Raw SQL queries and Rails
For some crazy reason you find yourself thinking “it’d be really great right now if I could just run some raw SQL queries against my database in this here Rails app”, but how? The saner amongst us...
View ArticleMenuito: Fixing Broken Sites One Restaurant at a Time
This week a good friend launched Menuito, his company aimed specifically at helping restaurants improve their websites for mobile users. Menuito is pretty damned clever. It effectively routes around...
View ArticleRake :needs deprecated
Recently I updated rake on a project and was met with this warning: WARNING: ‘task :t, arg, :needs => [deps]‘ is deprecated. Please use ‘task :t, [args] => [deps]‘ instead. It wasn’t immediately...
View ArticleLiving Code
Long, long ago I posted Better Range Intersection in Ruby, which was Dan’s improved solution to my solution for finding intersections across date ranges. Two years and 3,100 pageviews later, Montgomery...
View ArticleMeasuring Slow Code in Objective-C
A note to myself, because I can never remember how to do this: NSTimeInterval start = [NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]; ...operation here... NSTimeInterval duration = [NSDate...
View ArticleStubbing Geocode with FactoryGirl
Google doesn’t seem to like it when our geocoded models hammer their geocoding API during our test runs so we should stub out the geocoding call. To do so: FactoryGirl.define do factory :place do name...
View ArticleBlocking Facebook
While I do have a Facebook account (because it’s damned near impossible to delete one; it certainly isn’t possible via the Facebook site itself), for the most part I try to run invisible to Facebook....
View ArticlePaying vs. Pirating
Over in the Ottawa Citizen, Kate Heartfield writes in “Please, let me pay for that movie”, a poignant op-ed piece, that quite a lot of people who might be inclined to pirate content would really rather...
View ArticleRuby: Invalid multibyte char error and rspec
When testing in rspec and the dreaded “invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)” error shows up, it’s probably because the test file doesn’t have # encoding: UTF-8 at the top of it.
View ArticleRspec, DRb::DRbConnError and Connection Refused
My Rspec specs suddenly stopped working with the following error: Failure/Error: Unable to find matching line from backtrace DRb::DRbConnError: druby://127.0.0.1:8989 - # Oddly, the first two tests...
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