Red Squirrel Stumblog

Palm Pre max image height in pixels

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:55:38 -0500

For you future Palm Pre developer googlers: the max height is 425. Don’t trust the emulator!!!!

copyplist failed ... exit code 71

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:55:34 -0600

I got this error when trying to compile an iPhone project in XCode. I found the answer to my problem on StackOverflow, but I couldn’t upvote or thank Jimmy for his solution, which is related to a Ruby install. Thanks Jimmy!

If before_update is being called on create...

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:35:49 -0600

It’s because you have an update in your after_create.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_update :audit_info
  after_create :generate_key

private

  def generate_key
    update_attribute(:key, generate_stuff)
  end

  def audit_info
    AuditLog.big_change!(self)
  end
end

Yep, audit_info will get called when you User.create.

If you want Ruby's strftime to give you single digit hours

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:28:00 -0600

Then the undocumented %l (yes, a lower-case L) is your friend.

Time.now.strftime("%I:%M%p")
# generates 05:00pm
Time.now.strftime("%l:%M%p")
# generates 5:00pm

That’s just evil that l looks so much like I.

Rails transactions don't rollback in tests

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:58:00 -0500

Here’s a discussion, and here’s the simplest solution:

# in your TestCase
self.use_transactional_fixtures = false

Porting Ruby number_with_delimiter to Perl

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:43:00 -0500

Ruby:

def number_with_delimiter(number)
  parts = number.to_s.split('.')
  parts[0].gsub!(/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d))/, "\\1,")
  parts.join '.'
end

Perl:

sub number_with_delimiter {
    my $number = shift;
    my @parts = split(/\./, $number);
    $parts[0] =~ s/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d))/$1,/g;
    return join(".", @parts);
}

I want a US phone number that I can SMS, which will push that message to a URL

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:40:50 -0500

Tweet me with ideas

Dreamhost Subversion stops working after enabling Passenger

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:52:53 -0500

The solution to this is to just setup a subdomain for your Subversion repository.

A quick way to find slow Rails actions

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:13:00 -0500

tail -10000 log/production.log | egrep "Completed in [0-9]{2,}"

via RailsMachine support

Grouping by Object#hash

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:20:28 -0500

I liked this little idiom from Tobias.

servers = [ 'memcache1', 'memcache2', 'memcache3' ]
servers[ 'product-1' % servers.size ]

"Net::SMTPFatalError" with "553 5.0.0" and "User address required"

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0500

If you ever get this combination of errors while sending email, you should check the raw data for your “To:” field. I stupidly checked only the email address, rather than the raw data, which included the name, which, for some odd reason had backslashes for the last name. In other words, SMTP doesn’t like to send email to “John \\” <john@example.com>, in fact it hates sending email to these sorts of people and will do its best to ruin your afternoon if you attempt it.

Rails 2.1 breaks attachment_fu

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:17:07 -0500

Here’s a patch
http://pastie.textmate.org/145188

History Blog Meme

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:42:00 -0500

history 1000 | awk ’{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] “ ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head

95 cd
72 ls
52 svn
49 rake
27 exit
24 p
22 sudo
20 mimi
16 cap
15 git

via objo

One man's fight to disable Ferret during tests/specs

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:50:00 -0500

module ActsAsFerret
  module InstanceMethods
    # Overriding these so we don't hit DRb
    def ferret_create; true; end
    def ferret_update; true; end
    def ferret_destroy; true; end
  end
end

Reverting in git

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:07:57 -0600

git reset –hard

TextMate regex for removing newlines in CSV

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:44:59 -0600

Find: (,"[^"]+)\n([^"]+")
Replace: $1 $2

This will need to be run repeatedly until it doesn’t match anymore because it only removes one newline from a field at a time and some fields may have multiple newlines.

Combined logging for Sinatra and ActiveRecord

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:48:16 -0600

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(SOME_LOG_NAME)
Sinatra::Environment.prepare_loggers(ActiveRecord::Base.logger)

Close all tabs in TextMate

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:11:02 -0600

Command - Control - W

dup vs. clone

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:32:00 -0600

You might think that ActiveRecord::Base#dup is what you want, but you really want clone.

ActiveRecord's QueryCache#uncache

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 06:20:00 -0600

Sometimes you need to compare an attribute of an in-memory ActiveRecord instance against its attribute in the database. The way I usually do that is to grab a fresh instance from the database like this:

class Something < ActiveRecord::Base
  def previous(attribute)
    self.class.find(id)[attribute]
  end
end

That worked just fine in Rails 1.2. But Rails 2.0 has request-scoped query caching enabled by default, meaning that if you have already executed the same SQL that is generated by find(id), you’re going to get the exact same instance back from that call to find. This makes it impossible to compare in-memory attributes against attributes stored in the database.

The solution is to use ActiveRecord’s uncache method. This is a class method, so you’ll need to grab your class to call it like this:

class Something < ActiveRecord::Base
  def previous(attribute)
    self.class.uncached { self.class.find(id)[attribute] }
  end
end