Articles

See you at Conferencia Rails 2009

conferencia-rails-2009Brightbox founders Jeremy and John will be attending Conferencia Rails in Madrid later this week.

Hey, Is that your database crying? Video Online

We’ve just released the video for Hey… Is That Your Database Crying? from Aloha on Rails , in which Blythe Dunham walks you through tips and tricks for working with your relational database and ActiveRecord.

Enjoy the video, and mahalo to Panopto and ThinkTech Hawaii for making the videos possible!

Passenger 2.2.7 packages for Ubuntu

Passenger 2.2.6 (quickly followed by 2.2.7) was released last week and we now have i386 and AMD64 Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.

As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.

Software engineering can lie

When you have no idea where you are going - find a customer you can rely on, write some code and don’t stop until he says "fine!"
If you have no idea where the rabbit hole ends - you can make no plans
and so to prepare or fantasize about the fantastic mechanism that will be the kernel of your dream ship software is to fool yourself.

Fun with Twitter and Ruby

I’ve been toying around with the idea for a small website lately, but never actually got around to do it. In an attempt to clear out my personal to do list I finally motivated myself to start yesterday, and I have to say the following combination of tools is not only insanely efficient, but also really fun to work with:

Quick and dirty hack for RSpec's before(:all)

RSpec is generally nice testing framework. It supports before and after hooks which can be invoked before/after each test case or all test cases.
before(:all) is a little confusing though. It runs your "before" block before all "describes" and "contexts", also nested ones. Here's example:

Racksh: A Rails-Console-A-Like for Rack-Based Ruby Apps

Have you ever yearned for something like Rails's script/console or Merb's merb -i in your other Rack based apps? If so, then Marcin Kulik's racksh, inspired by Heroku's console, might be for you.

BSNL 3G Speed

After a long awaiting for the actual launch of 3G service in Chennai, its available now. I rushed up to the customer service center and got myself the 3G Sim Card and just tried the net speed which BSNL claims  upto 3.6 MBPS …but the result is shown in the below image

BSNL 3G Speed

BSNL 3G Speed

Learning From Bad Ideas

When we know something is ugly or “evil”, we’re quick to replace it with what we know to be a better solution. But if we don’t know why the solution is better, it makes it hard for us to investigate those things that look reasonable on the surface, yet have weaknesses just beneath the skin.

Search comma separated values db column in Rails

I wanted to search for a value in DB and the column data is comma separated values say …

foo,bar,hey,hay

Now I wanted to find a record based on the value …say …hay

MySQL’s FIND_IN_SET comes into play and it works as follows

Edit CSS in Any Browser With the Click of a Button | Rails Fire

Edit CSS in Any Browser With the Click of a Button

So, a few weeks back I showed you how you could see your CSS changes in real-time in any browser. That was cool and all, but I haven’t found myself using it simply because of the convenience factor. The script (along with jQuery) had to be included in the page, whereas I could just fire up Web Developer Toolbar in an instant.

Today I’m introducing the bookmarklet version of that same script. It no longer requires jQuery, so just drag the link below up to your bookmark toolbar, and you’ll have this functionality one click away.

Edit CSS

I’ve also put together a short (3-minute) demo below. Enjoy.

Non-Flash version of screencast is available here (the Files and Links section in the sidebar).

The source for this is on Github, so please add issues there and fork away.