http://unixmonkey.net creative engineering and technological abuse Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:03:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been crawling over this Rails project and lately finding lots of places where clarity could be increased by using symbol_to_proc, so I thought I would share it a bit for those not in the know on this handy ruby shortcut. Rails added symbol_to_proc shorthand in version 1.1, and it is ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=35 I ran into an interesting issue today where a client viewing my Rails site would go to a link; and instead of seeing the html view rendered, it was skipping right to an alternate format in the respond_to block. Clicking a link going to /orders, was instead taking them to /orders.xls, ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=33 For some complex searches, I find myself needing to build a query with some optional conditions that may or may not exist based on search terms. I could concatenate an SQL string, but when we are dealing with user-supplied input, we need to parameterize the sql query with question ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=31 I've been playing around with Shoes (shoooes.net) lately as a way to put a cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) on some of my small purpose-built command-line ruby scripts. I find that it is quite easy to get started with, and lends a lot of flexibility to the way your program is ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=27 I've got some data in an excel file that I need to put in the database and its far too much to do by hand, what will I do? Lets throw some ruby at the problem! First, excel it too darn complicated and proprietary a format to even mess with unless you ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=23 Sure, I haven't even turned it on in more than 5 years, and I certainly didn't use it very much back then either. Its been sitting in the bottom of the storage closet doing no one any good, yet it pains me just a bit to let it go. Not ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=22 The web is a generally free and open place for all types of communication, but if you put your email address on 1 website, you can expect an email-harvesting robot spider to find that address and send it to its spammer overlords. Once on a spammer's list, you can expect to ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=20 If you've ever wanted to keep track of revisions to document files or images in your Rails app, you are likely to want to use Acts_as_versioned, which is the authority on versioning database records, and Attachment_fu, which is the authority on uploading files with Rails. The problem is that they don't ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=18 Autotest is part of the ZenTest suite for testing ruby and rails apps. Instead of running 'rake test' every time you want to run your tests, simply open another tab in your terminal, browse to your rails project directory and run 'autotest'. It will run your test suite and ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=15 We all know mongrel is the bees knees when it comes to serving Rails or Merb apps, even if its creator had a meltdown. But there is a new kid on the block named thin that claims to run Rails apps almost twice as fast as mongrel. Check the graph. A simple ... http://unixmonkey.net/?p=13