Category Archives: Technical

Implementing CRUD HTTP style

I’m amazed by how often DHH can keep coming up with newer, simpler, and more elegant approaches to web development that really make you think. In his recent blog entry/keynote he discusses using HTTP’s PUT and DELETE methods to more … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Web | 1 Comment

June San Francisco Ruby Meetup

I attended the June 12th, 2006 San Francisco Ruby Meetup at CNet which was my first. There was quite a turnout, I’d guess maybe 80-90 people. The presentations focused more on process and lessons rather than in-depth technical sessions. Here … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

Configuring MySQL sql-mode in Ruby on Rails

In my previous post I wrote about setting MySQL to a stricter sql-mode to make it behave like most other databases, however, I recently ran into a case where I couldn’t set the global sql-mode without breaking some legacy applications. … Continue reading

Posted in MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering | 1 Comment

Creating subversion repositories for just about anything

I’ve been using Subversion for just about everything I work on including keeping my documents synchronized across multiple computers, backups, source control, etc… I got the idea a while back from Martin Fowler’s Bliki who uses it for a similar … Continue reading

Posted in Source Control, Systems Administration | Comments Off on Creating subversion repositories for just about anything

Modeling enumerated types in the database

Let’s say you have an Employees table and you want a column to track the status of an employee such as [’employed’, ‘resigned’, ‘retired’, ‘terminated’, etc…]. You have a couple of options including: Using your database’s custom enumeration data-type if … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

When installing MySQL always set the sql-mode

As I’ve described before, MySQL has some appalling out of the box settings which will thwart your attempts at good data integrity! They’ve clearly seen the light though and at least give you an option to achieve good data integrity … Continue reading

Posted in MySQL, Systems Administration | 1 Comment

Running Ruby on Rails with Apache 2 and mod_fcgid

My hosted Linux server runs Debian Sarge 3.1 with Apache 2. As most Ruby users have heard Apache 2 is rumored to be problematic with FastCGI. This evening I’ve been working on putting up a new Ruby on Rails site … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration | Comments Off on Running Ruby on Rails with Apache 2 and mod_fcgid

Use env to ensure a script will work in cron

I’ve often written scripts only to discover once added to crontab that it relies on an environment setting such as having the java command in the PATH or having CVSROOT set. To avoid this I now run scripts I’m developing … Continue reading

Posted in Systems Administration | 1 Comment

Avoid hard-coding the path to the interpreter in your scripts

In general when trying to write portable scripts don’t start them with #!/bin/bash , instead start them with #!/usr/bin/env bash . The only caveat is that you DO NOT want to do this for critical security scripts because it opens … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Systems Administration | 4 Comments

Creating database test fixtures and the rails export fixtures plugin

Being able to quickly and easily create test fixtures for your database is important yet it’s not always easy. There are basically 3 approaches I’ve seen used: 1. Use a MySQL or PostgreSQL dump that gets imported before the tests … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Java, MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments