Millarian - Home

Anonymous Caring

2008-11-09T03:24:00Z

I received a wrong number text message today that stated

U arent going to give up on
me n stop talking to me bc
things r complicated on my
end, r u?

This person was trying to make a connection with someone who might not be talking with them anymore. They’re having some difficulties in their relationship that I know nothing about, but if I didn’t answer their fear/suspicion becomes reality. In essence, by not answering, the person they were trying to reach decided not to answer them. So I jotted off a quick reply

Sorry, I think you have the wrong number.

Then added

Good luck. I hope it works out.

I’ve often wondered if sometimes people just need to know that someone cares, even if it’s anonymous, as in this case. It’s easy to get wrapped up in ourselves and forget that other people need encouragement and support, too. There are little moments like these everyday that are easy to miss or ignore but that might have an impact in someone’s life. Don’t let those opportunities pass you by.

Installing aspell and raspell for Ultrasphinx

2008-09-25T22:52:00Z

We’ve been playing around with the Sphinx full-text search engine and Ultrasphinx, the Ruby on Rails configurator and client to the Sphinx full text search engine. Sadly, it was giving us a warning about spell checking:

ultrasphinx: spelling support not available (raspell configuration raised "uninitialized constant Ultrasphinx::Spell::Aspell")

This is pretty easy to get rid of, though. You just need to install the aspell, spell checking library and raspell, the Ruby interface to aspell. The raspell README has instructions for installing aspell and raspell on both Mac and Ubuntu.

After we did this, we got one additional error:

ultrasphinx: spelling support not available (raspell configuration raised "No word lists can be found for the language "ap".")

Follow the instructions for setting up the custom wordlist needed by Ultrasphinx and you should be good to go.

Good luck and happy searching!

Error after upgrading SliceHost

2008-09-23T07:35:00Z

If you happen to see this error after upgrading your SliceHost account, be calm.

ActionView::TemplateError (Define INLINEDIR or HOME in your environment and try again)

The simple solution is to add an environment declaration to your environment/production.rb file:

ENV['INLINEDIR'] = '/path/to/.ruby_inline'

Once that was set, we were in business again… whew!

References

Here’s a relevant reference that took a while to find:

Problems with God, RubyInline and Rails

Quick Tip: Setting an SPF record

2008-09-23T07:09:00Z

I recently noticed a lot of rejected emails coming from a production app that had just switched to send mail through Google Apps. For some reason Google felt we might be spammers, so it began rejecting our emails out-of-hand. We would continuously get the following error message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
Message rejected.  See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information.

That wasn’t very helpful, but with a little digging it led me to find out about something called an SPF and convinced me that I should set this up. It was really easy and I suggest you do it if you’re sending mail from your Ruby on Rails application through Google Apps (or some other means).

When using Google Apps, simply add a TXT record to your DNS settings with the following value:

v=spf1 mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Note also that Google wants you to use include and specify all with a tilde(~), not a plus(+) or minus(-).

Publishing an SPF record that lacks include:aspmx.googlemail.com or specifying -all instead of ~all may result in delivery problems.

I also contacted Google to let them know of the error and if you start seeing this, be sure to let them know, too. Either that or setting the SPF record corrected our problem and we no longer get the rejected emails…

References

Freebootr Ahoy!

2008-09-20T06:10:00Z

I wrote recently about Phoenix Hacknight (that happens every Wednesday) because I want people to know that there is a vibrant, active community in Phoenix centered around technology. Hacknight has become a place where people meet consistently to network with each other and hack on various projects. I have attended every single Hacknight and closed shop on most of them, but besides the amazing 6 hour hacknight website, I’ve yet to really release a new idea to the public.

That’s why I’m happy to announce the launch of

The Idea

Freebootr is an idea hatched at Hacknight by Chris Irish and me. It provides a place for people to easily and quickly find free items in their area as well as post free items they no longer want or need. We hope that this will result in less landfill waste and reduced cost to consumers. We believe this type of service should be free and open to the public and that’s exactly what we’ve done. What’s more, we believe it should be fun to use, which is why the site is pirate themed! Why, you ask?

freebooter |ˈfrēˌboōtər|

noun

a pirate or lawless adventurer.

That’s right, a freebooter is a pirate, so naturally we themed the site after these denizens of the sea. Arrr!

The Journey

Freebootr has been in the works for about 8 weeks at Hacknight. Chris and I have put in about 40 hours each throughout that time and set a goal to release the first version of the product today, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We also took a 2 week hiatus to implement the Hacknight website. It has been a fun, and somewhat bumpy, ride to get here, but we did it.

The Rest

Now the real work begins, for us and for you. We want… nay, need your feedback to make Freebootr.com a great, useful site. So check it out and be sure to call us out when we suck (and occasionally when we kick ass).

Now go out there, me hearty, and become a Freebootr!

Hacknight

2008-09-17T01:50:00Z

About 24 weeks ago, we started hosting a regular Wednesday night gathering at our Chandler, Arizona office called hacknight (originally hack-a-mania). We open our office to the public from 6pm until whenever to allow people in the Phoenix area to meet, network, play, eat, have fun and, of course, hack on projects. After almost 6 months, hacknight is still going strong!

Check out this hacknight video

Also check out the people and projects at hacknight, on the new site devoted to everyone who makes these wonderful events happen! If you’re interested in what hacknights are doing for the Phoenix community, be sure to come by the office located at

290 E. El Prado Ct., Chandler, AZ 85225

We’re there every Wednesday night, hacking away… you should be too!

Suggest New Music

2008-09-14T20:39:00Z

I need some new music to add to my collection. I’ve been listening to the same couple of CDs for the last 4 months. Please help me by recommending your current favorite!

Leave your suggestions in the comments, I’ll post my purchases here afterward.

The Purchase

So after much time spent listening to samples from the recommendations I received, I settled on five albums. Three came from suggestions, one I’ve been wanting for a long time and one is the soundtrack of a movie my wife and I saw recently and loved. For better or worse, here they are:

Arcade Fire: Funeral
The Decemberists: Picaresque
Feist: The Reminder
Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy
Once: Soundtrack

Recommendations

Here is the list of all recommendations (that I didn’t purchase, but maybe you will?):

Atmosphere
Page France
The Mountain Goats
Bowerbirds
The National
The Hold Steady
Sufjan Stevens
Rodrigo y Gabriela: Rodrigo y Gabriela
José González: Veneer
Kimya Dawson
Mirah
Brooke Fraser
Portishead
Abandoned Pools
The Spill Canvas
SoftLightes
Leslie Hall

A big thank you to everyone who gave their 2¢ and feel free to keep the suggestions coming… I may buy more soon!

Quick Tip: Rails 2.1 Time Zones

2008-09-13T22:29:00Z

My last quick tip involved setting your time zone in Ubuntu Hardy, so now, how do you set your time zone in a Ruby on Rails application? Rails 2.1 makes it much easier to manage time zone settings than it was previously.

Add the following to your environment configuration file:

config/environment.rb

config.time_zone = 'Arizona'

Replace Arizona with your own time zone. You can find a list of valid values by running any of the following rake tasks:

rake time:zones:all
rake time:zones:local
rake time:zones:us

Your data will still be stored in UTC time, but it will be converted into the specified time zone when it is type cast on retrieval.

Update: If you set both your server’s time zone and your applications time zone then you may see some incorrect times. I believe this is because you’ll be storing local times and the Rails app will be trying to convert them to local – a double conversion. So be careful.

References

Quick Tip: Setting time zone on Ubuntu Hardy

2008-09-13T21:47:00Z

I’ve been pretty enamored with SliceHost recently. They make it very easy to setup a slice, configure it and get your product deployed quickly (I’m down to 30 min). I hadn’t noticed until just recently that I’ve never set a time zone on any slice I’ve configured. So, here’s how you do it, simple and easy.

SSH into your slice
Run this command: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Select your geographic area and location

That’s it, hope it helps!

If you want your own slice, consider using my Slicehost referral link. Thanks!

Nginx 405 Not Allowed Error

2008-09-05T08:06:00Z

405 Not Allowed

So, I got this error today and it took me a few minutes to track down why. Seems like the kind of thing that might be interesting to people. I’m using nginx on a project and this error was being thrown by nginx, not by Rails. What could be the cause?

Nginx configuration and REST

Do you have something in your nginx config file that looks like this?

if (-f $request_filename) {
  break;
}

Basically, render an existing, static file directly, aka. bypass Rails. This is great, we don’t incur the overhead of hitting Rails for static files, including cached files, right? Wrong.

You see, with REST, your URL will be the same for a POST to create as it will for a GET to index. For example, viewing the users index and creating a user:

GET  /users <= user's index
POST /users <= create a user

See the problem?

That’s right, if you cache the user’s index using a technique like caches_page then you have a static file (e.g., users.html) that matches regardless of the HTTP method. Therefore, it will bypass rails and attempt to serve the static file on a POST request, resulting in a 405 error. Whew!

Caching with nginx

So what do you do? I don’t know. But this is what I did and I hope it helps. Add the following to your nginx config prior to the serving of static files.

if ($request_method != GET) {
  proxy_pass http://foobar;
  break;
}

Uh, where foobar is the name you specified in the upstream declaration in the nginx config. This should pass any non-GET request to Rails immediately since we don’t want to statically serve files for anything other than GET.

References

Quick Tip: Form Partials

2008-09-02T01:11:00Z

Partials are a great way to keep your view code separated logically. Prior to Rails 2.1 if you wanted to reuse a form partial in, for example, a new and edit view, then you needed to pass the form into the partial somehow.

Given the following form partial:

views/users/_form.html.erb

<div>
  <%= form.label :name -%>
  <%= form.text_field :name -%>
</div>

Pre-Rails 2.1

You might consider passing the form in as a local, like so.

views/users/new.html.erb or views/users/edit.html.erb

<% form_for @user do |form| -%>
  <%= render :partial => 'form', :locals => { :form => form } -%>
<% end -%>

Rails 2.1

There’s now a shortcut for this common method of rendering a form partial.

views/users/new.html.erb or views/users/edit.html.erb

<% form_for @user do |form| -%>
  <%= render :partial => form -%>
<% end -%>

Nice! Cleans things up a bit.

Quick Tip: named_scope

2008-08-31T22:49:00Z

Have you ever found yourself writing queries like this?

User.find(:all, :conditions => ['state = ? AND created_at > ? AND created_at <= ?', 'active', start_date, end_date], :limit => 5)

I suppose you could refactor this into a custom finder that did the heavy lifting for you…

User.find_all_active_in_date_range(start_date, end_date)

But what if you need that same query where the state is ‘pending’? Create another custom finder? Modify it so it takes another parameter for state? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create some kind of reusable snippet that could be chained together to create a custom finder? Well, look no further. As of Rails 2.1, such a thing exists and it’s called named_scope.

Let’s refactor that code using named_scope.

app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  named_scope :active, :conditions => { :state => 'active' }
  named_scope :between, lambda { |starts, ends| { :conditions => ['created_at > ? AND created_at <= ?', starts, ends] } }
end

The lambda is simply so we can accept parameters into the named scope call. Named scopes are easily chainable, so to get the desired query we can call:

User.active.between(start_date, end_date)

Plus, if we want to add another condition, we just created another reusable named_scope and add it to the end.

app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  named_scope :active, :conditions => { :state => 'active' }
  named_scope :between, lambda { |starts, ends| { :conditions => ['created_at > ? AND created_at <= ?', starts, ends] } }
  named_scope :limit, lambda { |num| { :limit => num } }
end

And we have our original query. This is much more readable and maintainable than the previous code we were looking at. The named scopes can also be reused when another query comes up with those conditions.

User.active.between(start_date, end_date).limit(5)

There’s so much more you can do with named_scope, so check it out.

References

Quick Tip: SSH Backspace

2008-08-27T04:22:00Z

I just ran across this informative post by Jonathan Tron that solved an annoyance I’ve had for a while: backspace not doing what I want when I use SSH.

Change your Terminal Preferences

In Terminal, select Preferences | Settings | Advanced.
Select ‘Delete sends Ctrl-H’

You may need to do this again if you change your terminal style.

Specify a setting for nano

On your server open ~/.nanorc
Add ‘set rebinddelete’

And now you should have backspace working correctly for at least a few things…

Quick Tip: Route Associations

2008-08-27T03:39:00Z

Are you used to writing your routes like this?

map.resources :notes do |notes|
    notes.resource  :author
    notes.resources :comments
    notes.resources :attachments
  end

Don’t fret, there may be hope for you yet. For these simple routes you can use the has_one or has_many route association options.

has_one – use it for a singleton resource
has_many – use it for plural resources

Refactored routes

map.resources :notes, :has_one => :author, :has_many => [:comments, :attachments]

Give it a try!

Keep in mind I said simple. If you’re doing something more complex they might not be the best choice.

Additional Resources

Module ActionController::Resources

Quick Tip: Capistrano SSH Ports

2008-08-25T05:51:00Z

If you have changed the SSH port number on your server, then you need to let Capistrano know how to connect. Luckily, it’s pretty easy.

Add the following to your deployment file, replacing 8888 with your port number.

config/deploy.rb

ssh_options[:port] = 8888

This will apply that port number to connections made by Capistrano. If you need to specify the port for each server (app, web, db) then tack it on to the end of their declarations.

role :app, "65.74.169.199:8030" 
role :web, "65.74.169.199:8031" 
role :db,  "65.74.169.199:8032", :primary => true

I haven’t verified that one, but it supposedly works. Happy deployments!