http://www.opsb.co.uk Agile web craftsman Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:36:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some of those IO tasks can simply be the height of tedium. Why not ask the butler to take care of it? He's rather clever don't you know, he even understands a thing or two about that apache VFS. Butler will fetch byte [] String String in utf8 InputStream File from VFS locations - allows loading from any ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=176 On a page you'll quite often have a table like the following BookAuthor  Harry Potter and half blood princeJ.K. RowlingDelete ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=165 There seems to be a lot of bad info out there about this. It's really quite simple, you just have to make use of the built in tasks provided by cucumber and rcov. The following task definitions will generate coverage reports for cucumber features and rails tests in coverage.features and ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=163 We came across a case where we wanted to validate that the combination of first and last names for a new person was unique. Add the following snippet #config/initializers/validators.rb ActiveRecord::Base.class_eval do def self.validates_uniqueness_of_combined(*attr_names) options = attr_names.extract_options!.symbolize_keys attr_names = attr_names.flatten ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=149 It's happened so many times. The big release is coming up, we realise there isn't enough time to get all the necessary features in, the business demands that we drop quality to hit the deadline. We reluctantly comply and... we hit the deadline. The business and more importantly our customers ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=122 DBI is a database api based on Perls' DBI. It's great for those occasions where you want to interact with a database in a script, or perhaps when you have a really lightweight app that doesn't need an ORM framework. Install Ok, it took quite a bit of searching around but ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=88 Install mysql apt-cache search mysql-client Choose one and install (sudo apt-get install xxx) Install dev headers apt-cache search libmysql Choose one that ends in dev and install Install gem sudo gem install mysql http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=77 http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=76 First word: egrep -o "^\w*\b" http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=75 Now that I'm starting to use git more regularly I've started looking for ways to make git even better. It turns out that git's really easy to customise. Aliases Having recently heard that "git stage" is going to be added as an alias for "git add" another git fan mentioned that you ... http://www.opsb.co.uk/?p=56