If you’re programming in Ruby, then in the list of “should be’s” is “using autotest“, assuming you’re doing automated testing, which of course is a giant “should be”. One problem if you’re using a bunch of gems or Rails is that their code works and yours is broken but the failure stacktraces you’re reading contain their method names mixed in with yours. 99% of the time this is distracting. So, using some code from Faisal that did the same thing with an older version of Autotest but doesn’t work in the latest release, I hacked up the code to help remove unwanted text from Autotest test output. And now I present it to you.
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Category: ruby
Hacking rake:stats to get gross LOC
Web App Autopsy has some juicy metrics such as the 100:10:1 ratio of anonymous visitors to free registered users to paying users. But they also have LOC counts which seem quite high, and which include things that rake:stats (a Rake task that’s part of Rails, which counts lines of source code and provides some basic analysis) doesn’t count. So, I hacked rake:stats to include them. Here’s what I did:
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First Rails gotcha: Rails doesn’t tear down fixture data
Rails doesn’t delete loaded fixtures in the tear down phase of tests, but it does delete and re-insert the fixtures you do use at the beginning of tests. This is a serious problem if you use foreign keys.
This issue is covered in the Rails issue tracker here: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2404
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Ruby Deeper Impressions
For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
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Ruby First Impressions: Backup Scripting
I started programming in Ruby this week, and so far I like it a lot. From my initial use of Ruby as a backup automation scripting language, here are my thoughts.
You might be wondering, why am I working on backup scripting now? Don’t I have some big project I’m supposed to be working on 24/7? Yes, and actually this work is in the critical path of that project.
My super fast laptop is still away being repaired for a video problem, so I’ve taken a major hit in terms of the resources of my main computer: 90% less MHz, 36% less display area, 50% less memory. In the meantime, I’ve been avoiding tasks that need a lot of CPU or graphics performance and instead working on things that are easier on my old desktop computer.
This week, I decided that I would pause working on the design and implementation of my startup project, until I had really sorted out my server backup and monitoring situation.
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