A couple of good articles about integrating OAuth into your Rails app.
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2009/07/21/consuming-oauth-intelligently-in-rails
http://stakeventures.com/articles/2007/11/26/how-to-turn-your-rails-site-into-an-oauth-provider
http://github.com/pelle/oauth-plugin/tree/master
→ No CommentsTags: Rails Plugins · code · rails · security
http://railscasts.com/episodes/171-delayed-job – A good railscast about using Delayed Job.
http://www.therailsway.com/2009/7/22/do-it-later-with-delayed-job – Article by TheRailsWay about why to use and how to use.
It looks like are really simple way to offload long running tasks.
→ No CommentsTags: Rails Plugins · code · rails · scaling
Cucumber looks interesting but I am still not sold that it is necessary. It feels a little overkill. What do you think?
Here are some links to see how to use it and how it works.
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/cucumber-introduction/
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/cucumber-more-advanced/
http://railscasts.com/episodes/155-beginning-with-cucumber
http://railscasts.com/episodes/159-more-on-cucumber
→ No CommentsTags: code · rails · testing
In this article, Intridea shows you how to use CloudFront and AssetPackager together and prevent stale copies of assets from being served.
http://www.intridea.com/posts/amazon-cloudfront-preventing-stale-assets
→ No CommentsTags: AWS · Rails Plugins · code · rails · scaling · web
This is an article about different techniques for creating small unique tokens in Ruby.
http://blog.logeek.fr/2009/7/2/creating-small-unique-tokens-in-ruby
→ No CommentsTags: code · ruby
Here is a really good article about using Cassandra from Evan Weaver.
http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with-cassandra/
→ No CommentsTags: code · install · rails · scaling · web
A good article about using CloudFront from Amazon and the Paperclip plugin for Rails. http://www.intridea.com/posts/using-amazon-cloudfront-to-serve-assets
→ No CommentsTags: Rails Plugins · code · rails · scaling · web
Here is a good article about Scala. http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html
I have been interested in Scala for a while but have not done any programming yet in Scala. I think Scala has a lot of promise
→ No CommentsTags: scala
I decided about a week ago that I wanted to try Erubis with a Rails project to see if I got any performance boost. So after reading the documentation, it appeared to be straightforward to install. So I did.
But I discovered that the latest Erubis (2.6.4) and Rails 2.3 are not compatible. After doing some googling and looking at stackoverflow solutions, the problem was still not resolved. So I started to dig into the problem.
I found that the main issue is that the generated ruby code from Erubis uses “_buf” as the buffer variable and Rails 2.2 and 2.3 require “@output_buffer” to be used.
The reason for “@output_buffer” to be used is that ActionView helpers like CaptureHelper are designed around “@output_buffer” being the primary buffer in the generated code.
I have created a gem called elkinsware-erubis_rails_helper that fixes these issues and allows Erubis and Rails 2.3 (for sure but it should work for 2.2).
Here is how to use it:
inside config/environment.rb and the following
config.gem 'erubis' , :version => '2.6.4'
config.gem 'elkinsware-erubis_rails_helper', :lib => 'erubis_rails_helper', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
You can customize some of the options for Erubis still if you want to by adding config/initializers/erubis_config.rb to your initializers folder
#Erubis::Helpers::RailsHelper.engine_class = Erubis::Eruby # or Erubis::FastEruby
#Erubis::Helpers::RailsHelper.init_properties = {}
#Erubis::Helpers::RailsHelper.show_src = false
#Erubis::Helpers::RailsHelper.preprocessing = true
The source is at http://github.com/elkinsware/erubis_rails_helper/tree/master
Let me know if you have any issues with the gem.
→ No CommentsTags: Rails Plugins · code · rails
This is a list of steps I took to setup a headless XServer and CutyCapt on Ubuntu. Please let me know if you run into any issues using these steps.
The first set of steps is to get the requirements for CutyCapt installed and the Headless XServer setup.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
sudo apt-get install xvfb
sudo apt-get install xfs xfonts-scalable xfonts-100dpi
sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri
sudo apt-get install subversion libqt4-webkit libqt4-dev g++
Now lets download and install CutyCapt. Then we will run a couple of tests to make sure it is working properly.
svn co https://cutycapt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cutycapt
cd cutycapt/CutyCapt
qmake
make
xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" ./CutyCapt --url=http://www.google.com --out=example.png
xvfb-run --server-args="-screen 0, 1024x768x24" ./CutyCapt --url=http://www.google.com --out=example.html --out-format=html
I hope this helped and let me know if you have any feedback.
update: Per Paul’s comment, you may need to enable the aptitude backports repository in /etc/apt/sources.list, as this is off by default, to get the libqt4 libraries.
http://corpocrat.com/2008/08/19/how-to-install-xvfb-x11-server-in-linux-server/
http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wonko.be/2008/01
→ 9 CommentsTags: code · install · web
I work for a software company, do some web development on the side and tried to keep up with the latest trends in web development.
If you are looking for someone to design a website for your family, business, organization or podcast drop me an email at dave [at] elkinsware[dot]com
If you want to see more about what I offer in web development and services, please check out Elkinsware
This is a site I built to help my promote her business as an Initial Outfitters Consultant. This site allows user to browse through different product categories, allows her to build custom pages and blog about Initial Outfitters products. It is built using Ruby on Rails.
