One of the features that I miss most from my Perl days (and to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot I miss from my Perl days) is autovivification. For more information on what it is, read the wikipedia page on it here.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
Hash Autovivification in Ruby
6 Oct 2010 — ericInteresting Object Methods in Ruby
27 Sep 2010 — ericThis little Rubyism is something that I use frequently for debugging my objects. I add a method to every object to show only the interesting methods. What do I mean by interesting methods?
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Getting a Random Record From a MongoDB Collection
9 Aug 2010 — ericOne of my issues with MongoDB is that, as of this writing, there is no way to retrieve a random record. In SQL, you can simply do something similar to “ORDER BY RAND()” (this varies depending on your flavor) and you can retrieve random records (at a slightly expensive query cost). There is not yet an equivalent in MongoDB because of its sequential access nature. There is a purely Javascript method in the MongoDB cookbook here. If you are really interested, I would also read the Jira ticket thread #533 on this issue.
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Creating Configuration Files With Ruby Templates
30 Jun 2010 — ericI recently had a very repetitive configuration file that needed creating. There were approximately 50 config blocks of 10 lines each with only the host name changing with each block. So I decided to take a shortcut and do it in Ruby using ERB templates. This is so easy and literally save me hours worth of work.
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