http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech rails, rubies, and sometimes dolphins Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:58:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Most rails applications have many additional moving parts of which the health cannot be assessed with simply pinging the (hopefully page cached) homepage For example, Is Email is sent successfully? Is the SMS gateway alive and you bought sufficient credits? All database connections are alive? Backgroundrb down again? The cloud computing setup jacked the imagemagick? ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/599/health-monitor/ Download  crying databases from Aloha Rails Conf. http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/567/hey-is-that-you-database-crying/ My snowboard is jealous. I am going to Hawaii to ride surfboards, dive with sharks, jump off cliffs and present Hey.... is that your database crying? at the alohaonrails conference. There are some really great talks lined up about Map Reduce/Pig/Hadoop, Rails 3 and general ruby shoving. And seriously, who ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/541/hey-is-that-your-surfboard-crying/ [caption id="attachment_555" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Delicatable treats for the rubies."][/caption] Been a long time. shouldn't of left ya without a dope plugin to step to. meh. But for reals, I've been working way too much. Here's a tasty sampler of some new and revived github projects: ActiveRecord Dumper Asset Tag Extensions Ruby Prof Request Filters Google ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/545/delectable-plugin-treats-for-the-ruby-shovers/ I've gotten a little tired of failing rake tasks that don't give me enough diagnostic information with just the --trace option. Here's a little snippet to redirect the ActiveRecord (and SQL in debug mode) output to stdout. Then pipe it into a file for safe keeping. rake mytask LOG=DEBUG > mytask.out def ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/538/logging-with-rake/ If you write plugins or code to enhance ActiveRecord functionality, its a really good idea to run the ActiveRecord core test suite with your cool additions loaded. After working on ar-extensions, I liked the idea of running the core tests along with the plugin specific tests.  However, I soon grew ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/507/ar_test_runner-run-activerecord-unit-tests-with-your-code/ [caption id="attachment_492" align="alignright" width="210" caption="OMG Unicorns at RailsConf!"][/caption] The over all theme of this years RailsConf was: UNICORNS (click me!) I mean, yeah Rails 3 is rad, racks and clouds are great and we are scaling better now, but now with the power of OMG UNICORNS! The Phusion guys even made ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/483/railsconf-powered-by-unicorns/ RailsConf2009 Integrating SMS with your Rails App View more presentations from Blythe Dunham. Some ppt slides for you. Slide share soon to come. SMS On Rails rdoc script/plugin install git://github.com/blythedunham/smsonrails At the end of the snowgiraffe SMS show, I demoed the sms on rails engine plugin. I'll build it into a gem soon, but by ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/475/railsconf-2009-integrating-sms-with-your-rails-application/ [caption id="attachment_468" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Join the club! Rails Devs for Data Integrity"][/caption] I am a Rails Developer and I believe in data integrity. There I said it! And look, there are lots of people in the club. Jer on Rails had an awesome post in support for foreign keys a while ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/462/rails-devs-for-foreign-keys/ If you find them, please send them to my highly available sharding cluster. The last programmer I hired told me I accidentally deleted all the java googles in my script folder. He was charging me an arm and a leg to fix it. Apparently it all needs to be converted to a ... http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/455/i-lost-my-java-googles-at-mysqlconf-2009/