Day: February 12, 2006

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Beta Books

I’ve recently purchased a beta copy of Rails Recipes. It’s obviously not 100% finished, but appears to be largely complete. It’s already been really, really helpful to me, in particular the chapter on migrations.

But what’s really, really cool is the link at the bottom right of each page in the PDF. It just says “Report erratum”. Clicking it launches a web browser pointing at the erratum page for that book. It’s the easiest way of giving feedback that I have ever seen.

It’s not just erratum of course. Because it’s still a Beta Book, suggestions are also solicited. So I added a little note about how linking to the docs for migrations would be a good idea. Yes, it’s a very small point. But together, lots of people with lots of small points adds up to a much, much better book. I can’t wait to get my print copy of the final version!

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Locomotive / Typo bug

I’ve been trying to get typo working on my mac, using the very shiny Locomotive. Sadly, I kept getting display errors in my sidebar. After spending 3 hours looking at it last night, I’m now pretty sure that it’s a bug in YAML::load, which is called from inside ActiveRecord::Base#object_from_yaml. It works fine on my FreeBSD server running ruby 1.8.4. But under Locomotive (ruby 1.8.2), Instead of getting back a hash, I get some internal YAML class. Hmmm.

Thankfully, a simple patch is all that’s required to get things working properly.

Index: app/models/sidebar.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/sidebar.rb       (revision 724)
+++ app/models/sidebar.rb       (working copy)
@@ -27,7 +27,10 @@
   end

   def active_config
-    self[:active_config]||{}
+    ac = self[:active_config]||{}
+    # XXX Work around a bug in some versions of Ruby / YAML.
+    ac = ac.value if ac.respond_to? "value"
+    ac
   end

   def html_id

I’m so glad that I imported typo into subversion on a vendor branch. It makes this sort of thing a heck of a lot easier.

I should go and file a bug in the typo trac. But I have to admit to not being sure that it’s up and running properly yet…

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Reboots for Users

Jamis Buck has a good article on how to run TextDrive and Lighttpd together. It involves switching the Rails FastCGI processes to be managed independently from the web server. Essentially, the Rails FastCGI runners become independent daemons.

But what’s really useful is the tip in the first comment. It mentions an obscure crontab feature: @reboot. This will let you, as a user, execute a script when the machine boots up. This is dead handy, as it means that your application can be automatically restarted on server boot without having to bother the sysadmins.

More info: