http://www.mayerdan.com/ Continuously Deployed is a dev blog focused mostly on startups, lean techniques, Ruby, Javascript, mobile dev and easing the development process. en Copyright 2012 Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:42:37 -0700 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2012/01/rai.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2012/01/rai.php Computer Science Ruby on Rails Rails Ruby Testing Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:42:37 -0700 making snow with Ruby processing. ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/12/ruby_processing_making_it_snow.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/12/ruby_processing_making_it_snow.php Computer Science Ruby graphics processing ruby Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:42:06 -0700 find . -type f -mtime -3 | grep -v "/Maildir/" | grep -v "/logs/" The exploiters were modifying my .htaccess and adding a few files of their own, this deleted their files This code helped remove exploit code that was injected into all of the pages on the site. After upgrading my software and installing security patches, a bit of other cleanup, and file permission fixes everything was back to normal. ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/12/cleaning_up_files_after_hackin.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/12/cleaning_up_files_after_hackin.php General Resources admin system Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:07:22 -0700 User.order('lower(name)').all ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/activerecord_rails_case_insens.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/activerecord_rails_case_insens.php Computer Science Ruby Ruby on Rails Activerecorder Rails Ruby Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:56:39 -0700 NothingCalendar, which was inspired by CalendarAboutNothing. It let's users track events, anything they feel like tracking over time. Mark off days you worked out, kept to your diet, worked on writing, studied, quit smoking, or anything else. The idea was a simple way that I could add marks on a calendar on my phone, and have it sync-able and shareable. I also wanted it to be useable when you are offline, since phones loose connection often in metros, planes, lines, etc. One goal with the project is to keep it is small enough that I can build it and play around with different ideas. It is such a small app, that I could rewrite the entire thing with a new methodology if I wanted. Which is exactly what I plan on starting to do. I wanted a app that I could practice new skills and techniques on, while still being useful, and something I would use on a day to day basis. I started working on the project with the idea to build up a chain of doing some open source experimental development having a playground to try things and learn. A small app where I could push myself to look at new technologies, and to force myself to release them into a production environment, opposed to another one off script or tests that never see the light of day. I highly recommend forcing yourself to do a bit of development every day, it is recommended by a bunch of smart people (Andrew Hunt and David Thomas's The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Chad Folwer's The Passionate Programmer, Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters). I was in part inspired by Chris Strom (@eee_c), who has done incredible work keeping up a chain and blogging about what he learns. NothingCalendar is a testament to what you can do in about 15 minutes a day. That is about how much time I have spent on it most evenings. Just forcing myself to do a bit every day, has led to my longest streak on CalendarAboutNothing (66 days at the moment). Just remembering to code a bit everyday, keeps the project in your mind, keeps you improving it. It also makes refactoring little things a perfect task, you only have a few minutes take something on. Complete a tiny refactoring of from a todo list and check it in. I frequently just check in #TODO comments, and grep for them when I don't have much time or an idea of what to work on. After a tiny todo, call it a day and know you will have more time sometime soon to do something more substantial. Please give NothingCalendar a try, and let me know how it goes or any problems / feature ideas. I will will be working more more on it each day, and trying to rewrite large parts of the app using some new ideas.]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/announcing.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/announcing.php Computer Science General Mobile Ruby on Rails learning projects Rails Ruby Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:16:30 -0700 facebook_shared_url = action_url({:foo => 'bar', :buzz => 'baz'}) facebook_url = "https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=#{FACEBOOK_CLIENT_ID}&redirect_uri=#{URI.encode(facebook_shared_url).gsub('&','%26')}&description=#{text}&name=#{via}&link=#{URI.encode(facebook_shared_url).gsub('&','%26')}" ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/working_with_facebook_dialog_f.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/working_with_facebook_dialog_f.php Sun, 13 Nov 2011 12:26:57 -0700 alias find_touch_views='find app/views/ -name "*.touch.erb"' This generates the list of files you want to grep, now you just pipe that list to grep using xargs to grep each file for a specific word. alias grep_touch_views='find_touch_views | xargs grep -Ri "$0"' in the end this lets me run grep_touch_views touch-nav Modify these to fit your needs and add them to your ~/.bash_profile alias find_touch_views='find app/views/ -name "*.touch.erb"' alias grep_touch_views='find_touch_views | xargs grep -Ri "$0"' which gives me a list of all the views that contain touch-nav.]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/grep_a_filtered_list_of_files.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/11/grep_a_filtered_list_of_files.php Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:45:48 -0700 So I am working on a project that has a very long test suite. Yes, that is a problem and we should start to do something about it. For now that problem exists but it leads to wanting to do some weird things. I wanted to work on code in a branch, while my tests were running in another. I had cloned the project twice so I had two versions, of the project, the issue was the branch I wanted to work in hadn't been pushed remote. I then realized since it is git I could easily solve the problem by pointing my second version of my project at the first and fetching all of my local branches! Git is pretty great that you can solve things like this. It also means you could easily just run git off a shared network filesystem, no reason to really setup a fancy git server. Here are the steps make a second version of a project and then fetch the local branches from your first version # if you haven't clone a second version of the project do that from the filesystem or the git server > cd project_2 > git clone /Users/danmayer/projects/project_1 > Cloning into project_1... # in the second version of your project add a remote repo pointing at the original version of the project on your filesystem > cd project_1 > git remote add local /Users/danmayer/projects/project_1/ > git fetch local > git branch #=> a list of the branches on your first projects directory This is a pretty simple thing to do, but when I ran into the issue it took me a bit of time to realize how simple it was to solve this problem. It also just illustrates just how versatile git really is. http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/git_clone_from_local_filesyste.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/git_clone_from_local_filesyste.php Computer Science General Resources environment Git Github Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:34:49 -0700 .rvmrc * cd ../ * cd project_directiory * agree to trust the .rvmrc file That is pretty simple, but gets a bit annoying to do over and over. I figured I could very quickly whip up a solution in my bash profile. Unfortunately, due to my shell scripting skills kind of sucking, I ended up using Ruby. Basically after adding my new ruby script to my .bash_profile, I can now just type 'init_gemset newgemset', and I will be left in my project using my new gemset. The final script is below. One thing to note is the time saved with automating a repetitive task vs. time spent to automate it. In the end because of spending a decent amount of time trying to write this as a shell script without using Ruby. I likely spent more time getting this script working, than it will ever save me. It also isn't even fully reusable for other people in it's current state (the .bash_profile function needs a full path to the ruby script in it, and my preferred RVM ruby is hard coded). It could be made more easily reusable / sharable (likely making it a gem, or sending a pull request to RVM itself with this as a feature). Doing this the fully 'right' way would just add more time spent, on something I initially did to save a few moments. I wanted to get back to what I was originally working on, and I had something that would work for me. So I will leave it here as a simple gist. Working on this also made me think about what is worth spending time automating. In terms of savings this likely wasn't worth much, but there are many times that a repetitive task is really begging for automation.]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/simplifying_new_gemset_creatio.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/simplifying_new_gemset_creatio.php Computer Science Ruby Development environment ruby Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:41:11 -0700 ActiveRecord AssociationProxy objects, they weren't proxying the method correctly. The issue arose when trying to use the #any? method on an array which should be true when empty. When calling this on a AssociationProxy object that has 0 items it was returning false. Oddly enough inspecting or to_s the association and then calling #any? resulted in the correct behavior. It was so weird though that after looking at other options I ended up using the present?, which always behaved how I expected it to. Even weirder is the issue only presented itself in the rails server debug and production modes. It always acted as one would expect in rails console. I started to dig in more, but ended up yak shaving a lot of other stuff to try to learn exactly what the cause was. If anyone understands the issue better, I would be happy to know more. Until then, be aware that at least in the 2.3.X versions of rails, ActiveRecord AssociationProxy#any? acts funky and should not be trusted. Use a work around like present? or length > 0 (both worked correctly in console and on dev/production server environments). This is one of these issues where there is so much going on in the rails stack that it is hard to determine where the issue lies. So for those googling this issue, beware AssociationProxy.any? on has_many relationships. Example code: ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/activerecord_association_objec.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/10/activerecord_association_objec.php Computer Science Ruby on Rails Bugs Rails Ruby Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:58:46 -0700 Google's closure compiler. I started to get annoyed with this process and went looking for a better solution. If you are using Rails, there is a great solution using Jammit asset packager library for Rails. I was not using rails, and just needed something that could write the files on demand. A bit of quick searching came up withh this post Compressing Javascript Code With Google Closure Compiler And Ruby. It basically met my needs, but needed to be modified a bit to take a collection of files and write that collection of compresses files back to disk. Here is the solution I ended up with: ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/07/google_closure_compiler_and_ru.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/07/google_closure_compiler_and_ru.php Computer Science Resources Ruby javascript ruby javascript closure minification compression Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:22:37 -0700 swaps two buffers positions left and right, so I started with that code and modified it to do just what I want. I then bound the function to "C-x /" which wasn't in use and I can now swap buffer windows with ease. Also, kind of fun to do a bit of lisp/emacs hacking and breaking out of my Ruby world a bit. If you notice I have it also close the current tab for the buffer and move the cursor context to the new buffer on the other side of the screen. Most people hate and don't use tabs in emacs so that one tab closing could be commented out. I love tabs because I am a very spacial person and the tabs let me keep the physical location of the buffers in my head. This was written to run in Aquamacs, but will work equally well in standard emacs. Just drop it in your .emacs file or emacs config directory. Code can be found at this gist, Emacs swap buffer window]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/06/emacs_swap_buffer_window_metho.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2011/06/emacs_swap_buffer_window_metho.php Computer Science Resources Aquamacs Editors Emacs Lisp Sun, 05 Jun 2011 10:50:24 -0700 I had a problem, when I had files of weird encodings or unknown encodings emacs would add a stupid comment at the top # -*- coding: " coding-system " -*- where coding-system was the detected encoding, such as # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- I found this a big problem because it would add it to my erb files, which in turn would actually display the comment on the HTML, because # isn't a valid html comment... Actually that it was trying to comment it was a hint of where this was occurring so I could disable it. It turns out it was ruby-mode for emacs that was adding this stupid comment 'on my behalf' against my wishes... So now that I knew what was causing it, it was time to fix the problem. Just edit the ruby-mode emacs file, force it to recompile and use emacs without it screwing up your files... On my system the files was here, but it will be in your emacs folder wherever you keep it. `emacs /Users/danmayer/.emacs.d/elpa/ruby-mode-1.1/ruby-mode.el` Then comment out this code (note that ;; is a comment for lisp): ;; (defun ruby-mode-set-encoding () ;; "Insert a magic comment header with the proper encoding if necessary." ;; (save-excursion ;; (widen) ;; (goto-char (point-min)) ;; (when (re-search-forward "[^\0-\177]" nil t) ;; (goto-char (point-min)) ;; (let ((coding-system ;; (or coding-system-for-write ;; buffer-file-coding-system))) ;; (if coding-system ;; (setq coding-system ;; (or (coding-system-get coding-system 'mime-charset) ;; (coding-system-change-eol-conversion coding-system nil)))) ;; (setq coding-system ;; (if coding-system ;; (symbol-name ;; (or (and ruby-use-encoding-map ;; (cdr (assq coding-system ruby-encoding-map))) ;; coding-system)) ;; "ascii-8bit")) ;; (if (looking-at "^#![^\n]*ruby") (beginning-of-line 2)) ;; (cond ((looking-at "\\s *#.*-\*-\\s *\\(en\\)?coding\\s *:\\s *\\([-a-z0-9_]*\\)\\s *\\(;\\|-\*-\\)") ;; (unless (string= (match-string 2) coding-system) ;; (goto-char (match-beginning 2)) ;; (delete-region (point) (match-end 2)) ;; (and (looking-at "-\*-") ;; (let ((n (skip-chars-backward " "))) ;; (cond ((= n 0) (insert " ") (backward-char)) ;; ((= n -1) (insert " ")) ;; ((forward-char))))) ;; (insert coding-system))) ;; ((looking-at "\\s *#.*coding\\s *[:=]")) ;; (t (when ruby-insert-encoding-magic-comment ;; (insert "# -*- coding: " coding-system " -*-\n"))) ;; ))))) ;; (add-hook ;; (cond ((boundp 'before-save-hook) ;; (make-local-variable 'before-save-hook) ;; 'before-save-hook) ;; ((boundp 'write-contents-functions) 'write-contents-functions) ;; ((boundp 'write-contents-hooks) 'write-contents-hooks)) ;; 'ruby-mode-set-encoding) Finally, delete the compiled file forcing it to recompile the plugin next time emacs is opened... on my system: `rm /Users/danmayer/.emacs.d/elpa/ruby-mode-1.1/ruby-mode.elc` That's it, no more encoding comments in your files... The rest of ruby-mode continues to work, and you will have less urges to throw your computer out of the window. Don't worry, I still like you pretty well emacs, although it seems the whole world is moving to Vim, and if Textmate-2 is ever released, your cryptic ways may come to an end. Yes you can do anything, but I can't make you always do what I want. http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/10/fix_emacsaquamacs_keeps_adding.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/10/fix_emacsaquamacs_keeps_adding.php Computer Science Ruby Aquamacs editor emacs ruby ruby-mode Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:54:39 -0700 @env['rack.url_scheme'])=='https' wasn't a sufficient way of detecting if on https. You need to also check (@env['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO']. Below I wrote a simple before filter which you could place in the production configuration. After talking with the author of rack-ssl-enforcer I got that patched to work on heroku as well. So that is an even simpler option. Anyways, I spent far to long googling sinatra https, sinatra ssl, sinatra over https, sinatra secure, and heroku https, and couldn't find good pages on this for awhile. So here is the info for anyone else wanted to host secure Sinatra pages on heroku. ]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/08/force_all_sinatra_traffic_to_h.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/08/force_all_sinatra_traffic_to_h.php Ruby Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:18:17 -0700 Native messages for Android PhoneGap. Following this example, I was able to get my own Javascript interface working. Basically you create a class (using java for android example): I create this private class in the main Java class which extends DroidGap (the class that boots up PhoneGap and creates the webview UI). Then in your html you can call in javascript bridged Java functions like var myData = CUSTOM.getData(); which will return the java data (in this case a string) to the javascript. I have used the JS bride to begin new Android Activities, Close the WebView and move entirely to Native code. Background the WebUI to do something native for awhile, then return the WebView back to the front, Etc. This can be done similarly for the iPhone and Objective-C to Javascript with PhoneGap. This lets you leverage extra native flexibility while still building the majority of your app as JS, CSS, and HTML.]]> http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/07/adding_custom_javascript_handl.php http://www.mayerdan.com/2010/07/adding_custom_javascript_handl.php Computer Science Mobile javascript Android iPhone Java javascript Mobile PhoneGap Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:02:41 -0700