If somebody asked me if I used transactions much in MySQL, I would probably have said no… however, now that I don’t have them I realise just how much I used them. Things that just work when using ActiveRecord such as creating a record and ensuring that an associated record gets created is sooo much harder.

MongoDB has “Atomic Operations” which means if you have an embedded relationship, all is good and the database will be rolled back if the entire document does not save. As soon as you have two top level collections and need to ensure that a record is created in both, things get a little hairy.

There seems to be a great deal of “if you need transactions just use a RDBMS” talk but what if you need a flexible schema and transactions, the last thing you want to manage is some kind of EAV system like Magento.

I’ve created a thread on the Mongo User forum with a typical example so feel free to join in the discussion. I’d love to hear experienced Mongo user’s views on how to overcome these kinds of situations and what kind of applications people are running with MongoDB.

Below are a couple of bash functions I have in my “.profile” file to make this easier:

function tabname {
  printf "\e]1;$1\a"
}
 
function winname {
  printf "\e]2;$1\a"
}

Now you can easily name your tabs or windows with the following:

# Rename tab
tabname "Funky Tab"
 
# Rename window
winname "Funky Window"

Thanks to Bubu and Chris Page on the SuperUser site for the right codes.

If you’ve not tried it yet, head over to the Pow website and get it installed with:

curl get.pow.cx | sh

Happy new year everyone!

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/TextMate.pid

Hope this safes someone some puzzled frowning time.

Dennis Reimann has posted a nice alternative here using Capybara… thanks Dennis.

First add the other guy’s repository to your list of remotes:

cd my-fork
git remote add other-guy https://github.com/other-guy/other-guys-repo.git

If you were to then list your remotes, you would have something like:

origin
other-guy

Now it’s just a case of pulling from the relevant branch on their repo, in this case ‘master’:

git pull other-guy master

Hope that saves someone some time.

(function() {
  var MyLib = (typeof exports !== 'undefined') ? exports : this.MyLib = {};
 
  // MyLib.myFunction = ...
}());

Now in NodeJS you can do:

var MyLib = require('./mylib.js');

This also passes JS Lint using the following:

/*jslint */
/*global exports */
(function () {
    "use strict";
    var MyLib = (typeof exports !== 'undefined') ? exports : this.MyLib = {};
 
    MyLib.foo = 'bar';
}());

At what point in the lifecycle of a commercial project is it a good idea to Open Source?

Take Shopify for instance, they open sourced their payment integration code early on in the form of ActiveMerchant. This was undoubtably a wise move, as they benefitted from an entire Ruby community testing their code in the wild and contributing back in the form of new payment gateways.

I don’t know exactly when it was in the development of Shopify that ActiveMerchant was released but at what point are you open sourcing your competitive advantage. Don’t get me wrong, I love open source, I am just trying to determine when is a good time to open source and when are you just giving away your competitive advantage. For instance, if ActiveMerchant had been released 2 years before the release of Shopify, anyone could have used it in the development of a Shopify’esque product… but would anyone have even thought of using it in that way? Who knows?

Bite sized chunks

I feel it is a good idea to open source little and often. Obviously if Shopify had open sourced their entire shopping cart, subscription code and templating solution as a whole, you would have seen Shopify’s popping up all over the interweb and their business would likely have suffered. Instead they opted to open source their payment gateway code (ActiveMerchant) and templating library (Liquid) separately as self-contained projects.

A key ingredient

There comes a point when you simply should not open source certain code, this is when it contains the key ingredient to a commercial project. Do you think Coca-Cola would have been as big as they are today if they had released the complete recipe, including the key ingredient for their revolutionary new black fizzy pop? It’s all about the byproduct, for example if Coca-Cola had released the secret to their new screw on lid (I’m sure they didn’t invent screw on lids but bear with me), they would have got their name out there through recognition of their fancy lid, the pop community may have helped refine it’s design and coke may have stayed fizzy for longer… that’s one hell of a contrived example but hopefully you get my point. It doesn’t matter that every other pop out there will also stay fizzy longer, they’re not Coke.

I’d love to hear peoples examples of commercial projects where code has been open sourced. What result did it have on the project? Was it worthwhile or did it have a detrimental effect on your business?

git add .
git add -u
git status

The first line adds any new or modified file contents to the Git index and the second uses the “update” flag which marks any deleted files as deleted in the Git index. I then proceed with a commit and all my changes are committed.

I find myself repeating this before every commit and so had a browse of the documentation to see if there was a simpler way. I found the “-A” or “–all” flag which I had never noticed before (is this new?). Now my commits are usually a two step process:

git add -A
git commit -m "Committing all changed and deleted files"

Hope someone finds this useful.

IQ::Color is a really simple Gem for converting colour values to and from CSS(3) notation, this is used by a couple of our larger Gems but I can see it being of use on it’s own. A simple example:

color1 = IQ::Color.RGB.new(127, 127, 255)
color1.to_css #=> "#7f7fff"
 
color2 = IQ::Color.from_css('rgba(127,127,255,0.4)')
color2.red    #=> 127
color2.green  #=> 127
color2.blue   #=> 255
color2.alpha  #=> 0.4
color2.to_css #=> "rgba(127,127,255,0.4)"

More examples can be found on GitHub.