Trying to get a windows rails environment going this morning I stumbled upon something interesting – all ‘a’ characters were missing from cucumber and rspec output.

This has something to do with UTF-8 encoding and there’s a ticket and wiki post on cucumber about it, but no solution that I found acceptable.

Everything comes down to having change encoding in the current cmd window. This is achieved via a simple call to chcp 1252, but nobody want’s to do this every time, right?

To get this executed automaticaly and without resorting to serious registry editing, simply add this line to your cucmber.bat and any other batch files that are exhibiting this problem. You can find cucumber.bat in your /ruby/bin folder.

Here’s what it looks like:

chcp 1252
@ECHO OFF
IF NOT "%~f0" == "~f0" GOTO :WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "c:/ruby/bin/cucumber" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
GOTO :EOF
:WinNT
@"ruby.exe" "%~dpn0" %*

Here’s a quick 3rdRail overview in screenshots (flickr required).

CodeGear released 3rdRail this morning. A few highlights:

• Full Rails project support.
• Rails specific refactoring, ie renaming a method in a controller will update all references as well as link_to and rename the associated view file.
• Console with command completion.
• Integrated Gecko browser with request monitor, DOM source, CSS and JavaScript

You can watch a screen cast here and download a trial for Windows, Unix and OSX here.

Here’s a quick 3rdRail overview in screenshots (flickr required).

THE PROBLEM

So, what is the problem? It’s the fact that classes aren’t cached in development and that Rails insists on flushing them at the end of every request resulting in large chunks of your apps code having to be loaded, parsed, and reinterpreted for EVERY SINGLE request… which is SLOW.

THE IDEA

Why don’t we only reload the files when they have actually changed? Store the file names and their last modified time and then stat all the files before every request… if any are newer, kill the objects they originally defined and let the Dependency auto-loading code reload the objects from disk.

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/dev_mode_performance_fixes/

Here’s what you need:

1. Facebook account
2. Local box with Apache
3. Domain name pointing to your home IP. I use No-Ip.

Here are the steps I took.

1. Setting up development application on Facebook. Follow the guide, it’s pretty straight forward.
2. Set up No-Ip to point *.dev.mydomain.com to my local box. This allows me to create as many Rails applications as I need to.
3. Configured Apache to forward all calls to fbtest.dev.mydomain.com to localhost:3000 using mod_proxy like so:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName fbtest.dev.mydomain.com
     ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
   </VirtualHost>

4. gem install rfacebook
5. cd /anywhere/fbtest
6. rails .
7. ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rfacebook/plugins/rfacebook_on_rails
8. rake facebook:setup
9. Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
10. Copy and paste API key and secret to config/facebook.yml. Set canvas_path to the local path on Facebook, ie /myfacebookapp/ and callback_path to local path on your server, ie /facebook/.
11. ruby script/generate controller facebook index
12. Edit index method in Facebook controller, like so:

    class FacebookController < ApplicationController
      def index
        @result = fbsession.friends_get.uid_list
      end
    end

13. Edit index.rhtml like so:

    <% @result.each do |uid| %>
      <fb:name uid="<%= uid %>" />
    <% end %>

14. Start Apache
15. ruby script/server
16. Now you should be able to hit your Facebook application page at http://apps.facebook.com/myfacebookapp

You should see a list of your friends. Took me about 30 minutes to figure all this out.

require 'taggable'

Now you can use acts_as_taggable without any warnings. While this may seem obvious to many here, I hope it prevents the waste of a couple hours to a few other newbies thus my post.

Source. Definitely saved me time.

Model.find_by_sql("SELECT *, COUNT(*) AS rank FROM ...").each do |item|
  puts "%s (%d)" % [item.name, item.rank]
end

What I need is ability to specify associations by a column other than a primary key. For example:

create_table :nodes do |t|
  t.column :parent_id,        :integer
  t.column :uid,              :string,    :limit => 32
end

create_table :info do |t|
  t.column :uid,         :string, :limit => 32
  t.column :formatted,   :text
end

class Node < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_tree
  has_many :info, :foreign_key => :uid, :primary_key => :uid
end

class Info < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :node, :foreign_key => :uid, :primary_key => :uid
end

As you can see, I’ve used a made up :primary_key option to indicate which key column should be used. set_primary_key isn’t a good option here because UID column is for lose association and it isn’t a primary key.

Is this at all possible in Rails 1.2.3? Unfortunately my Rails core knowledge is very limited at this point and I wouldn’t be able to add this feature myself.

Not only it’s not the fastest dog on the block, especially the backend, they consistently kept shutting down Noobkit 5-8 times a day.

Mediatemple allocates 64MB of RAM for a Mongrel instance, which is fine. If your app goes over, they just shut Mongrel down, automatically… without restarting it. So I’m getting an SMS from Pingdom at 3AM telling me that the site is down and I have to go “cap restart” it.

Noobkit is a very small site currently and only been up and running for just over 10 days with barely 200 uniques a day. There’s absolutely no way Mongrel can tip over 64MB with this type of load. I tried running a production Mogrel locally and pound it with Apache’s AB. After 10,000 hits I’m seeing 45MB of RAM.

Response from Mediatemple to my question about frequent Mongrel shutdowns was as expected:

After reviewing our records, I was able to confirm that it has been shutting down repeatedly. However, testing it live versus on another system will not necessarily be an accurate estimate. You will either need to debug your application, or increase your container to another a larger server.

So yesterday I found a no-registration coupon and got myself an account at DreamHost. Moving the blog was a peace of cake. Setting up Capistrano was pretty easy as well and the DNS should be updated overnight.

At first, DreamHost seems much snappier. We’ll see how it works out.

After writing and making my user registration all pretty for Noobkit, I realized today, about 12 hours after release, that it would’ve been much easier and better if were to just use Open ID.

Having looked around for a decent acts_as_open_id_user_and_does_everything_else plugin, the only thing I found was this shameful attempt by none other than the DHH himself.

I don’t know if he was high when he submitted it because it’s just horrible. Never mind the fact that it doesn’t run at all and code has syntax errors. Methods that are called just once, strange object/result/message bubbling and integration with user models which are never mentioned anywhere except on the error pages. Worst of all, it actually extends ApplicationController. Do I really need Open ID authentication methods in every single controller? Where’s all the prettiness and tidiness?

Well, I brought my own bag of said “prettiness and tidiness”. The result is my own open_id_authentication plugin. I’ve cleaned up the code, made it a regular module to be included in a model and split up spaghetti dual purpose method into two simple methods. One to be called to start Open ID authentication process and the second one to process response from the Open ID server.

Next time, when I learn how to create generators in plugins I will add some nice model generation. For now, it’s completely decoupled from the user model.

Enjoy!