A Single Programmer's Blog

Entering the Enterprise Space: Moving to Bloom Digital Platforms

2009-09-29T10:31:31-04:00

After a few years as a consultant, I received an offer from Bosko Milekic from Bloom Digital Platforms Inc. Starting on October 5th, I will be a permanent Bloom employee. Marc-André and Gary are moving outside the enterprise, while I’m moving inside.

At Bloom, I will be responsible for the AdGear API, enabling applications to easily connect to their platform for ad serving and management. We even have an open source Ruby client available on GitHub as ad_gear_client.

This will be a welcome change of pace for me.

See you at the next Montreal.rb, at my new office!

RestClient + Multipart Form Data: See My Branch

2009-08-12T11:05:38-04:00

I just merged Rick Olson’s (technoweenie) rest-client multipart_streaming branch with RestClient 1.0.4. You can see the results at francois/rest-client. I sent a pull request to Adam, so if he pulls it in, everyone will benefit from this code.

Using ActiveResource With Digest Authentication: Branch in Progress

2009-08-04T16:04:11-04:00

I have a work-in-progress branch for using Digest authentication with ActiveResource.

So, how did I do it? It wasn’t too hard actually. When I spiked, I changed ActiveResource::Connection#request to handle authentication itself. I ended up with a big mess: a new rescue clause, 10 lines of code to calculate the digest and so on. But I knew it would work. So, I git checkout . and started with tests, as it should.

The way ActiveResource is built, if a username / password is sent in, ActiveResource will send those automatically in an Authorization header, using the Basic authentication method. I need a way to turn this off. Thus grew #use_basic_authentication= and #use_digest_authentication=.

Next up, actually being able to calculate the Digest. A quick search turned up code by Eric Hodel in the form of a Ruby module: An implementation of HTTP Digest Authentication in Ruby

After a bit of cleanup and rewriting, I have a branch of ActiveResource that’s ready to be commented on. Please see francois/ar_digest and leave comments there.

An example of using Digest would be:

 1 require "logger"
 2 require "activeresource"
 3 require "pp"
 4 
 5 ActiveResource::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDERR)
 6 
 7 ActiveResource::Base.site     = "http://adgear.local/api"
 8 ActiveResource::Base.user     = "francois"
 9 ActiveResource::Base.password = "my-funny-new-password-which-you've-never-seen-before"
10 ActiveResource::Base.timeout  = 30
11 
12 # Don't attempt Basic authentication, but be sure to use Digest
13 ActiveResource::Base.use_basic_authentication  = false
14 ActiveResource::Base.use_digest_authentication = true
15 
16 class Site < ActiveResource::Base
17 end
18 
19 pp sites = Site.find(:all)

This work was sponsored by Bloom Digital Platforms, as part of my work on their AdGear API.

Piston 2.0.6: minor bug fixes

2009-08-01T13:21:14-04:00

I just pulled in a couple of patches from outside contributors. These are all minor bug fixes, but are important:

Chris Gibson: When forcing the repository type, Piston would break because it called #downcase on a Symbol. 1bcc16bf8
Terry Heath: Subversion‘s —non-interactive would prevent OS X’s keychain from kicking in. 93d9a957
Florian Aßmann: In certain cases, the revision would be a String, and other times it would be an Integer. Normalize before comparing. 40c0bc4e

All users are advised to upgrade:

1 $ sudo gem install piston

Clear and Concise Explanation of RESTful Resources

2009-07-22T14:30:23-04:00

I just found Your Web Service Might Not Be RESTful If… by Paul Sadauskas. This article is a very clear and concise explanation of how to do real RESTful services.

His arguments are:

1. Present a single top-level resource;
2. All resources should be accessible by followling links from the top-level resource;
3. Don’t put API tokens in the URL or headers (use representations instead).

A very enjoyable read, and something we should all be following.

Piston 2.0.4: minor fixes

2009-07-20T11:18:11-04:00

I just release Piston 2.0.4. This is a minor fix to enable Piston to work with more Git versions.

Git 1.6.0.1 accepts checking out a new branch without specifying the remote’s name:

1 $ git checkout -b my-2-3-stable 2-3-stable
2 # implies origin/2-3-stable

Versions prior to that expect the full name of the remote branch:

1 $ git checkout -b my-2-3-stable origin/2-3-stable

Installation is the usual incantation: sudo gem install piston

What is Piston?

Piston is a utility that eases vendor branch management. This is similar to svn:externals, except you have a local copy of the files, which you can modify at will. As long as the changes are mergeable, you should have no problems.

MongoDB or Redis? The Choice Is Yours

2009-07-15T09:35:54-04:00

In the past couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to look at MongoDB and Redis in more details. Both are fast, but serve different needs. Here’s my take on them both.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a document oriented database. MongoDB stores structured data, as documents:

1 {
2   'name': 'François Beausoleil',
3   'email': 'francois@teksol.info',
4   'year-of-birth': 1973,
5   'tags': ['friendly', 'ruby', 'coder', 'father']
6 }

Since MongoDB stores structured data, it has a richer query language:

 1 // Find people that are fathers OR coders
 2 db.people.find( { "tags" : { $in : ['father', 'coder'] } } );
 3 
 4 // Find people that are fathers AND coders
 5 db.people.find( { "tags" : { $all : ['father', 'coder'] } } );
 6 
 7 // Index the email member of documents
 8 db.people.ensureIndex({email: 1});
 9 
10 // Query using the index
11 db.people.findOne({email: 'francois@teksol.info'})

Redis

Redis is a key-value store that is strongly typed. Redis has three types of values: strings, sets and lists. Out of the box, you cannot store structured data in Redis. You have to build the index manually, storing yet other keys.

Redis is conceptually simple. All operations are either stores or fetches:

1 PUT key value
2 GET key

You can think of Redis as a persistent Hash or Dictionary. The fact that Redis is strongly typed makes some operations very interesting.

 1 # Store other data as serialized JSON object, but we won't be able to query the value itself
 2 SET "people:francois" "{'name': 'François Beausoleil', 'email': 'francois@teksol.info', 'year-of-birth': 1973, 'tags': ['friendly', 'ruby', 'coder', 'father']}"
 3 
 4 # Build ourselves an index on the email value
 5 SET "email:francois@teksol.info" "francois"
 6 
 7 # Build another index for tags
 8 SADD "tags:friendly" "francois"
 9 SADD "tags:ruby"     "francois"
10 SADD "tags:coder"    "francois"
11 SADD "tags:father"   "francois"
12 
13 # During authentication, we would find the person using the email address
14 GET "email:francois@teksol.info"
15 
16 # Get the rest of the data
17 GET "people:francois"
18 
19 # Find the keys that have both father AND coder as tags
20 SINTER "tags:father" "tags:coder"

Conclusion

So, which one should you choose? The short answer is “it depends”.

The longer answer is to use the best tool for the job. Storing documents is different than storing simple key values. Of course, both can be used for the same job, but Redis will be easier if you need a simple Hash/Dictionary. Use MongoDB for storing structured data.

Cliaws 1.5.0: cliec2 commands implemented

2009-07-07T20:48:44-04:00

Please grab cliaws from Rubyforge:

1 $ gem install cliaws

What is Cliaws?

Cliaws is a replacement for the Amazon EC2 API tools, but uses Ruby, and thus does not suffer from a long boot time. Cliaws is also easier to setup:

1 $ AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=# Your Access ID
2 $ AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=# Your secret ID
3 $ # Setup is done, enjoy!
4 $ clis3 list YOUR_BUCKET
5 $ cliec2 launch AMI --keypair KEYNAME

Please view the README for some details. The implementation is still the best place to get information about the options you can pass.

We've Been Doing TDD for Centuries, You Know..

2009-06-20T21:55:29-04:00

Today, I was working on my lawn. Spreading new soil to sow new grass. I was looking at the ground, and I was pretty sure drainage wasn’t going to be good. I decided to make a test: I got out the garden hose and let it flow. Sure enough, water was pooling instead of draining. Back to the drawing board (or at least, a couple more rakes to spread things around).

As I was working the soil, a thought hit me: I’d say nearly every profession has been doing test driven design (not development) since pretty much the dawn of time:

the toolsmith in the ancient tribes would hit the stone, see if it did work or not, and repeat as appropriate;
the chef tastes his food before letting other people eat it;
the plumber tests the pipes before letting the water flow in;
the soldier tests his equipment before setting off on the battlefield;
naval engineers are simulation testing their latest aircraft carrier in an effort to ensure nothing is out of place;
certain programmers write automated tests for their code, to ensure it works as designed.

If nearly every profession has been doing it for thousands of years, why aren’t you doing it today?

Piston on Windows: Some Pointers

2009-06-07T07:34:20-04:00

If you need to run Piston on Windows, BoxCycle wrote some information about it at: Rails Plugin Updates, SVN, and Piston 2.0.2 on Windows

How to Parse HTML Documents Under JRuby Using XOM, TagSoup and Nux

2009-05-01T16:03:16-04:00

It’s not that hard, but it still took me 2 hours to do it. I had a couple of false starts, and I pored over documentation for a while until I hit upon the excellent Nux library.

I won’t let you go through the same failures I had. Here’s the code:

 1 # Demonstrates how to parse a local HTML document using XOM,
 2 # TagSoup and Nux, under JRuby.
 3 #
 4 # http://www.xom.nu/
 5 # http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/
 6 # http://acs.lbl.gov/nux/
 7 
 8 include Java
 9 mydir = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
10 
11 # This is how you require libraries without touching your
12 # CLASSPATH from JRuby. I put the required files in vendor/.
13 # Nux includes it's dependencies (XOM and saxon), so I didn't
14 # have any other libraries to add.
15 require File.join(mydir, "vendor", "tagsoup.jar")
16 %w(nux.jar saxon8.jar xom.jar).each do |filename|
17   require File.join(mydir, "vendor", "nux", "lib", filename)
18 end
19 
20 import "org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser"
21 import "nu.xom.Builder"
22 
23 builder = Builder.new(Parser.new)
24 
25 # XOM's Builder expects a full URL, so tell it where to find the
26 # document.
27 doc = builder.build("file://#{File.expand_path(File.join(mydir, ARGV[0]))}")
28 puts doc.toXML

Extra! Add XPath querying

Continuing from above, you can add XPath querying:

1 import "nux.xom.xquery.XQueryUtil"
2 
3 # Must use '*:p'.  '*' stands for any/default namespace.
4 results = XQueryUtil.xquery(doc, "//*:p")
5 p results.size
6 results.size.times do |index|
7   puts results.get(index).toXML
8 end

Why am I going through these motions? Because I wanted to use my 20% for fun. Besides, I need to process large quantities of HTML as quickly as possible for a cool project I’m working on, and JRuby seems to be the fastest implementation, according to my unscientific benchmark.

But the real reason was that both Nokogiri and Hpricot wouldn’t load/run under JRuby 1.2.0.

Actually, let me rephrase that: Nokogiri did load, but crashed while requiring the library:

 1 $ jruby -w test.rb data.html 
 2 /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:180: undefined method `next_sibling' for class `Nokogiri::XML::Node' (NameError)
 3         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri/xml/node.rb:31:in `require'
 4         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/current/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
 5         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri/xml.rb:3
 6         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri/xml.rb:31:in `require'
 7         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/current/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
 8         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri.rb:10
 9         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/nokogiri-1.2.3-java/lib/nokogiri.rb:36:in `require'
10         from /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/current/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
11         from test.rb:2
12

I have reported this bug to the proper authorities.

Hpricot is another matter entirely. When I tried to use it earlier, I hit a roadblock because JRuby couldn’t install the native extensions. I tried again just now, and if you specify the version to be ~> 0.6.1, it works. Specify any other version, and you’re a sitting duck:

 1 $ jruby -S gem install -v '~> 0.6' hpricot
 2 Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
 3 ERROR:  Error installing hpricot:
 4         ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
 5 
 6 /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/current/bin/jruby extconf.rb install -v ~> 0.6 hpricot
 7 
 8 
 9 Gem files will remain installed in /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.8.1 for inspection.
10 Results logged to /Users/francois/Library/Java/JRuby/jruby-1.2.0/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.8.1/ext/hpricot_scan/gem_make.out
11 
12 $ jruby -S gem install -v '~> 0.6.1' hpricot
13 Successfully installed hpricot-0.6.164-java
14 1 gem installed
15 Installing ri documentation for hpricot-0.6.164-java...

Keeping Yourself DRY in Shoulda Tests

2009-04-29T22:02:42-04:00

When I’m testing admin controllers, I often have tests that follow this form:

test/functional/admin/orders_controller_test.rb

 1 class OrdersControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
 2   logged_in_as :active_user do
 3     context "on GET to :index" do
 4       setup do
 5         get :index
 6       end
 7 
 8       should_deny_access
 9     end
10   end
11 
12   not_logged_in do
13     context "on GET to :index" do
14       setup do
15         get :index
16       end
17 
18       should_deny_access
19     end
20   end
21 end

Well, this is all Ruby, right? And Ruby has wonderful blocks, and blocks can be passed around…

test/functional/admin/orders_controller_test.rb

 1 class OrdersControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
 2   deny_access_tests = lambda do
 3     context "on GET to :index" do
 4       setup do
 5         get :index
 6       end
 7 
 8       should_deny_access
 9     end
10   end
11 
12   logged_in_as :active_user, &deny_access_tests
13   not_logged_in, &deny_access_tests
14 end

This is valid for any block of code that you want to test again and again:

test/functional/admin/orders_controller_test.rb

 1 class OrdersControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
 2   successful_index_render = lambda do
 3     should_respond_with :success
 4     should_render_template "new"
 5     should_assign_to :orders
 6   end
 7 
 8   logged_in_as :admin do
 9     context "", &successful_index_render
10   end
11 
12   logged_in_as :sub_admin do
13     context "", &successful_index_render
14   end
15 end

Alternatively, and it might be easier in the end, you could use methods:

test/functional/admin/orders_controller_test.rb

 1 class OrdersControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
 2   def self.should_render_successful_index_response
 3     should_respond_with :success
 4     should_render_template "new"
 5     should_assign_to :orders
 6   end
 7     
 8   logged_in_as :admin do
 9     should_render_successful_index_response
10   end
11 
12   logged_in_as :sub_admin do
13     should_render_successful_index_response
14   end
15 end

Note thought that you must define your methods at the top of your test case. Remember that Ruby executes a class definition, so when you suddenly call should_render_successful_index_response, the method definition has to be available, or else Ruby will complain with a NoMethodError.

Ain’t Ruby sweet?

What if You Didn't Have Access to If/Then/Else?

2009-04-17T11:33:16-04:00

Image a Ruby where if/then/else isn’t available:

1 class Account
2   # This method returns the balance in words, negative or positive, ready for display in the UI
3   def balance_in_words
4     # Err...  How do I do that?
5   end
6 end

If you were a strict Object-Oriented person, you’d do it this way:

 1 class PositiveBalanceAccount
 2   def balance_in_words
 3     "Positive"
 4   end
 5 end
 6 
 7 class NegativeBalanceAccount
 8   def balance_in_words
 9     "Negative"
10   end
11 end

But then, your objects would have to change class whily-nilly. Pretty darn hard. But multi-method dispatching gives us a nice solution:

 1 class Account
 2   def initialize(balance)
 3     @balance = balance
 4   end
 5 
 6   defmulti :balance_in_words,
 7     lambda { @balance < 0 } => "Negative",
 8     lambda { @balance > 0 } => "Positive"
 9 end
10 
11 Account.new(15).balance_in_words # => "Positive"
12 Account.new(-5).balance_in_words # => "Negative"

For the observant amongst you, you might have noticed I forgot the nil balance case. This is really a programming error, so it should be treated as such:

1 Account.new(0).balance_in_words
2 lib/defmulti.rb:46:in `balance_in_words': #<Account:0x197222c @balance=0> received balance_in_words but did not have a guard clause that matched and no else clause. (Defmulti::MissingGuardClause)
3         from test.rb:16
4

For the even more observant, yes, there exists an implementation that does exactly what I have described above. It’s called defmulti, it’s a gem, and it’s on GitHub: http://github.com/francois/defmulti.

What is this useful for?

This library is a thought experiment. When you lose the familiar tools, what can you do? Of course, this library works atop the existing Ruby implementation and to be truly useful, syntax would have to be provided to make this much less verbose. It’s interesting nonetheless to see what can be done without the syntax extensions.

Anyway, what would you use this for? Multi-method dispatching is a tool that helps writing code without conditionals. The conditionals are specified outside the block of code that executes. The examples above are pretty thin, but looking at Java.next #3: Dispatch, I can provide another solution to his Ruby example:

 1 defmulti :letter_grade,
 2   lambda {|grade| (90..100).include?(grade) || grade == "A"} => "A",
 3   lambda {|grade| (80...90).include?(grade) || grade == "B"} => "B",
 4   lambda {|grade| (70...80).include?(grade) || grade == "C"} => "C",
 5   lambda {|grade| (60...70).include?(grade) || grade == "D"} => "D",
 6   lambda {|grade| ( 0...60).include?(grade) || grade == "F"} => "F"
 7 
 8 letter_grade 60  # => "D"
 9 letter_grade "A" # => "A"
10 letter_grade nil # => Defmulti::MissingGuardClause

Again, I’m struck by the clunky syntax, but if we ignore that for a second, could this be even better than Stuart Halloway’s example? Ruby’s case statement is very, very powerful and very easy to use. Is this useful? Not at the moment. But it’s a thought experiment I thought I’d throw out there.

Beware of Git's Content Tracking

2009-04-15T00:31:52-04:00

A while ago, I was wondering how rename tracking in Git worked. I was told that renames didn’t really exist in Git, as Git tracked content, not files themselves. Fair enough.

But, I just stumbled upon something:

 1 $ gdc vendor/plugins/acts_as_money/LICENSE 
 2 diff --git a/vendor/plugins/acts_as_money/LICENSE b/vendor/plugins/acts_as_money/LICENSE
 3 index e69de29..a273c73 100644
 4 --- a/vendor/plugins/acts_as_money/LICENSE
 5 +++ b/vendor/plugins/acts_as_money/LICENSE
 6 @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 7 +one:
 8 +  user: active
 9 +  name: name
10 +  description: description

Tell me, does that look right? I’ll manually fix that file, but that just decreased my confidence level in Git.

The original LICENSE file was empty, and there apparently was another file (a fixture file) that was empty too, and the latter saw some content added.

Why did this happen? LICENSE was updated as part of a merge—from a branch in which the LICENSE file doesn’t exist.

Returning CSV data to the browser - revisited

2009-04-06T10:23:30-04:00

Back in 2006, I wrote Returning CSV data to the browser. The method I was using back then is way obsolete. Let’s use the correct way to do it. If you want to follow along, just browse over to returning-csv-data-to-the-browser-revisited and read on.

First of all, the correct way to return non HTML data to the browser is to use respond_to. Let’s do so here:

app/controllers/reports/timelines_controller.rb

 1 class Reports::TimelinesController < ApplicationController
 2   def show
 3     @timelines = Timeline.all
 4     respond_to do |format|
 5       format.csv do
 6         response.headers["Content-Type"]        = "text/csv; charset=UTF-8; header=present"
 7         response.headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=timeline-report.csv"
 8       end
 9     end
10   end
11 end

The rest is pretty easy. Generating the data is easy enough:

app/models/timeline.rb

 1 require "fastercsv"
 2 
 3 class Timeline < ActiveRecord::Base
 4   default_scope :order => "started_at ASC"
 5 
 6   def to_csv
 7     FasterCSV.generate_line([
 8           started_at.to_s(:db),
 9           ended_at.to_s(:db),
10           project_id]).chomp
11   end
12 end

And rendering the view? Look how easy this gets:

app/views/reports/timelines/show.csv.erb

1 Started At,Ended At,Project ID
2 <%= render :partial => @timelines %>

Notice the file’s name? show.csv.erb? The csv in the filename is what connects the respond_to call with the view.

And the final piece, the timeline partial:

app/views/reports/timelines/_timeline.csv.erb

1 <%= timeline.to_csv %>
2

Now, on to the next obsolete article in the bunch…

Building the SQL WHERE Clause Dynamically - Updated

2009-04-02T09:29:11-04:00

Back in October 2005, I wrote an article entitled Building the SQL WHERE Clause Dynamically. This article is obsolete and I’m replacing it with this one instead.

What do you do with a FORM that has multiple conditions? Something like this:

The way I would do it today is using named scopes:

app/models/person.rb

 1 class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
 2   is_taggable
 3 
 4   named_scope :in_region,
 5     lambda {|region| {:conditions => {:region => region}}}
 6   named_scope :with_salary,
 7     lambda {|lower, upper| {:conditions =>
 8       {:salary => (lower .. upper)}}}
 9 
10   # Elided, but something similar to the above
11   named_scope :tagged_with,
12     lambda {|tags| {:conditions =>
13       ...}}
14 end

Then you need your controller to translate between what the view provides and what the model expects:

app/controllers/searches_controller.rb

 1 class SearchesController < ApplicationController
 2   def show
 3     root = Person
 4     root = root.in_region(params[:region]) unless params[:region] =~ /all/i
 5     unless params[:salary] =~ /all/i
 6       params[:salary].gsub!("K", "000")
 7       lower, upper = params[:salary].split("-")
 8       root = root.with_salary(lower, upper)
 9     end
10     root = root.tagged_with(Tag.parse(params[:tags])) unless params[:tags].blank?
11     @people = root.paginate(:page => params[:page])
12   end
13 end

For simpler forms, the approach above would be sufficient. For more complex forms, I suggest you look at plugins that aim to provide more structure around your SQL clauses, such as:

I also suggest looking at Searching and Queries Plugins – Agile Web Development to find other plugins.

Actions With Dashes - Updated

2009-04-02T09:00:00-04:00

Back in October 2005, I wrote an article entitled Actions with Dashes. This article is perfectly obsolete and uses a trick instead of the router as it was intended.

Let’s say you want an action where the URL is http://myproject.com/contact-us. The best way to do that currently is to use Rails’ router:

config/routes.rb

1 map.contact_us "/contact-us", :controller => "pages", :action => "show", :page => "contact_us"

app/controllers/pages_controller.rb

1 class PagesController < ActionController
2   def show
3     render :action => params[:page]
4   end
5 end

The PagesController above is also good for any other static pages you want to serve on your site.

I'm Updating and Obsolescing Articles on My Blog

2009-04-02T08:00:00-04:00

A couple of days ago, @jfcouture tweeted:

@cmercier People with stuff older than 6 months in the Rails world on their blog should do the same!

@jfcouture via Twitter

This was in response to Carl’s rant that obsolete Merb tutorials should be removed / deprecated.

I decided to follow their advice. I’m revisiting all my old posts and saying they are either obsolete, or providing links to replacements. Expect to see at least a post a day for the next couple of weeks as I revisit my old posts. This is interesting! I had forgotten about a lot of things I had written about.

Piston 2.0 Finally Released: With Git, Subversion and Ruby 1.9

2009-04-01T18:27:58-04:00

It’s been a long time coming, I know. Believe me when I say so. But the good news first:

Piston 2.0 supports Git repositories and working copies
Piston 2.0 supports Subversion repositories and working copies
Piston 2.0 is Ruby 1.9.1 compliant

Get it

(Allow a couple of hours for the gem to propagate)

1 $ sudo gem install piston

What is Piston?

Piston eases your vendor branch management worries. It copies vendor/upstream code into your own repository, preserving local patches.

The new website

Yes, I have a new look to go along with the website. http://piston.rubyforge.org/

There is also an avenue for asking questions and getting help about Piston. Register to the piston-discussion Google Group

Please have fun and enjoy yourselves.

NOTE: This is not an April’s Fool joke (although it would have been really cool to do it if I had thought so!)

ArgumentError on #Sum When Using Classifier::Bayes

2009-03-27T22:04:24-04:00

If you want to use the Classifier gem within a Rails project, you’re in for a surprise:

 1 /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:102:in `sum': wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) (ArgumentError)
 2         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:102:in `instance_method_already_implemented?'
 3         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:72:in `define_attribute_methods'
 4         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:71:in `each'
 5         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:71:in `define_attribute_methods'
 6         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:351:in `respond_to?'
 7         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:219:in `method_missing'
 8         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:219:in `each'
 9         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:219:in `send'
10         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:219:in `method_missing'
11         from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:364:in `method_missing_without_paginate'
12         from /Users/francois/Projects/family_budget/vendor/gems/mislav-will_paginate-2.3.5/lib/will_paginate/finder.rb:167:in `method_missing'
13         from script/classifier:8

This is because the Classifier gem implements Array#sum. Unfortunately, Classifier is loaded after Rails, which means ActiveSupport’s own #sum is replaced. The solution? Use either Yury’s fork, or my own. Both use ActiveSupport’s #sum instead of a custom implementation.

The only difference between my version and Yury’s is I use Jeweler to maintain and package the gem.

Know How to Use Your Tools: ResourceController

2009-03-10T15:12:08-04:00

Today, I was building a controller action that was polymorphically finding and associating an object. I could have used a ~~simple~~ dumb solution, such as this:

app/controllers/watches_controller.rb

 1 class WatchesController < ApplicationController
 2   def create
 3     @watch = Watch.build(:watcher => current_person)
 4     @watch.subject = case
 5                      when params[:person_id]
 6                        Person.find(params[:person_id])
 7                      when params[:event_id]
 8                        Event.find(params[:event_id])
 9                      else
10                        raise ArgumentError, "Don't know how to handle other keys... #{params.keys.inspect}"
11                      end
12     @watch.save!
13     flash[:notice] = "You're watching #{@watch.subject.name}"
14     redirect_to root_url
15   end
16 end

That sucked. Really bad. Why did I have to have a case/switch statement in my controller? Why not use a simpler alternative? I could have gone the full polymorphic route too:

app/controllers/watches_controller.rb

 1 class WatchesController < ApplicationController
 2   def create
 3     @watch = Watch.build(:watcher => current_person)
 4 
 5     # For illustration purposes, this is fine, but INSECURE!!!
 6     @watch.subject_type = params[:subject_type]
 7     @watch.subject_id   = params[:subject_id]
 8     @watch.save!
 9 
10     flash[:notice] = "You're watching #{@watch.subject.name}"
11     redirect_to root_url
12   end
13 end

Then, I remembered that my controller was already a ResourceController implementation. I opened up the code and used this instead:

app/controllers/watches_controller.rb

1 class WatchesController < ResourceController::Base
2   belongs_to :person, :event
3 
4   create.before do
5     @watch.watcher = current_person
6     @watch.subject = parent_object
7   end
8 end

I needed to add a bit of infrastructure (some routes and has_many declarations in my models), but those were benefits (I know I’ll need them later anyway). My controller code is simpler, and the intention is clearer, I think.

In the same vein, are you following #standup on Twitter?

How to Get Your Autotest Output Directly in Your Editor

2009-03-06T16:26:27-05:00

While discussing in Campfire with James Golick today, James said he would prefer to have his output directly in Vim, our editor of choice. I initially said that since Vim isn’t Emacs and can’t support a live console, it wouldn’t work. James told me to think outside the box.

1 $ autotest &>tmp/autotest.out &
2 $ vim
3 # :e tmp/autotest.out

Yes, thinking outside the box, and knowing your tools makes it much easier. So far, I’m liking autotest output in Vim very much. It’s easy to navigate the output using Vim movement commands: /Person finds the errors in person, gf opens the named file, etc. All in all, this is a pretty good experience.

Getting Started with Autotest

2009-03-06T10:59:13-05:00

Since yesterday, I read a bit more about autotest. I stumbled on Getting Started with Autotest which you should read immediately. The article talks about setting up your plugins and doing all kinds of interesting things.

Getting more proficient with my tools now!

How I Wasted an Hour on Something Git did in 10 seconds?

2009-03-05T13:00:17-05:00

Git is a wonderful system. It has all kinds of nooks and crannies that one forgets about. Anyway, I was doing client work this morning, and my build server (Integrity, but this isn’t about Integrity) didn’t fail, although my local tests were failing. I began investigating, and vendor/plugins wasn’t even on the build server. Uh? I began investigating, and found vendor/plugins had turned into a git submodule a while back. I even had the commit’s SHA1 of when that happened. I found myself in the unenvious position of having to find and install every plugin we had before that commit back into the application.

1 # 04f7e1 is the commit when the submodule was born
2 # Checkout the commit before that error occured
3 $ git checkout 04f7e1^
4 $ ls vendor/plugins > plugins
5 $ git checkout master
6 $ cat plugins
7 $ script/plugin install git://github.com/giraffesoft/timeline_fu.git
8 # And so on, for the 9 other plugins

And then, there was this one plugin which we haven’t released yet which I was missing. It’s called configurable_mailer, and allows us to configure ActionMailer::Base from tests and from some environment variables. Anyway, I again checked out the code from 04f7e1^, copied vendor/plugins/configurable_mailer outside the repository, checked out master again, and moved the plugin back into place. As you can imagine, this was painful. And error-prone. Then I ran my tests, and immediately had errors. This application is based off of Blank, and was using slightly modified versions of certain plugins. So I added Blank as a remote, fetched and merged. Ran my tests again. Still had errors. And lots of them:

 1 $ rake test:units
 2 (in /Users/francois/Projects/project)
 3 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/unit/account_activation_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/company_test.rb" "test/unit/event_test.rb" "test/unit/fanship_test.rb" "test/unit/internal_message_test.rb" "test/unit/job_application_test.rb" "test/unit/job_creation_presenter_test.rb" "test/unit/job_suggestion_test.rb" "test/unit/job_test.rb" "test/unit/media_test.rb" "test/unit/message_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/message_test.rb" "test/unit/password_reset_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/person_test.rb" "test/unit/profile_url_test.rb" "test/unit/recommendation_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/recommendation_presenter_test.rb" "test/unit/recommendation_test.rb" "test/unit/relationship_test.rb" "test/unit/timeline_event_test.rb" 
 4 Loaded suite /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
 5 Started
 6 ............FFF.........EEEEEEEEEEEEE........................FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.F....F.....EF..EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
 7 Finished in 45.235105 seconds.
 8 
 9 542 tests, 762 assertions, 26 failures, 73 errors

Bad, I’m telling you. Then I remembered something about git checkout being able to checkout certain paths. I read about this somewhere but I can’t find the source, anymore. Sorry! Without even reading the manual, I set out to work.

1 $ get checkout -b fix
2 $ git rm -r vendor/plugins
3 $ git checkout -m "Removing submodule'd vendor/plugins (how did that happen?)"
4 $ git checkout 04f7e1^ -- vendor/plugins

Wall clock time? 10 seconds. I was ready to add and commit.

This is a post to remind you to know your tools, and know them well. Sorry I can’t stay anymore. I’m off to read autotest’s source and documentation, again.

Announcing XLsuite Open Source

2009-02-18T02:29:34-05:00

Would you believe we just GPL’d nearly 40,000 lines of code? Yes we did

Nonexistent When Using Phusion Passenger

2009-02-18T02:11:59-05:00

This evening, I was fooling around with mod_passenger for XLsuite. I ran into a little problem where Passenger was telling me “No such file or directory – /nonexistent”. A quick search on Google revealed Phusion Passenger error “No such file or directory – /nonexistent”.

That post really made my day.

GiraffeSoft FLOSS Week: Begins Today!

2009-02-16T16:33:03-05:00

James Golick just opened our company blog by adding FLOSS week. Over the next few days we’ll release a couple of plugins that we’ve been working on/with for the past few projects.

Only problem is, we never get around to releasing this stuff. Starting a blog seemed like a good excuse to spend some time polishing up some code and, you know, writing READMEs.

Go on over and enjoy the view! Don’t forget the RSS feed: GiraffeSoft: The Blog

ib_outlet Doesn't Create Accessors

2009-02-16T08:34:56-05:00

Lately, I’ve been having fun with RubyCocoa while reading Brian Marick‘s RubyCocoa. It’s an entertaining book, and I really like RubyCocoa itself. But I hit a little gotcha. Take the following code:

PathController.rb

 1 require 'osx/cocoa'
 2 
 3 class PathController < OSX::NSObject
 4   ib_outlet :path, :events
 5   ib_action :choosePath
 6   
 7   def choosePath(sender)
 8     panel = OSX::NSOpenPanel.openPanel
 9     panel.canChooseFiles          = false
10     panel.canChooseDirectories    = true
11     panel.allowsMultipleSelection = false
12 
13     result = panel.runModal
14     if result == OSX::NSFileHandlingPanelOKButton then
15       self.path.title = panel.filename
16     end
17   end
18 end

What could be wrong with this? Turns out #ib_oulet does not define accessors for the instance variables it defines. Look at the exception:

 1 OSX::OCMessageSendException: Can't get Objective-C method signature for selector 'events' of receiver #<PathController:0x2297be class='PathController' id=0x534ec0>
 2   /Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework/Resources/ruby/osx/objc/oc_wrapper.rb:50:in `ocm_send'
 3   /Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework/Resources/ruby/osx/objc/oc_wrapper.rb:50:in `method_missing'
 4   /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/PathController.rb:27:in `choosePath'
 5   /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/rb_main.rb:22:in `NSApplicationMain'
 6   /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/rb_main.rb:22
 7 /Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework/Resources/ruby/osx/objc/oc_wrapper.rb:50:in `ocm_send': Can't get Objective-C method signature for selector 'events' of receiver #<PathController:0x2297be class='PathController' id=0x534ec0> (OSX::OCMessageSendException)
 8   from /Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework/Resources/ruby/osx/objc/oc_wrapper.rb:50:in `method_missing'
 9   from /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/PathController.rb:27:in `choosePath'
10   from /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/rb_main.rb:22:in `NSApplicationMain'
11   from /Users/francois/Projects/fsevtest/build/Debug/fsevtest.app/Contents/Resources/rb_main.rb:22

From the obscure message, I gathered this was some kind of NoMethodError (why couldn’t they use an exception with a good name?) That was Sunday morning. Sunday evening, I suddenly had a flash that ib_outlet wouldn’t define an accessor. Changed my code to use the instance variable instead:

PathController.rb

1 if result == OSX::NSFileHandlingPanelOKButton then
2   @path.title = panel.filename
3 end

Lo and behold! It worked beautifully.

Productivity Tip: Read Your Blogs in the Afternoon

2009-02-16T08:18:58-05:00

If you’re in any way, shape or form like me, you usually have more energy in the morning (if you don’t, skip this post). My regular schedule puts me in my office around 9 AM every weekday. First thing I do is pop open Google Reader, and start reading blogs. What an utter waste of time… I waste perfectly good coding time to do an activity that’s similar to watching television. I can waste my time in the afternoon, when I have less energy. I say waste but I really mean relax. Don’t take me wrong: reading blogs is a very important time, but I should just do it when it’s OK to do, not when I have the most energy.

Yesterday evening, I was pondering on the why of the above. Turns out I can procrastinate just as well as anyone else…

How to Paste Without Indenting in Vim

2009-02-11T08:40:32-05:00

I wanted to paste some HTML into Vim, and I was having a hard time getting something that preserved existing indentation.

After doing :help autoindent, I found out about smartindent. So, I turned both smartindent and autoindent off before doing my paste. That worked wonders!

1 :set nosmartindent
2 :set noautoindent
3 i
4 <CMD>-V
5 <ESC>
6 :set smartindent
7 :set autoindent

Voilà, a correctly pasted, non-indented version of whatever was in the clipboard!

UPDATE: 2 minutes after I posted the link to this article on Twitter, @jpalardy replied:

View jpalardy’s tweet

Setting Up Passenger on Mac OS X Using Passenger Prefs Pane

2009-02-09T11:13:01-05:00

Before today, I was using Thin to host my development servers. This was a bother because I had to remember to start/stop Thins as required when I switched tasks. Well, not anymore…

Reading my feeds today, I found Passenger Preference Pane, by Fingertips.

Download the preference pane itself
Untar
Follow the directives in the README about RubyCocoa (either Leopard 10.5.2 or install RubyCocoa yourself from source)
Double click the prefpane: this will install the preference pane
Open System Preferences, then Passenger in Other
Drag and drop your Rails (or Rack-based) application folder into the list
Click Apply
Go back to System Preferences, and open Sharing
Stop and start Apache using the checkbox for Web Sharing
Visit http://your-apps-base-name.local/ and enjoy!

One caveat I found was that my home directory had to change permissions. I had to grant a+rx before it would work:

1  $ ls -ld ~
2 drwxr-xr-x+ 78 francois  staff  2652  9 fév 11:13 /Users/francois

Of course, if you have a multi-user machine, that opens an interesting can of worms for security. A quick fix would be:

1 $ chmod a-rx * && chmod a+rx the-apps-base-name

Modify as needed.

Another Productivity Tip: Use iTerm and Vim

2009-02-05T11:29:41-05:00

I was pairing with James Golick the other day, and he told me he was using iTerm in fullscreen mode. I was pretty excited by that, and I immediately downloaded and installed it.

I was already a Vim user, through the excellent MacVim, but I started using Vim from the console instead. My main screen is an Acer X243w, and with Vim in full screen, I have more than enough space to do all my coding. Splitting vertically is now a real pleasure, and I can even have a 4 way split that’s not too claustrophobic.

The other benefit of using iTerm instead of the default Mac OS X Terminal is that iTerm can be used in 256 colors, enabling Vim to do even more syntax highlighting. That wasn’t a problem in MacVim though.

Only caveat? Scrolling is a bit slow. Me and James both wonder about this…

Duplicate Bug #5404556: Git on Snow Leopard

2009-02-04T20:32:02-05:00

Just received an email from Apple today:

From: devbugs@apple.com
Subject: Re: Bug ID 6543251: Git is not available by default on Leopard

Hello François,

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 6543251. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5404556. The original bug number being used to track this duplicate issue can be found in the State column, in this format: Duplicate/OrigBug#.

Thank you for submitting this bug report. We truly appreciate your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs.

Best Regards,

Kit Cheung
Apple Developer Connection
Worldwide Developer Relations

This is a followup to Want Git preinstalled on next Mac OS X?

Beware of the Habit Creature

2009-01-23T10:12:03-05:00

You know, I write controller tests day in, day out. I’m used to seeing this:

1 should "be valid"
2   assert assigns(:user).valid?
3 end

So, when I write a Rake task and I render some data, I need my assigns:

lib/tasks/ssl.rake

 1 namespace :ssl do
 2   task :build => :environment do
 3     rm_rf "config/sites/"
 4     mkdir "config/sites"
 5 
 6     Dir["config/ssl/*"].each do |path|
 7       site = File.basename(path)
 8       parts = site.split(".")
 9 
10       puts "Processing #{site}"
11       assigns = {
12         :wildcard_domain           => parts[0] == "_",
13         :domain_name               => parts[-2..-1].join("."),
14         :ssl_key_file_path         => File.expand_path(File.join(Dir.pwd, path, "#{site}.key")),
15         :ssl_certificate_file_path => File.expand_path(File.join(Dir.pwd, path, "#{site}.crt"))}
16 
17       next "Skipping #{site}: #{assigns(:ssl_key_file_path)} does not exist or is unreadable" unless File.file?(assigns(:ssl_key_file_path))
18       next "Skipping #{site}: #{assigns(:ssl_certificate_file_path)} does not exist or is unreadable" unless File.file?(assigns(:ssl_certificate_file_path))
19 
20       view = ActionView::Base.new([File.dirname(__FILE__)], assigns)
21 
22       File.open(File.join("config", "sites", "#{site}.ssl.conf"), "w") do |site_config|
23         puts "Writing config/sites/#{site}.ssl.conf"
24         site_config.write view.render("ssl.conf.erb")
25       end
26     end
27 
28     view = ActionView::Base.new([File.dirname(__FILE__)], {})
29     File.open(File.join("config", "sites", "default.conf"), "w") do |site_config|
30       site_config.write view.render("default.conf.erb")
31     end
32   end
33 end

Can you spot the error on lines 17 and 18? Go on, I’ll wait…

You want some help? Here’s the backtrace:

 1 ** Invoke ssl:build (first_time)
 2 ** Invoke environment (first_time)
 3 ** Execute environment
 4 ** Execute ssl:build
 5 rm -rf config/sites/
 6 mkdir config/sites
 7 Processing _.xlsuite.com
 8 rake aborted!
 9 undefined method `assigns' for #<Object:0x389a0>
10 /Users/francois/Documents/work/xlsuite-stable.svn/lib/tasks/ssl.rake:17

Yes, took me a while too. I was calling a method named assigns, not using the Hash named assigns.

Habit, when you take hold of me…

Using Cucumber for Writing Stories for Command-Line Applications

2009-01-18T13:19:56-05:00

I just started using Cucumber to write acceptance tests for a new command-line application I’m writing. I used the wonderful newgem to generate the basics for me.

Then I wrote my first stories:

features/command_line_client.feature

 1 Feature: Command Line Client
 2   In order to use Nestor
 3   A developer
 4   Wants an interface to the program
 5   So that he can use it
 6 
 7   Scenario: Getting Help
 8     When I start nestor with "--help"
 9     Then I should see "Usage: nestor [options]"
10 
11   Scenario: Getting the version number
12     When I start nestor with "--version"
13     Then I should find "nestor \d+\.\d+\.\d+"

After writing those, I ran them:

 1 ~/nestor (master) $ rake features
 2 (in /Users/francois/nestor)
 3 ...F
 4 
 5 
 6 Failed:
 7 
 8 1)
 9 <"nestor: version unknown\n"> expected to be =~
10 </nestor \d+\.\d+\.\d+/>.
11 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:48:in `assert_block'
12 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:500:in `_wrap_assertion'
13 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:46:in `assert_block'
14 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:229:in `assert_match'
15 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:495:in `_wrap_assertion'
16 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:221:in `assert_match'
17 ./features/step_definitions/assertions.rb:8:in `Then /^I should find "(.*)"$/'
18 features/command_line_client.feature:13:in `Then I should find "nestor \d+\.\d+\.\d+"'
19 rake aborted!
20 Command failed with status (1): [/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/...]
21 
22 (See full trace by running task with --trace)

Haha! So, Cucumber caught the fact that newgem didn’t set the new gem to return the version number immediately! Interesting.

Anyway, here are my step definitions, for the curious:

features/support/env.rb

1 require "test/unit"
2 
3 World do
4   include Test::Unit::Assertions
5 end

features/step_definitions/nestor.rb

1 When /^I start nestor with "(.*)"$/ do |args|
2   %x"#{NESTOR_APP_ROOT}/bin/nestor #{args} > #{NESTOR_LOG_ROOT}/nestor.log 2>&1"
3 end

features/step_definitions/assertions.rb

 1 Then /^I should see "(.*)"$/ do |data|
 2   stdout = File.read(File.join(NESTOR_LOG_ROOT, "nestor.log"))
 3   assert_match Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(data)), stdout
 4 end
 5 
 6 Then /^I should find "(.*)"$/ do |regexp|
 7   stdout = File.read(File.join(NESTOR_LOG_ROOT, "nestor.log"))
 8   assert_match Regexp.new(regexp), stdout
 9 end

Notice that I really run the nestor binary to assert against the gem’s STDOUT. Redirecting the output to a log file I can open and search in really makes things easier. I had a bit of difficulty wrapping my head around this idea (of starting the binary from Cucumber), so I hope that helps other people too.

I Seem to Have Broken My RubyGems?

2009-01-16T16:43:05-05:00

I really don’t know how I did this. I’d like to say it’s the Gremlins in the machine, but it must be some kind of human error.

 1 ~ $ gem --version
 2 1.2.0
 3 ~ $ gem env
 4 RubyGems Environment:
 5   - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.2.0
 6   - RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]
 7   - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
 8   - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby
 9   - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /usr/bin
10   - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
11     - ruby
12     - universal-darwin-9
13   - GEM PATHS:
14      - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
15      - /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
16   - GEM CONFIGURATION:
17      - :update_sources => true
18      - :verbose => true
19      - :benchmark => false
20      - :backtrace => false
21      - :bulk_threshold => 1000
22      - "install" => "--env-shebang"
23      - "update" => "--env-shebang"
24      - :sources => ["http://gems.rubyforge.org", "http://gems.github.com/"]
25   - REMOTE SOURCES:
26      - http://gems.rubyforge.org
27      - http://gems.github.com/
28 ~ $ sudo gem update --system
29 Password:
30 Updating RubyGems
31 Nothing to update
32 ~ $ rails newapp
33       create  
34       create  app/controllers
35       ...
36       create  log/test.log
37 ~ $ cd newapp/
38 ~/newapp $ script/generate model person
39 Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 (you have 1.2.0). Please `gem update --system` and try again.
40 
41 $ ls -d /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rubygems*
42 /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.2.0  /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.1
43 /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.0

What’s going on? Anybody has an idea? A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything interesting. Probably I’m not searching for the right thing.

Productivity Tip: A Simple Change to ~/.bash_profile

2009-01-12T10:16:12-05:00

I put everything I code into ~/Documents/work. Could be called projects, same thing. Anyway, everytime I opened Terminal, I would have to type cd Documents/work. Of course, with tab completion, it’s not so bad. I’m a bit stupid though, and it takes me eons before I added cd ~/Documents/work to the end of my ~/.bash_profile.

Whenever I open a Terminal, I’m really going to start doing something in this folder. Now, why didn’t I think of that earlier? Next: retrain myself to not cd anywhere when I open a new Terminal…

Here’s my full ~/.bash_profile:

~/.bash_profile

 1 #!/usr/bin/sh
 2 
 3 # Installed by Git OSX Installer from
 4 # http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/
 5 export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
 6 export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant
 7 export JRUBY_HOME=~/Library/Java/JRuby/current
 8 export MYSQL_PATH=/usr/local/mysql
 9 export PATH=~/bin:/opt/local/sphinx/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:$MYSQL_PATH/bin:$PATH:$JRUBY_HOME/bin
10 export MANPATH=/usr/local/git/man:$MANPATH
11 export EDITOR=vim
12 
13 # And this is from:
14 # http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/
15 export PS1='\w$(git branch &>/dev/null; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo " (\[\033[00m\]$(git branch | grep ^*|sed s/\*\ //))"; fi) \$\[\033[00m\] '
16 
17 export VISUALWORKS=~/Applications/vw7.6nc
18 export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID= # your AWS access key, for cliaws gem
19 export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= # your AWS secret access key, for cliaws gem again
20 
21 # http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060502160527780&query=terminal%2Btitle
22 function settitle() { echo -ne "\e]2;$@\a\e]1;$@\a"; }
23 
24 if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
25   source ~/.bash_aliases
26 fi
27 
28 cd ~/Documents/work

MySQL's MEMORY Engine Barely Faster than InnoDB's?

2008-12-12T08:04:23-05:00

Yesterday, I read Brian Cardarella‘s post entitled Brian Cardarella’s post entitled A case against Mocking and Stubbing. In the article, Brian says:

SQLite3 can be an in-memory database. Problem solved, right? Not quite. SQLite3 is pretty limited. Most people are probably using MySQL and rely upon many of the SQL functions that are included.

What would be nice (and well beyond my ability) is to have a Gem that simulated the database you use, only it is in-memory. Optimized for small data sets. No need to go through a heavy hashing algorithm. Keep it light. Keep it fast.

Brian Cardarella in A case against Mocking and Stubbing

MySQL already has the MEMORY storage engine, and I wanted to see if that would help for testing purposes. Since we’re staying in MySQL-land, this should have been a simple matter.

First, the good news. I had to change only a couple of lines:

 1 diff --git a/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb b/vendor/rails/activerecor
 2 index 1e452ae..c207080 100644
 3 --- a/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb
 4 +++ b/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb
 5 @@ -442,7 +442,13 @@ module ActiveRecord
 6        end
 7  
 8        def create_table(table_name, options = {}) #:nodoc:
 9 -        super(table_name, options.reverse_merge(:options => "ENGINE=InnoDB"))
10 +        engine = case Rails.env
11 +        when "test"
12 +          "MEMORY"
13 +        else
14 +          "InnoDB"
15 +        end
16 +        super(table_name, options.reverse_merge(:options => "ENGINE=#{engine}"))
17        end
18  
19        def rename_table(table_name, new_name)
20 diff --git a/vendor/rails/railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake b/vendor/rails/railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake
21 index 5cb27f1..c520d4a 100644
22 --- a/vendor/rails/railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake
23 +++ b/vendor/rails/railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake
24 @@ -368,9 +368,9 @@ namespace :db do
25  
26      desc 'Check for pending migrations and load the test schema'
27      task :prepare => 'db:abort_if_pending_migrations' do
28 -      if defined?(ActiveRecord) && !ActiveRecord::Base.configurations.blank?
29 -        Rake::Task[{ :sql  => "db:test:clone_structure", :ruby => "db:test:load" }[ActiveRecord::Base.schema_format]].i
30 -      end
31 +      # if defined?(ActiveRecord) && !ActiveRecord::Base.configurations.blank?
32 +      #   Rake::Task[{ :sql  => "db:test:clone_structure", :ruby => "db:test:load" }[ActiveRecord::Base.schema_format]]
33 +      # end
34      end
35    end
36

Great, but there’s little benefit. First, a regular run (InnoDB):

 1 $ time rake
 2 (in /Users/francois/Documents/work/fasttest)
 3 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/unit/password_reset_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/person_test.rb" 
 4 Loaded suite /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
 5 Started
 6 ............................
 7 Finished in 0.520087 seconds.
 8 
 9 28 tests, 33 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
10 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/functional/accounts_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/password_resets_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/people_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/sessions_controller_test.rb" 
11 [DEPRECATION] should_be_restful is deprecated.  Please see http://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807/tickets/78 for more information.
12 [DEPRECATION] should_be_restful is deprecated.  Please see http://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807/tickets/78 for more information.
13 Loaded suite /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
14 Started
15 .....................................................
16 Finished in 1.828175 seconds.
17 
18 53 tests, 72 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
19 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb"  
20 
21 real  0m10.365s
22 user  0m6.582s
23 sys  0m1.925s

Next, a run with the MEMORY engine:

 1 $ time rake
 2 (in /Users/francois/Documents/work/fasttest)
 3 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/unit/password_reset_mailer_test.rb" "test/unit/person_test.rb" 
 4 Loaded suite /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
 5 Started
 6 ............................
 7 Finished in 0.602607 seconds.
 8 
 9 28 tests, 33 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
10 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/functional/accounts_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/password_resets_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/people_controller_test.rb" "test/functional/sessions_controller_test.rb" 
11 [DEPRECATION] should_be_restful is deprecated.  Please see http://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807/tickets/78 for more information.
12 [DEPRECATION] should_be_restful is deprecated.  Please see http://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5807/tickets/78 for more information.
13 Loaded suite /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
14 Started
15 .....................................................
16 Finished in 1.132142 seconds.
17 
18 53 tests, 72 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
19 /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby -Ilib:test "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb"  
20 
21 real  0m9.111s
22 user  0m6.862s
23 sys  0m1.870s

Note that in test/test_helper.rb, I had to disable transactional fixtures. This would account for a lot the lost time difference.

If you want to play with this further, the sample application’s code is available at http://github.com/francois/fasttest

I would be interested in seeing other people’s runs, to know if it’s just my machine that runs at essentially the same speed.

How to Use AlterEgo With ActiveRecord

2008-12-09T09:52:17-05:00

I stumbled on AlterEgo last week, after Avdi announced it. This library implements the state pattern for any object, not just ActiveRecord models, which acts_as_state_machine (and it’s successor, aasm) do.

But, many people, myself included, want to use AlterEgo in the context of ActiveRecord models. Fortunately, AlterEgo provides us with all the necessary plumbing to do that very easily.

I will reuse Avdi’s traffic light example from the specifications. Avdi already points us to 90% of the solution in his example:

 1 class TrafficLightWithCustomStorage
 2   def state
 3     gyr = [
 4       @hardware_controller.green,
 5       @hardware_controller.yellow,
 6       @hardware_controller.red
 7     ]
 8 
 9     case gyr
10     when [true, false, false] then :proceed
11     when [false, true, false] then :caution
12     when [false, false, true] then :stop
13     else raise "Invalid state!"
14     end
15   end
16 
17   def state=(value)
18     gyr = case value
19           when :proceed  then [true, false, false]
20           when :caution  then [false, true, false]
21           when :stop     then [false, false, true]
22           end
23     @hardware_controller.green  = gyr[0]
24     @hardware_controller.yellow = gyr[1]
25     @hardware_controller.red    = gyr[2]
26   end
27 end

When an object implements #state and #state=, AlterEgo will serialize it’s state using these two methods. Let’s hook this to ActiveRecord (note, I changed the code for a quick example, so it’s not exactly the same, but very similar):

app/models/traffic_light.rb

 1 class TrafficLight < ActiveRecord::Base
 2   def state
 3     case read_attribute(:color)
 4     when "green";   :proceed
 5     when "yellow";  :caution
 6     when "red";     :stop
 7     else;           raise "Invalid color: #{read_attribute(:color).inspect}"
 8     end
 9   end
10 
11   def state=(value)
12     color_value = case value
13     when :proceed;  "green"
14     when :caution;  "yellow"
15     when :stop;     "red"
16     else;           raise "Don't know how to convert #{value.inspect} to color value"
17     end
18     write_attribute(:color, color_value)
19   end
20 end

The most important thing you should check is that your database model has a valid state on model instantiation. Whether you do it using the :default key in your migration or some other way is irrelevant, but the value has to be provided, or the #state method will barf (or implement default processing there?) In the example app, I opted to use a default value:

db/migrate/20081209150159_create_traffic_lights.rb

 1 class CreateTrafficLights < ActiveRecord::Migration
 2   def self.up
 3     create_table :traffic_lights do |t|
 4       t.string :color, :default => "red"
 5     end
 6   end
 7 
 8   def self.down
 9     drop_table :traffic_lights
10   end
11 end

You may check the full code in action in the GitHub repository: alter_ego_plus_active_record

A Simple LinkedList Implementation in Ruby

2008-11-11T14:40:31-05:00

Being bored out of my mind on Monday night, and not having anything interesting to watch on TV, I decided I’d try my hand at implementing a linked list in Ruby. For the impatient:

1 $ sudo gem install linked_list

Unfortunately, performance is very poor:

Building a list of 1 million random strings
Took 4.389 seconds
Converting to an array
Took 1.686 seconds
                      user     system      total        real
list#push/pop     0.350000   0.000000   0.350000 (  0.364001)
array#push/pop    0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.009894)
                      user     system      total        real
list#last         0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000027)
array#last        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000012)
                      user     system      total        real
list#first        0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.001188)
array#first       0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000449)
                      user     system      total        real
list#reverse      7.540000   0.170000   7.710000 (  7.806306)
array#reverse     0.010000   0.010000   0.020000 (  0.008443)
                      user     system      total        real
list#dup         23.080000   0.380000  23.460000 ( 24.039316)
array#dup         0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000017)

NOTE: #dup is implemented as self.reverse.reverse, which is pretty inefficient, I know. Thanks for asking.

I probably have implementation issues, but I expected #push and #pop to be as fast as the Array implementation. Anyway, if anyone’s interested, there’s a GitHub repository.

FAIL: Can't Migrate Because Pending Migrations..

2008-11-02T21:06:55-05:00

How’s that for being helpful?

 1 $ rake db:migrate --trace
 2 (in /Users/francois/Documents/work/family_budget)
 3 ** Invoke db:test:prepare (first_time)
 4 ** Invoke environment (first_time)
 5 ** Execute environment
 6 ** Invoke db:abort_if_pending_migrations (first_time)
 7 ** Invoke environment 
 8 ** Execute db:abort_if_pending_migrations
 9 You have 13 pending migrations:
10      1 CreateFamilies
11      2 CreatePeople
12      3 CreateAccounts
13      4 CreateTransfers
14      5 CreateTransferMembers
15      6 AddFamilyToPeople
16      7 DestroyTransferMember
17      8 AddDebitAccountIdCreditAccountIdAndAmountToTransfers
18      9 CreateBudgets
19     10 AddAdminFlagToPerson
20     11 DefaultBudgetAmountToZeroFromNull
21   20081103020010 CreateTransactions
22   20081103020142 CreateBankAccounts
23 Run "rake db:migrate" to update your database then try again.

Hmm, I’m trying to run migrations, stupid…

I finally traced the problem (using git bisect !) to this:

lib/tasks/cucumber.rake

 1 $:.unshift(RAILS_ROOT + '/vendor/plugins/cucumber/lib')
 2 require 'cucumber/rake/task'
 3 
 4 namespace :test do
 5   desc "Runs the Cucumber features tests (integration tests)"
 6   Cucumber::Rake::Task.new(:features) do |t|
 7     ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = RAILS_ENV = "test"
 8     Rake::Task["db:test:prepare"].invoke
 9     Rake::Task["db:fixtures:load"].invoke
10     t.cucumber_opts = "--format pretty"
11   end
12 end

Can you spot the error? The problem originates with setting RAILS_ENV in this code block. But isn’t the block supposed to be executed later? When the block is #call’ed? Very strange. At the moment, I simply commented out the line, but that’s going to bite me in a couple moments when I’m ready to test my features again… Oh joy of debugging!

Why no #should_allow_attributes?

2008-11-01T22:33:19-04:00

Thoughtbot’s Shoulda is a very nice piece of work. Their ActiveRecord macros are also a god-send:

1 should_protect_attributes :family_id, :debit_account_id, :credit_account_id, :created_at, :updated_at

This code will assert that ActiveRecord attributes are somehow protected (either though attr_accessible or attr_protected). But what about the reverse? There isn’t a macro to do that. I happened to need it, so I implemented it on my own fork of Shoulda.

This allows us to specify:

1 should_protect_attributes :family_id, :debit_account_id, :credit_account_id, :created_at, :updated_at
2 should_allow_attributes :family, :debit_account, :credit_account, :amount, :posted_on, :description

NOTE: Example taken from my family budget application.

We Are Winners!

2008-11-01T21:50:32-04:00

WOW Initially, What Does this Error Mean? had a pretty strong presence in the top leaderboard. As the days went on, we slipped further and further down the scale. We hovered between 10th and 15th on the general leaderboard.

I knew we could sort by different criterias, and I occasionaly looked at the leaderboard by other criterias, but I can’t remember at what ranks we were.

In the end, we won Most Useful. That is a very good thing for us.

Again, congratulations to all teams that participated, and I’m hoping to see another repeat for 2009.

Evolution of a Home Page: What Does This Error Mean?

2008-10-23T19:58:19-04:00

To celebrate the start of voting for the RailsRumble 2008 competition, I thought I’d make a new video. Thank god for version control! This allowed me to go back in time, all the way to the initial checkin, and take a snapshot of each evolution of our design.

It was a very iterative process. I did a couple of things in the bus from Sherbrooke to Montreal, then James picked up from there. The ugly green and red is mine, the nice white, orange and greys are his.

I hope you enjoy this show!

Evolution of a home page: What Does this Error Mean? from François Beausoleil on Vimeo.

If you prefer the high-quality video: evolution-of-a-home-page—what-does-this-error-mean.mov (15 Mb, QuickTime 4)

Future creep? We simply had to Stay Focused

2008-10-20T12:24:39-04:00

During the RailsRumble, we really had to guard against future creep. Jamis summarized it well in Beware of future creep

First, never implement more than you need to. That sounds harsh, in a grasshopper-and-the-ant kind of way, except it really isn’t. It isn’t a mandate to slack off, it’s a command to do what you know. Implement the feature you’re working on, not the feature you hope will land someday. Keep it simple, keep it minimal, and keep it real.

Jamis in Beware of future creep

While pairing with Daniel, it happened to us a couple of times when he or I would say “What does our story say already? Oh, let’s add a story for later”. That was really the essence of the competition. Delay anything (features, infrastructure, what have you) that could be delayed.

We’re really excited about What Does this Error Mean? and the way it panned out. Happy voting !

Don't Write Tests? Are You Crazy?

2008-10-19T23:46:37-04:00

Reading up on RailsRumble, I found Raymond Law’s RailsRumble 2008 post-mortem.

Raymond writes:

Forget about writing tests – Look, I am in support of agile and test-driven development, with one exception. That is, you are not participating in RailsRumble. There’s just no time for it. If you are a good enough programmer, you can build a small application with no tests. If you can’t, I don’t want to work with you. Writing tests for a new application starting from scratch in just 48 hours is simple not feasible. No bargain!

Raymond Law in RailsRumble 2008

Sorry Raymond, but that is plain crazy. We took the time to write tests, and it gave us confidence. We even ended up with a 1:1.9 ratio of code to test. I do believe in agile (like you do), and I was really happy for those tests. Especially as we got more and more tired, the tests were a safety vest that kept us afloat while time was running out.

No ticketing system like Unfuddle and Lighthouse – One team member had tried to use Unfuddle to create tickets to get ourselves more organized. While it was a sincere attempt, it simply didn’t work. There’s no time to accept a ticket, create a new ticket, … We pretty much abandoned it soon after we started.

Raymond Law in RailsRumble 2008

We used Pivotal Tracker to organize our stories. As Raymond said, he didn’t have a lot of time to plan ahead of the competition. We got together 10 days prior to the competition and we used Pivotal Tracker to remember a lot of things for us. Accepting a story was as simple as clicking Start. I think having the stories spelled out gave us another safety vest by keeping us focused and on track.

Before the rumble, I didn’t know about Pivotal Tracker, but now that I do, I’ll be sure to use it more and more. It was a very low ceremony way to remember things. Even while coding the tests for a story, if we uncovered a missing requirement, we just Apple-Tab’d to Pivotal Tracker, added the story, Apple-Tab’d back and went on.

Hope you had a great weekend!

Fixture Validations in Using Shoulda

2008-10-19T22:08:47-04:00

I was working on my family budget application and wanted to validate existing fixtures. I wrote the following:

test/shoulda_macros/validation_macros.rb

 1 module ValidationMacros
 2   def self.included(base)
 3     base.send :extend, ClassMethods
 4   end
 5 
 6   module ClassMethods
 7     def should_have_valid_fixtures(klass=self)
 8       should "have all valid fixtures" do
 9         klass.name.sub("Test", "").constantize.all.each do |object|
10           assert object.valid?, "Fixture #{object.inspect} is invalid"
11         end
12       end
13     end
14   end
15 end
16 
17 Test::Unit::TestCase.send :include, ValidationMacros
18 
19 # Usage Example
20 class AccountTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
21   should_have_valid_fixtures
22 end
23 
24 class StrangeNameTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
25   # Pass the ActiveRecord (or anything that respond_to?(:valid?)
26   # and respond_to?(:all)) class to validate against.
27   should_have_valid_fixtures Account
28 end

This might be interesting if you use fixtures.

RailsRumble 2008: Done & Deployed!

2008-10-19T20:40:27-04:00

Well, those were an interesting 48 hours. We built and deployed What Does this Error Mean? within the time constraints that were imposed by the rules.

What is What Does this Error Mean? ? It’s a way to search for errors and solutions, but without Google’s page ranking algorithm being in the way. You want to know what it looks like?

Click for larger version

The concept behind What Does this Error Mean? is simple: you receive some obscure error message you don’t understand. You copy it, go to What Does this Error Mean?, paste and then click “Find me some help!”. If we find similar error messages in the system from previous posters, we’ll present you with ranked solutions. If we don’t find a solution, we allow you to follow the error so you get notified of new solutions on your error.

To help us poor developers, Team GiraffeSoft even took the time to create two plugins: What Does this Error Mean? Rails Edition and What Does this Error Mean? Merb Edition (both plugins have only been tested on the latest released branch). Install the plugins, and suddenly your development error page becomes a direct link to What Does this Error Mean?.

To top it all off, James made a screencast for your viewing pleasure: wdtem_screencast.mov (QuickTime MP4, 75 Mb, 3 minutes).

If you like our idea, but most of all it’s implementation, vote for us. We will be very thankful.

Things that worked

So, what worked about this competition? Well…

Being in the same physical location helped, a lot. This meant we could bounce ideas off each other very quickly;
Pair programming;
Unit testing (we used Shoulda and Test::Unit);

These are so self-evident, I don’t know why people don’t do that all the time. The RailsRumble team encouraged us to do unit testing, and I pity anyone who didn’t do that. We’re confident that our application is pretty solid, given the amount of tests we have versus the simplicity of the application:

 1 $ rake stats
 2 (in /Users/francois/Documents/work/team-giraffesoft)
 3 +----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
 4 | Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
 5 +----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
 6 | Controllers          |   278 |   223 |       8 |      25 |   3 |     6 |
 7 | Helpers              |   153 |    85 |       0 |      12 |   0 |     5 |
 8 | Models               |   241 |   188 |       7 |      31 |   4 |     4 |
 9 | Libraries            |   251 |   136 |       1 |      28 |  28 |     2 |
10 | Functional tests     |   730 |   588 |      11 |      13 |   1 |    43 |
11 | Unit tests           |   767 |   622 |       7 |       2 |   0 |   309 |
12 +----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
13 | Total                |  2420 |  1842 |      34 |     111 |   3 |    14 |
14 +----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
15   Code LOC: 632     Test LOC: 1210     Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.9

I kept an eye out on our statistics during the competition, and our code to test ratio steadily climbed. At the end of Saturday, we were at 1.2 / 1.3, and now 1.9? Wow, hadn’t really realized that.

Things that didn’t work

While pairing with Daniel, we were stumped a couple of times. One of the most stressful ones was when we were trying to set properties on Person, and they wouldn’t be set. We were really stumped, and just stumbled upon for nearly 20 minutes. You know what? The error was that Person had an attr_accessible declaration. Once we realized that, our test passed immediately. Daniel said he’d write a plugin so that assigning to a protected attribute in test mode would raise an exception. This will be a welcome relief!
Realizing Sunday morning that 1.5 hours of work from Saturday was a bad design decision. Initially, we would put a 10 year cookie in your browsers. Then James realized that this had security implications. We were going to use the cookies to remember what errors and solutions you had posted so that if you ever came back and finally logged on or signed up we could just associate the anonymous postings to your person record. So, 1.5 hours down the drain… We eventually replaced that with some values saved in the session.

Thank you to the RailsRumble organizers for putting up this event for the second year in a row. I count myself very lucky to have participated in this competition with such talented coders as Daniel and James.

And good luck everyone on your own applications. May the best one win!

BTW, if you’re wondering, we only built 17 story points on Sunday. Bug fixing, you know…

Team GiraffeSoft Built 28 Story Points in a Day

2008-10-18T19:52:46-04:00

We used Pivotal Tracker to track our stories to build. Initially, I thought we’d do maybe 15 points in a day. Looks like I was really, really, wrong:

We delivered 28 story points in a single day. Team GiraffeSoft really rocks!

RailsRumble Started: OpenID FAIL

2008-10-17T23:27:07-04:00

Well, the competition is started, but I can’t access my account. I use Technorati as my OpenID provider, but Technorati won’t let me grant RailsRumble permission to read my profile.

Yee ha! The wonders of OpenID! But the saddest fact is that I did authorized RailsRumble at Technorati at least once, since I could sign in and register.

Who said OpenID solved all problems? If I had an account at RailsRumble, this wouldn’t be a problem…

Anyway, that won’t prevent me from kickin’ asses!