Jason Seifer

Installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion

Jason — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:47:44 +0000

This is a quick heads-up! I have a blog post up on the Think Vitamin blog on installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion. The instructions will also work on Snow Leopard (sorry Leopard users) and it walks through setting up gcc, homebrew, git, and mysql. It also uses RVM to install the latest release of Ruby. Check it out.

db Bistro Burger Review

Jason — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:39:24 +0000

Taking a small break break from normal ruby and programming related posts, I reviewed what’s widely regarded as one of the best burgers in New York over on my friend’s Orlando food blog. Spoiler: it was really good (if the picture doesn’t do it justice, that is) but maybe not the best burger ever. Check it out for the full review.

CoffeeScript and Rails 3

Jason — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:26:51 +0000

After all of the debate with the news that CoffeeScript will be bundled in Rails 3.1, I made a new site: http://doihavetousecoffeescriptinrails.com/.

If you’re looking for a real article on the subject, Peter Cooper has a great post on Ruby Inside summarizing Rails 3.1, CoffeeScript, jQuery, and SASS.

Employee Scheduling Software

Jason — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:16:46 +0000

I’ve been working on this for a while and finally think it’s good enough to release to the world. You can now sign up for my employee scheduling software. Scheduling is employee scheduling software that lets you manage your work schedules quickly and easily. It’s best suited for businesses that have employees that work something other than the typical 9-5 shifts such as restaurants, offices, etc.

If you make schedules, Scheduling allows you to easily make a schedule, remember requests for time off, post the schedule for employees, and more.

If you’re an employee, Scheduling allows you to easily request time off, communicate with the rest of your office via the wall, and quickly and easily see when you work.

Tech wise, it’s written using Rails 3, resque, Apache, and passenger. There are a lot of places I’d like to take this software and look forward to maintaining the app and adding more features. I’ll also do some technical posts later about getting everything working.

So check out the app, tell your friends, and let me know what you think!

Automatically updating your IP with DNSimple

Jason — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:53:05 +0000

I’ve been using DNSimple for most a lot of my domain hosting lately. It’s a great service and I highly recommend checking them out for domain hosting. Recently I went out of town but wanted some way to be able to SSH home if I needed to. Luckily, DNSimple has a nice REST API that lets me update records easily. I created a "home" record for one of my domains and created a script to auto update:

#!/bin/bash
 
LOGIN=""
PASSWORD=""
DOMAIN_ID=""
RECORD_ID=""
IP="`curl http://icanhazip.com/"
 
curl -H "Accept: application/json" \
     --basic -u "$LOGIN:$PASSWORD" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -i -X PUT https://DNSimple.com/domains/$DOMAIN_ID/records/$RECORD_ID.json \
     -d {"record":{"content":"$IP"}}

It uses the awesome new jsonip service to grab your ip. It then does a quick sed parsing on that output to grab just your ip. Finally it does a put to the record in DNSimple updating it with the new information. You must have already created a record and domain in order for this to work. I saved this script as dnsimple_update.sh in my ~/bin directory.

Fill in your login and password credentials (or set some environment variables) and domain and record ids and you’re good to go. You can get your domain and record ids by hovering over the edit link in the advanced editor in DNSimple for the record you want and copying and pasting the domain and record ids.

Finally, I set it to run as a cronjob every 15 minutes:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/15 * * * * /home/my_user/bin/DNSimple_update.sh

This worked out very well and with some port forwarding on my home router I was able to ssh in to my home machines without any problems.

Update: Kristopher Murata gave a correction to the script in the comments since jsonip changed their format. Twice!! Thanks, Kris!

On The Internet

Jason — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:12:57 +0000

I launched a new podcast! On The Internet is a quick snippet of the latest news from the tech industry. It’s like Weekend Update from Saturday Night Live but for Tech news. I hope you enjoy it and find it funny.

Textmate Next and Previous Tab Keys

Jason — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:27:02 +0000

If you’ve just upgraded to Revision 1616 of Textmate, you may be wondering why your next and previous file tab keys stopped working. The author of Textmate recently changed the next and previous file tab key shortcuts to the universal mac application equivalents. Here it is in the release notes:

[CHANGED] Change next/previous file tab key equivalents to shift command [ and ]. This has become the de facto standard.

I tried to deal with this for a few days but that keyboard shortcut is just too ingrained in my brain. You can fix this, though, by going in to your Keyboard preference pane, then the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab. Under "Application Shortcuts" click the plus button, find TextMate, and add the following:

Voila. Fixed! Now you can get back to coding at the speed of thought.

The Changelog Joins The Genius Pool

Jason — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:51:24 +0000

I just posted this over on my redesigned company site but it’s awesome so I had to share it here too. The Changelog, an amazing development podcast, is now part of the Genius Pool Network. Check out the blog post on Twisted Mind, over on The Changelog, or post a job now.

Rails 3.0 rc2 Notes

Jason — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:00:07 +0000

With the recent release of Rails 3.0 Release Candidate 2, DHH posted on the official Rails blog to check out the sweet GitHub compare view between the two RCs for detailed information. This list is by no means complete but I made some notes from the commit view, with links where possible, about the bigger changes:

Add a header that tells Internet Explorer (all versions) to use the best available standards support. [Yehuda Katz]
Rename _snowman to _e. Update: This was later updated to utf8 as Kieran and Santiago point out in the comments.
Mysql2 is now the default mysql adapter.
render :file is deprecated in favor of render :template except for absolute paths.
Apps upgrading from version 2.3 get defaulted to utf-8.
Update documentation on autosave.
Several performance improvements mostly by tenderlove.
Tons of deprecations.
Require rdoc version 2.5.10
Require rack-mount 0.6.12

Genius Pool Supports Twitter Integration

Jason — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:11:20 +0000

This has been around for a little while now, but Genius Pool now has Twitter integration when a new job is posted. Check it out and post a job.

Mac OS X Post Install Guide, May 2010

Jason — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:37:23 +0000

Part 1: Update Software

This takes a while. Go get some coffee and install the developer tools.

System Settings

Appearance

Place scroll arrows at top and bottom. This is a left over windows preference I just can’t get used to.

Finder

Add delete and get info to toolbar. I’m of the opinion that this should be the default.

Keyboard

The Keyboard is a pretty big deal for developers. Here are my settings:

Get some Emacs keybindings in all of cocoa:
http://www.gnufoo.org/macosx/. I’m a vim guy but they’re useful.

Modifier keys, set caps lock to control. Allow Full keyboard access also.

Uncheck "Illuminate keyboard in low light conditions" for better battery life.

Apps

BetterTouchTool
Adds a bunch of configuration options for the Magic Mouse. I set a 3 finger tap for spaces. It’s handy.
Dropbox
Effortlessly sync files across computers. If you use the link above I get some free space. Use this one for a referral free link if you prefer.
Skitch
Capture screenshots, share images. This has become so ingrained in my day to day use I don’t know what I’d do without it.
Evernote
Enhanced syncable notepad. I use this for everything from code snippets to projects notes, recipes, and everything in between.
Google Chrome Beta
I couldn’t do without it. Spice it up with some developer extensions and you’re good to go.
Mailplane
Gmail on the desktop. I’ve tried almost every os x mail solution and couldn’t get more productive than Gmail. However, I still keep Mail.app configured in case I need to refer to old mail offline.
Textmate
This is practically a necessity. The best text editor on OS X.
MacVIM
It’s no emacs but it’s good to have around.
iStat Menus

Find out useful information about what’s going on in your system. I mainly use this for the calendar widget in the menu bar. Why this isn’t an option in OS X by default I’m not sure. It recently became a paid app and I upgraded immediately.
Concentrate
Eliminate distractions. I’ve written about this one before in my Using concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique post.
Adium
Multi protocol IM client. I use it when not forced to use iChat by others.
Skype
Needed for work and for recording podcasts.
BusyCal
Think of it as iCal pro. I like this better for syncing with Google Calendar.
Things
The best to do list app on OS X.
LaunchBar 5
LaunchBar is an app launcher and more. Although, to be fair, I’m giving Alfred a shot right now, too.
SuperDuper!
I don’t even use Time Machine because of SuperDuper! It’s a great backup program, though the target is a bit different than Time Machine. It’s well worth the money because of the smart backup feature.
Choosy
Choosy is a “better default browser” for os x. It lets you choose which browser you want to open a link in. It’s really invaluable when you get used to it.
TrueCrypt
Described on the web site as “Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.” I use it for an encrypted disk image where I hold my financial information. This image is kept in my Dropbox and synced when ever it’s unmounted automatically.
Tweetie
My favorite OS X Twitter client so far.
RSS Menu
RSS Menu lets you track rss feeds in your menu bar. I don’t have all my feeds in here but a few select ones, like twitter searches that I want to pay attention to.

Developer Stuff

Git branch in Bash Prompt. This goes in ~/.bash_profile:

parse_git_branch() {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\ →\ \1/'
}
 
export PS1='\[\e[1;37m\][\[\e[1;35m\]\u\[\e[1;37m\]@\[\e[1;32m\]\h\[\e[1;37m\]:\[\e[1;36m\]\w\[\e[1;33m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\e[1;37m\]]$ \[\e[0m\]'

This will make your prompt look like this:

Git config (~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
	st = status
	co = checkout
	br = branch
	ui = update-index
	lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %f %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

Domain checking obsession. Put this in ~/.bash_profile, courtesy of Chris Wanstrath:

function isreg {
	whois $1 | grep -q 'No match' && echo "No" || echo "Yes"
}

Use as follows:

$ isreg jasonseifer.com
Yes

Put the following in ~/.inputrc. Create it if it doesn’t exist. Paste in the following:
```
set show-all-if-ambiguous On
set completion-ignore-case on
"\ep": history-search-backward
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
```
Now you can use tab to auto complete ignoring case and also suggest more options. The history search stuff lets you use the up arrow to search backwards through your history by typing in the first few letters of a command you’ve typed before and going back through. It’s like ctrl+r but easier.

Install Homebrew. Then:

  brew install wget
  brew install git
  brew install mysql

Ruby:

First thing’s first. The version of rubygems that comes with Snow Leopard is a bit outdated. Update it:

sudo gem update --system

RVM is the Ruby Version Manager. It lets you have multiple versions of Ruby installed on you system. But it’s much more than that. You can also have gemsets which are preconfigured sets of gems. I’ve been using one gemset per project.

Local rack apps can easily be hosted with Passenger Pane. Then you can also set up your rdocs for local viewing without using gem server. The instructions in the article still work, you just need to keep an old version or rdoc installed.

mategem command to edit a gem in Textmate with completion:
```
_mategem()
{
    local curw
    COMPREPLY=()
    curw=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    local gems="$(gem environment gemdir)/gems"
    COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '$(ls $gems)' -- $curw));
    return 0
}
complete -F _mategem -o dirnames mategem
```
PeepOpen is a new application from PeepCode that gives you a smarter fuzzy file search (like in TextMate) and also works in MacVim and Emacs. It really helps out in MacVim and is much easier to configure than the fuzzy file finder plugin.

Wrapping Up

This isn’t everything I use but It’s a pretty good start. If you have any must have apps or dev environment shortcuts, please post in the comments.

Friends Around Me

Jason — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:55:40 +0000

I’d like to congratulate Friends Around Me with their official launch today. I was involved with doing some back-end development for this project. It’s mainly an iPhone (and iPad!) app with a Rails back-end. It’s a great idea from a very talented group of people whom I was lucky to work with. Check out the site or grab the app from iTunes.

Rails Envy

Jason — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:06:40 +0000

Many have asked what happened to Rails Envy so I thought it was time to tell the story. Fair warning: this gets a bit personal at times.

A Brief Bit About Me

I went to school for Psychology where I got a Bachelor of Science at the University of Central Florida. I took some programming classes but was always a "closet geek." I’ve been programming since I was 6 years old and Ruby and Rails just felt right when I found it. Even more so after coming from PHP, Perl, C, and (shudder) some MS Access coding. Right around when I was finishing college I started attending ORUG meetings and some hackfests. This is where I met Gregg Pollack. We got along great, especially with coding.

Where Rails Envy Came From

I think I attended all but the first Orlando Ruby Users Group and occasionally gave presentations. On the Tuesday, November 14th meeting I gave a presentation on using RJS in Rails. I actually thought it was a good idea to use the term "AJAXified" in a presentation description, but I digress. That night I was joking around with someone and we decided a local [insert other language here] developer had "Rails Envy." At the time, I thought it would make a pretty funny Rails focused blog name so I registered the domain. Then I sat on it for a while.

At some point in all this, Gregg, who has his Patched Software consultancy at the time, asked me to come work for him on a contract basis because he needed help on a project. This actually terrified me at the time. What would I do when the contract ran out? How would I find other work? I was pretty fresh out of college and hadn’t considered going contract. After talking it over with a lot of people, I quit my job.

Full Time to Contract

This picture has nothing to do with the paragraph, but it’s from that time period.

Coming from the full time employment world, working on a contract basis was a wonderful experience. I was working while wearing a t-shirt and shorts! Plus, the work was fascinating to me. I remember working with Gregg to solve some very interesting Ruby and Rails problems of the time. There were always people blogging but not as many as today and a lot of the time you had to dive deep in to Rails rather than googling solutions. It’s inspiring to see how far Rails has come.

After I working with Gregg for a little while I convinced him that we needed a blog. Gregg wasn’t convinced we were qualified enough to write a blog. I remember saying that we didn’t have to be because we had something to offer people based on our experience developing Rails full time. This was a different time — not many people were doing full time Rails work. We used railsenvy.com, set up Mephisto, and we were rolling.

We weren’t expecting the amount of feedback we got. It was great.

We Make Some Videos

I remember leaving ORUG one night and saying to Gregg "Wouldn’t it be funny if we parodied the Mac vs PC ads only using Ruby on Rails and other web development frameworks?" I was just joking but Gregg convinced me it would be a good idea to actually shoot these. I remember writing some script on a notepad during ORUG about a guy running in a track suit. I’m really glad that one didn’t make it in. Anyway, Gregg set up a writeboard (password: railsenvy), we bounced some ideas back and forth, got in touch with a friend of mine who did video work, and actually shot the videos.

Shooting the videos turned out to take a lot longer than I expected. It also was much more fun than I expected. I think the original set of four took nearly two full days including rehearsals. I still love the bear in a jar for hibernate. The videos went viral and that was awesome. I think I have a screenshot somewhere of 3 of the videos being in various spots on the front page of digg at the same time.

Gregg managed to get in contact with Chad Fowler and have the videos played at the first Railsconf. That was a truly exciting experience. I wasn’t expecting it at all and was flattered that they even considered playing them. After Railsconf we made some more. To this day I’m still embarrassed by the myspace one.

Hey, Let’s Start a Podcast!

I wasn’t much of a podcast listener. Gregg turned me on to the amazing Radio Lab and This American Life podcasts. I had noticed at the time that there weren’t any Ruby or Rails news podcasts. I remember it took some convincing of Gregg to get one started. My original pitch was something like "Just a five minute thing where we read what’s new. We’re reading all of the RSS feeds anyway" "Why would people listen to us when they could just read RSS feeds?" "Some people like listening to podcasts. And we’re funny." After doing some research on how to set up a successful podcast (Thanks Miles and Ryan!) we were up and running.

I learned a ton about editing podcasts. Dan taught me why I should use compression rather than normalization under certain circumstances. For the longest time, I used Soundtrack Pro to edit the podcasts. I think I did the first 40 episodes in Soundtrack before learning Pro Tools. Gregg and I would record each story separately and assemble them later. It usually took three takes if we messed up. Which was often. Looking back, I can’t believe I edited over 90 of them. Every week. It was a lot of work but I loved doing it.

Rails Can’t Scale

I think a lot of people were wondering why a Rails developer would be saying that Rails can’t scale, very often at least once a week. When I started this meme there were a lot of blog posts and questions about the time about Rails and scalability. People were citing Twitter as an example of Rails not being able to scale during their fail whale days. Java people were saying Ruby is slow. TechCrunch was all over it.

My idea was to make the expression "Rails can’t scale" so tired out that people would get sick of hearing it. When people commented asking me to stop, I knew I was doing a good job. Sorry everyone. But it was for a good cause. There’s a lot less sentiment these days about Rails not being able to scale. I’d like to think I played a small part in that.

Working for The Man!

Gregg and I were approached by Dan Benjamin about working for a startup called Helium Report (now Halogen Guides). We accepted. I got the opportunity to work with a kick ass team. I have nothing but praise and respect for everyone I worked with. We had our challenges but I think we handled them well. I wrote some pretty good code, if I do say so myself.
However, for reasons I’m about to outline, I wasn’t able to keep the job.

Tragedy Strikes

This part is difficult for me to write. Gregg mentioned in his post that I moved to Ft. Lauderdale for a year but didn’t say why. On May 1st, 2008, my mother woke up to find my father missing from the house. She was very worried and under a lot of stress at the time. My sister and I eventually found my dad, though my mother suffered her second heart attack while we were looking for him. She passed away a few days later.

Words can’t convey how deeply I miss her. I think about her every day. She was an amazing human being and I’m proud to be her son. I owe her a lot and I’m largely the person I am today because of her.

I’m not sure people ever really "get over" these kinds of things; rather, you find a new normal. I got a lot of supportive emails when Gregg announced this at the end of the podcast. I’m sorry if you emailed and I never got back to you.

I wasn’t able to keep a job while all of this was going on. However, everyone at Halogen Guides was ridiculously, above and beyond, supportive. For that I’m extremely grateful. I wish everyone nothing but the best.

Some Good Comes out of it

My girlfriend Candace and I moved to South Florida to help take care of my father. She selflessly changed jobs and moved in with my father and I. This sealed the deal in my mind and I proposed. She said yes. She’s a wonderful person and we’re getting married September 25th, this year. I couldn’t be happier, even though I’m a bit difficult at times. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get through everything without her support and the support from some very good friends. You know who you are. I thank you all deeply.

Wrapping Up

With me living in South Florida and Gregg in Orlando, each working on different projects, it started to become more difficult to do the podcast which was still going strong. We did our best but it started making more sense to split off in to our own companies. I started Twistedmind Inc. where, among other things, I offer consulting services scaling Rails. Dan Benjamin took over the reigns as co-host of the podcast, which we eventually moved over to 5by5. We also started The Dev Show to do a big longer discussion on general programming topics.

Moving On

Though we have mutually decided to take the Rails Envy web site down, I feel that Rails Envy, and what Gregg and I accomplished together, should be celebrated. I’m proud of the work we did and what we accomplished as a team. I’m proud of the videos, podcasts, talks, and client work we did. I’m grateful for the opportunities to have met and worked with so many people. It was a great experience. I hope to continue to set the bar high doing client work through my new company, Twistedmind (Hire me!), being a part of podcasts like The Ruby Show and The Dev Show, and launching projects like Genius Pool and Employee Scheduling software. I wish everyone the best. See you soon.

Rake Tutorial

Jason — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:25:09 +0000

If you’re developing with Rails you’ve probably encountered rake once or twice. This blog post aims to walk you through where rake came from and an introduction on how to use it effectively in your Rails apps.

A Little Bit of History

Rake is the project of Jim Weirich. It’s a build tool. For a good laugh and an even more in depth history check out the "rational.rdoc" from the Rake documentation. Essentially, rake started as an idea for using Ruby inside of a Makefile. Though Jim doesn’t sound convinced from the tone in that document, it is a good idea.

What’s the need for an automated build system at all? As usual, Wikipedia has the answer:

Historically, developers used build automation to call compilers and linkers from inside a build script versus attempting to make the compiler calls from the command line. It is simple to use the command line to pass a single source module to a compiler and then to a linker to create the final deployable object. However, when attempting to compile and link many source code modules, in a particular order, using the command line process is not a reasonable solution. [sic]
As the build process grew more complex, developers began adding pre and post actions around the calls to the compilers such as a check-out from version control to the copying of deployable objects to a test location. The term “build automation” now includes managing the pre and post compile and link activities as well as the compile and link activities.

It’s about Dependencies

This may be a bit of a stretch to say but build tools are about dependencies. One file or set of files depends on another set to get compiled, linked, or other fun things before the next set can be processed. The same idea exists in rake with tasks and task dependencies. Let’s look at a simple rake task. Save the following as “Rakefile” in any directory:

  directory "tmp"
 
  file "hello.tmp" => "tmp" do
    sh "echo 'Hello' >> 'tmp/hello.tmp'"
  end

What we’re saying here is that the file named “hello.tmp” depends on the directory "tmp". When rake runs across this, it’s going to create the directory "tmp" first before running the "hello.tmp" task. When you run it, you’ll see something like the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake hello.tmp
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'

If you were to look at the "hello.tmp" file you would see the phrase "Hello". What happens if you run it again? You’ll see the same output again. What’s going on? Rake is generating the file again. It’s doing this because it can’t actually find the file tmp/hello.tmp from that definition. Let’s redefine the task:

  directory "tmp"
 
  file "tmp/hello.tmp" => "tmp" do
    sh "echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'"
  end

Now if you were to run it twice you would see something like this:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake "tmp/hello.tmp"
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  mkdir -p tmp
  echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'
  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake "tmp/hello.tmp"
  (in /Users/jason/src)

Rake now knows that the file task has been run.

Running Other Tasks

Rake tasks can take the form of having prerequisites and can depend on another task. Let’s say I wanted to get ready in the morning. My process would be something like this:

Turn off alarm clock.
Groom myself.
Make coffee.
Walk dog.

Let’s further assume that I have OCD and have to do all of these in order. In rake I might express my morning as follows:

  task :turn_off_alarm do
    puts "Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though."
  end
 
  task :groom_myself do
    puts "Brushed teeth."
    puts "Showered."
    puts "Shaved."
  end
 
  task :make_coffee do
    cups = ENV["COFFEE_CUPS"] || 2
    puts "Made #{cups} cups of coffee. Shakes are gone."
  end
 
  task :walk_dog do
    puts "Dog walked."
  end
 
  task :ready_for_the_day => [:turn_off_alarm, :groom_myself, :make_coffee, :walk_dog] do
    puts "Ready for the day!"
  end

If I were to run this as is I would type rake ready_for_the_day and I’d see the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake ready_for_the_day
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though.
  Brushed teeth.
  Showered.
  Shaved.
  Made 5 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.
  Dog walked.
  Ready for the day!

By running the ready_for_the_day task it notices that the turn_off_alarm, groom_myself, make_coffee, and walk_dog tasks are all prerequisites of the ready_for_the_day task. Then it runs them all in the appropriate order. You’ll notice that we can pass something in to the make_coffee task. If we were having a really tough day we could pass in a value to the COFFEE_CUPS environment variable and be more prepared:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake COFFEE_CUPS=5 make_coffee
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Made 5 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.

Namespaces

Rake supports the concept of namespaces which essentially lets you group together similar tasks inside of one namespace. You’d then specify the namespace when you call a task inside it. It keeps things tidy while still being quite effective. In Rails, you might notice the db:migrate task. In that example, db is the namespace and migrate is the task. Using the above example, we might put everything in to the morning namespace:

  namespace :morning do
    task :turn_of_alarm
    ....
  end

Now if you were to run rake COFFEE_CUPS=3 morning:ready_for_the_day you would have the same output as above, only it only took 3 cups of coffee today. Score!

The Default Task

Rake has the concept of a default task. This is essentially the task that will be run if you type rake without any arguments. If we wanted our default task to be turning off the alarm from the example above, we’d do this:

  task :default => 'morning:turn_off_alarm'

Running rake now produces the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though.

Describing Your Tasks

You can use the desc method to describe your tasks. This is done on the line right above the task definition. It’s also what gives you that nice output when you run rake -T to get a list of tasks. Tasks are displayed in alphabetical order. We’ll define some descriptions in our Rakefile (abbreviated for brevity):

  ...
  desc "Make coffee"
  task :make_coffee do
    cups = ENV["COFFEE_CUPS"] || 2
    puts "Made #{cups} cups of coffee. Shakes are gone."
  end
  ...

Now when we run rake -T for our list of tasks we get the following output:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake -T
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  rake afternoon:make_coffee      # Make afternoon coffee
  rake morning:groom_myself       # Take care of normal hygeine tasks.
  rake morning:make_coffee        # Make coffee
  rake morning:ready_for_the_day  # Get ready for the day
  rake morning:turn_off_alarm     # Turn off alarm.
  rake morning:walk_dog           # Walk the dog

You can add in a string to get tasks matching that displayed. Running rake -T af would show just the afternoon task.

Redefining Tasks

Let’s say you want to add on to an existing task. Perhaps you have another item in your grooming routine like styling your hair. You could write another task and slip it in as a dependency for groom_myself but you could also redefine groom_myself later on (shortened for brevity but you get the idea):

  namespace :morning do
	....
	task :groom_myself do
      puts "Brushed teeth."
      puts "Showered."
      puts "Shaved."
    end
    ....
  end
  ...
  namespace :morning do
    task :groom_myself do
      puts "Styled hair."
    end
  end

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake morning:groom_myself
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Brushed teeth.
  Showered.
  Shaved.
  Styled hair.

Invoking Tasks

You may at some point want to invoke a task from inside another task. Let’s say, for example, you wanted to make coffee in the afternoon, too. If you need an extra upper after lunch you could do that the following way:

  namespace :afternoon do
    task :make_coffee do
      Rake::Task['morning:make_coffee'].invoke
      puts "Ready for the rest of the day!"
    end
  end

Which outputs:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake afternoon:make_coffee COFFEE_CUPS=1
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Made 1 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.
  Ready for the rest of the day!

A real world example of this is the rcov:all task. I use this in Genius Pool for aggregate rcov data. It’s shamelessly stolen from Clayton Lengel-Zigich. Go check out that post for a good example of invoking other tasks from rake.

Refactoring

You’ll notice in the example above we’re delegating most of the work to already defined methods and tasks in the RSpec and Cucumber classes. As a general rule, try to keep your methods already defined other places and call them from rake with your specific options and use cases. Let’s say I had a Rails application that e-mailed all accounts in the system that their account was expiring in a certain number of days. Here’s one way to write it:

  namespace :accounts do
    desc "Email expiring accounts to let them know"
    task :email_expiring => :environment do
      date = ENV['from'] ? Date.parse(ENV['from']) : Date.today
      accounts = Account.find(:all, :conditions => ["expiration_date = ?", date]
      accounts.each do |account|
        Notifier.deliver_account_expiration(account)
      end
    end
  end

A better way, that would let you test it more thoroughly would be to do the following:

  namespace :accounts do
    desc "Email expiring accounts to let them know"
    task :email_expiring => :environment do
      date = ENV['from'] ? Date.parse(ENV['from']) : Date.today
      Account.notify_expiring(date)
    end
  end

This lets you unit test your notify_expiring method on the account class and make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. This is a small, made up example, but you get the idea. Here’s an example from Resque:

  desc 'Restart redis'
  task :restart do
    RedisRunner.stop
    RedisRunner.start
  end

Notice the delegation to the RedisRunner class methods? This is a great rake task

Rails

You can get access to your models, and in fact, your whole environment by making tasks dependent on the environment task. This lets you do things like run rake RAILS_ENV=staging db:migrate. Rails will autmatically pick up tasks in lib/tasks. Any files named with the .rake extension will get picked up when you do rake -T.

Scheduling Rake Tasks

You can use cron to schedule rake tasks. Let’s say you wanted to run the account email expiration task every night at 12:15 on your production server, you might have something like this:

  15 * * * * cd /data/my_app/current && /usr/bin/rake RAILS_ENV=production accounts:email_expiring

Misc

Rake.original_dir gives you the directory that the original rake task was run from.

Derivatives

Thor is a more class based approach to solving some of the things rake does as far as actual tasks go.
Capistrano is the de facto standard for deploying rails apps. Its syntax is inspired pretty heavily by Rake, but it is definitely not rake.

Useful Rake Examples

Sample Rakefile from this article.
redis.rake from Resque.

If you have any more useful rake examples, please let me know and I’ll add them here.

Photo Credits:
Shaker rake by dicktay2000 on Flickr.
Toy sampling megaphone by altemark on Flickr.

Developer Job Board

Jason — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:51:07 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the Genius Pool job board. This is a new job board for connecting companies to job seekers. With the connection to the 5by5 podcast network, making sure your job opportunity is in the ears of qualified applicants has never been easier. Why’s that? If you’re looking for a Ruby or Rails developer, what better spot is there than The Ruby Show? The same applies to The Dev Show. You can also be assured that whomever is applying has an impeccable sense of humor and taste.

So check it out if you get a moment or follow Genius Pool on Twitter for new job postings as they get posted. I’ll be doing some blog posts in the coming weeks about the process of launching your own project as well.

80s Me

Jason — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:34:11 +0000

This fantastic image courtesy of Peter Cooper.

On Passwords

Jason — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 10:00:11 +0000

On a recent episode of The Dev Show Dan and I talked about passwords. In particular, the topic of password hashing came up. I’d like to say up front that I’m not a security guy and most definitely not a cryptographer. However, I don’t have to be because there are much smarter people who have already done a lot of work on encryption schemes and have done it much better than I ever could.

Above: discussion of best practices in passwords.

This should go without saying: you shouldn’t be storing your passwords in plain text in your database. Unless you need to be able to retrieve the password later, it should be stored in the database in a hashed format. Thomas Ptacek, a very highly respected security professional, explains all you need to know about passwords in this blog post. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing: just use bcrypt as your encryption scheme. It’s the slowest to generate the encrypted hash. By virtue of being slow to generate, it would also take a very long time to perform a successful lookup using rainbow tables. See that blog post linked for much more information and a thorough explanation.

Just how much longer does it take to generate? The following is a quick ruby program I whipped up to benchmark. It uses each encryption scheme to generate a password 50 times. The following was how long it took to run on my macbook using ruby 1.9.1-p378. You can grab the script here if you’d like to run it locally. It contains absolutely no tests which makes my inner Corey Haines frown:

  Password to hash: password
                    user     system      total        real
  MD5           0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001443)
  SHA1          0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001679)
  SHA256        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001308)
  bcrypt (3)    0.080000   0.000000   0.080000 (  0.086532)
  bcrypt (10)   4.550000   0.010000   4.560000 (  4.601996)

The differences between the (3) and (10) are the "cost" of generating the password. The documentation for the bcrypt gem summarizes that very well:

Takes an optional :cost option, which is a logarithmic variable which determines how computational expensive the hash is to calculate (a :cost of 4 is twice as much work as a :cost of 3). The higher the :cost the harder it becomes for attackers to try to guess passwords (even if a copy of your database is stolen), but the slower it is to check users’ passwords.

But I’m getting off topic. The reason I wanted to write this post was to create a list of popular open source software and see what kind of passwords hashing schemes are in use. Here’s the list I’ve compiled so far:

Django
Encryption Scheme: SHA1, MD5, or crypt
Notes: Previous Django versions, such as 0.90, used simple MD5 hashes without password salts. For backwards compatibility, those are still supported; they’ll be converted automatically to the new style the first time check_password() works correctly for a given user. More info:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/
http://docs.python.org/library/crypt.html
MySQL
Encryption Scheme: Double SHA1
WordPress
Encryption Scheme: PHPass
Notes The awkwardly named PHPass library defaults to bcrypt (awesome) and falls back to DES or MD5 based salted hashes depending on the php version and supported features.
Expression Engine
Encryption Scheme: SHA1
Joomla
Encryption Scheme: MD5
phpBB
Encryption Scheme: Proprietary hash method using /dev/urandom and md5
ASP.Net Authentication
Encryption Scheme: Uses a concept of "providers".
Notes: There’s a BCrypt open source option available.
Rails: restful-authentication
Encryption Scheme: SHA1
Notes: This was the defacto standard for a long time in the Rails world as far as authentication goes. Changing the encryption scheme in an application would be a relatively painless process.
Rails: Authlogic
Encryption Scheme: bcrypt, aes256, md5, sha1, sha256, sha512
Notes: This is configurable to any of the listed options. Default is SHA512. The author doesn’t recommend using MD5 or SHA1 in the README but provides the options for migration and compaitiblity. How awesome is that?
Drupal
Encryption Scheme: MD5 by default
Notes: Christefano points out in the comments that MD5 is used by default but PHPass and AES are available via third party modules.

If you don’t see your favorite software here, either leave it in the comments or contact me and I’ll add it to the list. These are in no particular order, so I’m not trying to favor anything in particular (though we all know I’m mostly a Ruby developer).

Rails Reminder: DATE_FORMATS

Jason — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:49:39 +0000

A friend of mine recently asked me about adding time formats to Rails apps. It’s not completely intuitive on how to add new "default" symbols for date and time formats or to get a list of the built in ones. The API has the built-in lists of constants under DATE_FORMATS but it’s a bit difficult to read on that page. Here’s a link to the current stable version of the Rails time formats: rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/time/conversions.rb. In order to add new ones you use the ruby strftime function.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Date::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!({
  :quick => "%m %d, %Y at %I:%M %p",
  :end_date => "%B %d, %Y"
})
 
ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!({
  :job_list => "%B %d, %Y"
})

This lets you do something like <%= model.created_at.to_s(:quick) %> in your code.

And here’s the strftime options from the cheat page as a refresher:

  %a - The abbreviated weekday name (``Sun'')
  %A - The  full  weekday  name (``Sunday'')
  %b - The abbreviated month name (``Jan'')
  %B - The  full  month  name (``January'')
  %c - The preferred local date and time representation
  %d - Day of the month (01..31)
  %e - Day of the month without leading zeroes (1..31)
  %H - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock (00..23)
  %I - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock (01..12)
  %j - Day of the year (001..366)
  %k - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock w/o leading zeroes ( 0..23)
  %l - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock w/o leading zeroes ( 1..12)
  %m - Month of the year (01..12)
  %M - Minute of the hour (00..59)
  %p - Meridian indicator (``AM''  or  ``PM'')
  %P - Meridian indicator (``am''  or  ``pm'')
  %S - Second of the minute (00..60)
  %U - Week  number  of the current year,
          starting with the first Sunday as the first
          day of the first week (00..53)
  %W - Week  number  of the current year,
          starting with the first Monday as the first
          day of the first week (00..53)
  %w - Day of the week (Sunday is 0, 0..6)
  %x - Preferred representation for the date alone, no time
  %X - Preferred representation for the time alone, no date
  %y - Year without a century (00..99)
  %Y - Year with century
  %Z - Time zone name
  %z - Time zone expressed as a UTC offset (``-04:00'')
  %% - Literal ``%'' character
 
   t = Time.now
   t.strftime("Printed on %m/%d/%Y")   #=> "Printed on 04/09/2003"
   t.strftime("at %I:%M%p")            #=> "at 08:56AM"
   t.strftime("%e %B, %Y")	       #=> "9 April, 2003"
   t.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")     #=> "2003-04-09T08:56:07" (EN 28601)

The preferred method for doing this is to add these in an initializer in your app. Something along the lines of config/initializers/my_time_formats.rb.

Stand Up While You Read This!

Jason — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:15:36 +0000

The New York Times has an article up on standing while you work. People who sit all day without moving around much are at higher risk for medical problems typically associated with obesity. This includes doctors who even do the same job but just walk more during the day:

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

So part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

Obviously it’s not the best idea to take medical advice from an opinion writer but I can personally attest to the benefits of sitting on an exercise ball throughout the day for work. In addition to building core muscles, for some reason it helps me focus more on coding.

Here are a couple of quick tips on choosing an exercise ball:

If you plan on working out with one, get a high quality one so you don’t have to fear having it burst. Duraball and TOGU Powerball Premium are high quality ones for that. The Chek Institute has a good DVD for a home workout as well.
If you plan on sitting on one while working, get one that’s the next size up from the recommended size for your height.

Link

Using Concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique on OS X

Jason — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:21:28 +0000

Concentrate is a Mac only app. It lets you do a number of things like block web sites, launch apps, play sounds, etc. Combinations of these things can be configured to go on for varying amounts of time. I use it for the Pomodoro Technique when programming. Corey Haines introduced me to Tomatoist when I paired with him during one of his journeyman tours. While that site is awesome, I prefer using the Mac app to force eliminate distractions.

The Pomodoro Technique

The root of the idea is that you program for 25 minutes straight and then break for 5 minutes. This seems like a pretty simple idea but when you’re working by yourself things can happen. For example, maybe you want to send a quick email to someone but want to refer to something in their Facebook account you can’t quite remember. So then you look it up. While looking it up you notice something else interesting by another one of your friends and the distractions start. By the end of the distractions you’ve ordered enough parts for a fully functional robot suit off eBay. If you only had 5 minutes to do this stuff, maybe that wouldn’t have happened.

Setting Up Concentrate

Concentrate is actually a very simple application to use. Click on the “New Activity Button” and set your options. I called mine "Program Pomodoro." It’s set to block any site that could potentially distract me, Growl a message, and play a sound on completion. The typical Pomodoro technique lasts 25 minutes so drag the location slider over until you see 25 minutes. Boom, good to go. Now you can’t look at anyone’s Facebook account or respond to any threads on hacker news for a good 25 minutes. You’ll get to that during your break.

The next task you’ll want to set up is the break. This is the most rewarding task. I just have this one Growl a message ("Get back to work!") and play a sound when it’s done. The duration slider should be set to 5 minutes.

Get To It!

That’s about it. It’s simple software and well worth the $30 to eliminate distractions. I use it only for those two techniques listed above and have been very happy. Special thanks to Corey Haines for introducing me to the Pomodoro technique.

Jason Seifer

Installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on Mac OS X Lion

db Bistro Burger Review

CoffeeScript and Rails 3

Employee Scheduling Software

Automatically updating your IP with DNSimple

On The Internet

Textmate Next and Previous Tab Keys

The Changelog Joins The Genius Pool

Rails 3.0 rc2 Notes

Genius Pool Supports Twitter Integration

Mac OS X Post Install Guide, May 2010

Part 1: Update Software

System Settings

Appearance

Finder

Keyboard

Apps

Developer Stuff

Wrapping Up

Friends Around Me

Rails Envy

A Brief Bit About Me

Where Rails Envy Came From

Full Time to Contract

We Make Some Videos

Hey, Let’s Start a Podcast!

Rails Can’t Scale

Working for The Man!

Tragedy Strikes

Some Good Comes out of it

Wrapping Up

Moving On

Rake Tutorial

A Little Bit of History

It’s about Dependencies

Running Other Tasks

Namespaces

The Default Task

Describing Your Tasks

Redefining Tasks

Invoking Tasks

Refactoring

Rails

Scheduling Rake Tasks

Misc

Derivatives

Further Reading

Useful Rake Examples

Developer Job Board

80s Me

On Passwords

Rails Reminder: DATE_FORMATS

Stand Up While You Read This!

Using Concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique on OS X

The Pomodoro Technique

Setting Up Concentrate

Get To It!