once we’ve verified it installs and runs on enough systems—we initially had Ruby 1.8.6 issues (it was my fault), which Ric Roberts helped me fix.

Loom is built with Ruby on Rails, but help from designers and writers would be awesome too! You’ll get fully credited of course!

Secure Trading Rails Plugin

Alex Young — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:06:22 BST

We use Secure Trading for Helicoid’s payment processing. I wrote a payment processor plugin for our apps about two years ago, and it’s been in production since then. A few people have asked me to open source the code, so here it is: securetrading-rails.

I’d like to integrate it with ActiveMerchant because I like their API, but I haven’t had time so far.

Out of all the payment processing companies I’ve dealt with, which is a lot, Secure Trading have been the most reliable with the best customer service. Their XML API is relatively straightforward too.

Loom exception logging for your apps

Alex Young — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:14:47 GMT

We’ve recently added exception logging to Loom. There’s an open source rails plugin which you can use to integrate Loom with your Rails apps. The API is simple so we’ll probably collect plugins and libraries for other platforms (I’ll look into iPhone support for iPhone apps).

If you haven’t seen it before, Loom is a tiny app we built to track bugs in our apps. It also works well as a customer support tool. It originally started off as Bugtagger in 2006, and it had some work towards remote exception logging but this was never finished. Bugtagger was a quick app I built to support Tiktrac customer support in the early days.

So now remote exception logging is almost ready for the public. You can check out the plugin and integrate it with your apps by adding your Loom account details to a controller. The README on Github has more details. The code looks like this:


  enable_loom :email => 'alex@example.com',
              :password => 'test',
              :url => 'http://yoursubdomain.loomapp.com',
              :project_id => 1

There’s a lot of work to do to make this a truly useful tool, but I have a feeling closely integrating bug reports with support requests and logged exceptions could lead to something incredibly useful.

Add ShareThis buttons to Tumblr

Alex Young — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:51:06 GMT

Tumblr can be extended heavily by editing the templates and by adding services through JavaScript. I just wrote this ShareThis JavaScript that will automatically add ShareThis buttons to your Tumblr posts. This will:

Add Digg/Delicious/etc buttons in a menu so people can easily Digg your articles
Add the correct link and title to pages on your Tumblr index page, as well as on the article pages themselves

Here’s the code:

To use it follow these steps:

Sign up to ShareThis
Create JavaScript for “Other Blog” (ShareThis JS)
Login to Tumblr, and go to Customize, Theme
Get my JavaScript: tumblr_sharethis.js
Replace the first script line with your ShareThis JavaScript (ShareThis JS)
Paste your edited tumblr_sharethis.js into the header of your Tumblr Template
Change the template where it says {Block:regular} to include <div class=”ShareThis”></div> after {Body}

I’ve been quite explicit with these instructions but it’s actually very easy to do. Just remember that you need to edit my JavaScript with your ShareThis code, because ShareThis uses your publisher ID for its API.

You can see this JavaScript in use on QuiteUseful.

Awesome Helipad ruby gem

Alex Young — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:46:18 GMT

If you want to write software that works with Helipad, there’s now an awesome Helipad gem written by Lonnon Foster. I’ve checked over the code, and it’s clean and well-written.

You could build a lot of cool stuff with this. How about a Shoes Helipad app? Or maybe something with RubyCocoa? Let us know what you build and we’ll give you mad props (and possibly riches).

Here’s some example code from Lonnon’s library:

Unified Single Site Browser (SSB) support

Alex Young — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:04:00 GMT

In Rapid Fluid support I talked about adapting web applications for Fluid. Since Bubbles for Windows has a similar API I decided to write a wrapper around Fluid and Bubbles so you can support both SSBs in your web applications.

This wrapper is called ssbx, and is used like this:


if (SSBX.isAvailable()) {
  SSBX.log('hello');
  SSBX.notify({ message: 'This is a message', title: 'Title' });
  SSBX.notifyOnce({ message: 'This is a message', title: 'Title', unique_id: 5});
  SSBX.setDockBadge(5);
  SSBX.log(SSBX.availableDriver);
}

You can also only run when there’s a compatible SSB available like this:


SSBX.run(function() {
  SSBX.log('hello');
}

It’s still evolving, so add it to your watch list on GitHub if you’d like to stay up to date.