I 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 …
By eric
While diving into Gearman using Gearman::Client with MySQL and libdrizzle (I know, a mouthful), I ran into what I thought was a bug. I was only able to add 1 background job of any type at a particular time. The launchpad “bug note,” which is available in its entirety here, is rightly labeled won’t fix.
By eric
I have been trying to figure out how, while using OptionParser to be able to check for files being input on the command line and if they don’t exist, check other input streams (like Bash). This initially wasn’t very easy since input streams are blocking. So with a little help from friends (thanks roberto), I …
By eric
I don’t know what the right answer is, so any insight would be appreciated. From Googling around, I came across this thread on StackOverflow which talks about Validating exits and aborts in Rspec. I have a few issues with this, namely that I am using shoulda and I don’t want to validate the exit, I …
By eric
One of the best ways to learn something new is to find a project in that realm and do it. I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I wrote a web site. I wanted to learn Python, so I did a project in it for work. Now I want to get better at Ruby, …
By eric
There are a lot of people who say, “if it isn’t monitored, then it isn’t a service.” The problem is that I don’t think enough people outside of the systems world believe that or even understand why its said. I think the primary offenders here are developers. It isn’t because they don’t know better, but …
By eric
Although one of the primary ideas behind frameworks is to keep things as simple as possible, sometimes they create issues in the long run. What I am about to discuss is something of a luxury problem (as scaling usually is), but it is a problem nonetheless. When initially starting a project, whether you are using …
By eric
My editor of choice for most of what I do on the Mac (when I’m not in the shell using Vim) is Textmate. I recently came across a neat plugin called the Textmate Minimap. Essentially this plugin opens a map across the side of your Textmate window (like another drawer on the other side) and …
By eric
Having spent a lot of time in the Perl world and even trying to write a Perl poem here and there, I decided to give some Python poetry a try. It turned out to be a bit more philosophical than poetic. But it compiles and that’s what counts; even though it doesn’t do anything useful …
By eric
Having recently implemented Thinking Sphinx on one of my web sites, I thought it would be cool to be able to search every indexed model. With Thinking Sphinx, it’s easy to have a bunch of different classes returned in the results. The tougher part is displaying them in a way that is organized (although admittedly …
By eric
