Blog - ShiftEleven

So not only is git useful for the small projects, it’s also good for keeping track of todos and issues. Ticgit is a distributed ticketing systems based on git. It provides a command line interface as well as a web interface via sinatra and stores all of the ticket info in a separate branch, called ticgit. Rather clever I think.

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We know that when you are working with a bunch of developers for code that’s going to be deployed to the world that version control is something that you want in your toolbox. I would like to submit that it’s not the only reason to use source control.

I bought a Flex book to, well, teach myself Flex. The book right now is taking me though one application and is building it out piece by piece. So I began to think: “What if I just keep track of all my changes through git?”

For one, Flex is nice because it’s all XML, so that makes revision tracking fairly easy. Also, git is very easy to get started because you don’t have to do any server setup. Just issue a git init command and get going. Then after each chapter, I can tag the repository for posterity’s sake. And I have to say, it’s been great to see how the code has changes, especially since Flex Builder generates code.

That’s one thing I love about git, and mercurial, it’s so easy to start using version control for even the littlest of tasks.

Usually one of the first things I read about on how to speed up ActiveRecord is to index my columns to speed up the lookup of items. “Of course!” But could indexing too much be harmful?

Essentially, if your column is an enum, then indexing it could actually cause MySQL to do more work. Why? Because the data set is so large, the MySQL ends up doing a full scan. So things like keeping track if something is active (1 or 0) then you can expect indexing to hurt.

So how does this effect ActiveRecord? Well, if you’re keeping track of whether a user is active or not you would not want to index that column alone. Nor would you want to index a type column if you were using single table inheritance, again, because there isn’t a lot of variance in the type.

So make sure that you index the right things, like IDs and leave the enum-like columns alone.

So there I am, wanting to install Photoshop on my laptop, which happens be a Mac with Leopard installed when I see this lovely message:

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If you are using Google Code, and let’s say that you want an issue addressed, like having ruby supported in GAE. Please, Please, PLEASE, use the star voting and avoid making comments that are simply “+1″. The more stars a defect has, the more attention it has, not the number of comments and especially the number of “+1″s.

Actually, you hurt the initiative to get an issue addressed when you make those comments. You see, when you star an issue, you receive emails when that issue gets updated or commented upon. So if an issue has 100 or so “+1″ comments, then whoever put a star on that defect is going to get 100 or so emails. After getting 20 inane emails, one might decide to remove the star from the issue, thus lowering it’s rating and hurting the campaign.

So please, if you want to help, just star the issue.

So after I used middleware to make browsers work with RESTful URLs in GAE, I started to write more than simple little methods and I’m trying to write a test application. Upon doing so, I ran into a defect with how request parameters are returned for a PUT request. To be fair, this is more of a problem with webob than with GAE, but I hope that this gets fixed because my attempts at monkey patching the problem have not worked out too well.

So there was much talk and whathave you about Google’s new App Engine, and after viewing the tutorials and reading the documentation, I thought it was pretty rad too. Because I was using rack for some previous stuff, WSGI felt right at home (probably because rack was modeled after WSGI). There was one thing that bothered me however. When writing a class using their webapp framework there isn’t any magic param name, like _method, that I could use to mock requests methods like DELETE and PUT since the browser doesn’t support those HTTP methods.

Well my friends, fear not. If you enjoy the sweet freedom of RESTful urls, I’m here to help. Since this is all built on top of WSGI, we can create a some new Middleware to sit before the application to resolve this little issue.

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I have always used MySQL, but I wanted to give PostgreSQL a whirl. This is what I did.

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Maybe someone may have told you to use ruby and CGI together, but I think that person has a screw loose. I mean, come on. Everyone knows that what you really need to use is Rack

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Rails is great and all, but sometimes it can be just a little too much and you just need to set up a few pages, not the next big app. Fear not, there is still tool in the ruby tool box at your disposal: the CGI library. CGI is fast and lean and still can be used will all of your favorite friends, like HAML

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