http://pennysmalls.com A blog about Ruby, Rails and other tech. Mostly. Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:24:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here's a little insight I had the other day. If you use MyISAM tables, and there are various performance related reasons you might, then you've been stuck having to turn transactional fixtures off in your tests. But unless you are using some special feature of MyISAM that is not present in InnoDB, ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/11/05/much-faster-rails-tests-if-you-use-myisam/ You may not know this, and I didn't until recently, but you can place images directly in your img tags. Not just the address of them, but the whole binary data - base 64 encoded. The technique is based on the Data URI scheme. Take a look at the source of ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/09/23/fastimageinline-inline-images-in-your-html-code/ A roundup of some of my projects that may be of interest: 1. FastImage Resize This builds on my work on FastImage to provide an image resize facility.  The resize code calls libgd to do the work of resampling and resizing the image - this is a library that is very likely ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/07/14/recent-code-fastimage-resize-scrooge-and-read-from-slave/ I just released a gem to find image dimensions and type information fast. I have previously done some work in this area, but this is a much more comprehensive solution, and fixes problems with certain jpegs. FastImage finds the size or type of an image given its uri by fetching ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/06/11/fastimage-finds-image-dimensions-fast-using-minimal-resources/ I took the trouble to port ferret to ruby 1.9.1 yesterday evening.  I have it working on my mac. Here's a gem for you to try - I have labelled it 0.11.6.19.  If you use it let me know how it runs, but it's at your own risk, I haven't extensively ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/03/24/ferret-on-ruby-191/ Rails 2.3 will be with us soon, so I took the time to update our app to be compatible. It's a reasonably large app (26,000 LOC), so there's bound to be some issues. The first thing to notice is that the PStore store for sessions has completely gone away. ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/03/04/rails-23-breakage-and-fixage/ The passenger manual makes it clear that you need to close and reestablish your connections to things like memcached after it forks to avoid inadventently sharing file handles. The reason is well and clearly explained there. The api to do this is simple - just place this kind of code ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/03/02/using-acts-as-ferret-with-phusion-passenger-mod_rails/ I happens that I wish to upgrade apache, and I know there is an update available. So, I follow the advice given: # yum update httpd Setting up Update Process Could not find update match for httpd No Packages marked for Update Ok, that's not working. Let's try this: # yum clean all Cleaning up Everything # yum ... http://pennysmalls.com/2009/02/24/yum-refuses-to-update/ Finally our app is completely Rails 2.2 ready. Some quick notes on some issues and things that needed to be fixed: 1. Default error messages This call is no good any more ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages Use this instead: I18n.translate('activerecord.errors.messages') 2. Use ActiveSupport::Inflector rather than Inflector The warning tells you all you need to know: DEPRECATION WARNING: Inflector is deprecated! Use ActiveSupport::Inflector ... http://pennysmalls.com/2008/11/29/breakage-and-fixage-in-rails-22/ Ever seen a shattered hard disk? It happened to a friend.  So backup your data.  Now! http://pennysmalls.com/2008/11/21/backup-now/