AdaRuby » Complaints

A Server Hard Drive Crash :(

ceefour — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:31:32 +0000

Just got a server hard drive crash

We should be back operational soon. In the mean time please bear with us. Thank you.

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Fixing RubyGems in Ubuntu Gutsy Installation

ceefour — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:57:08 +0000

Upgrading to the latest RubyGems in Ubuntu Gutsy is a bit non-straightforward. I’d like to share a quick fix this time. It’s trivial when you know it, but if not, a friend of mine has almost hosed his system just because of this annoying “bug”.

Installing Ruby in Ubuntu is pretty simple:

sudo aptitude install ruby ri irb rdoc rubygems libruby-extras libmysql-ruby ruby1.8-dev

(add other packages as you see fit)

The problem occurs right after you upgrade RubyGems to the latest version:

sudo gem update --system

Then you get something like this:

ceefour@caliva:/usr/bin$ gem
/usr/bin/gem:23: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)

Logging in and out doesn’t work. The world is coming to an end!

Don’t worry, the world is still running. Check out your /usr/bin folder:

ceefour@caliva:/usr/bin$ ls -la gem*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 701 2007-08-24 12:18 gem
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 698 2008-03-20 09:20 gem1.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  84 2008-03-20 09:20 gemlock
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  89 2008-03-20 09:20 gem_mirror
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  76 2008-03-20 09:20 gemri
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  89 2008-03-20 09:20 gem_server
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  86 2008-03-20 09:20 gemwhich

So, there is some mismatch between gem and gem1.8. The latter being the newer/correct version.

Simply remove the “gem” one and replace (or link) it to the “gem1.8″ one:

ceefour@caliva:/usr/bin$ sudo rm gem
ceefour@caliva:/usr/bin$ sudo ln -s gem1.8 gem

Now:

ceefour@caliva:/usr/bin$ gem -v
1.0.1

Presto! We’re back in business.

Interesting RubyGems articles:

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Quick Call for Help: What is the Keyboard YOU Use?

ceefour — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:10:21 +0000

I need your help to buy a new USB keyboard in the next few days. I’ve been typing exclusively on a laptop for the past 4 months and by God, my hand hurts like hell right now and I don’t intend continuing so.

This isn’t any regular Ruby post.

So, let me know of your recommendations. It’d be great if you actually used it or typed on it, nevertheless any links would be helpful.

The winner recommendation will get a personal thanks from me. (I mean that literally)

PS: In case you’re interested, what I’m targeting now is Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 (sans mouse). Seems to have great reviews, nice price too (+/- $20).

Update: Here’s my workstation now, with a Colemak “poster”…

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Kemalasan Seorang Ruby Programmer

ceefour — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:18:57 +0000

Kadang-kadang manusia memang keterlaluan malasnya. (pointing at myself)
Bingung gimana caranya mindahin daftar URL yang di Planet Ruby Indonesia ke halaman Daftar Situs Ruby di Wiki Ruby Indonesia.

Jadi ya, terpaksa deh… pake “cara lama”. Select, View Source, Copy&Paste, ketik sedikit kode Ruby…

ceefour@ojalanow:~$ irb -rubygems -rhpricot irb(main):001:0> doc = < irb(main):002:0"



irb(main):003:0" 

irb(main):004:0"  Aditya Agustyana

e="subscribe"> Yohanes Santoso



irb(main):005:0" 

irb(main):006:0"

irb(main):007:0" 

irb(main):008:0"  Andry S. Huzain

irb(main):009:0" 


irb(main):010:0" 

irb(main):011:0"  Arie Kusuma Atmaja

irb(main):012:0" 


irb(main):013:0" 

irb(main):014:0"  Budi Susanto

irb(main):015:0" 


irb(main):016:0" 

irb(main):017:0"  Hendra

irb(main):018:0"

irb(main):019:0" 


irb(main):020:0" 

irb(main):021:0"  Hendy Irawan

irb(main):022:0" 


irb(main):023:0" 

irb(main):024:0"  JRuby Inside

irb(main):025:0" 


irb(main):026:0" 

irb(main):027:0"  Julius Sirait

irb(main):028:0" 


irb(main):029:0" 

irb(main):030:0"

irb(main):031:0"  Kojack

irb(main):032:0" 


irb(main):033:0" 

irb(main):034:0"  Muhammad Rofiq

irb(main):035:0" 


irb(main):036:0" 

irb(main):037:0"  Niwatori

irb(main):038:0" 


irb(main):039:0" 

irb(main):040:0"  Pak Bambang

irb(main):041:0"

irb(main):042:0" 


irb(main):043:0" 

irb(main):044:0"  Ruby Indonesia

irb(main):045:0" 


irb(main):046:0" 

irb(main):047:0"  Ruby Inside

irb(main):048:0" 


irb(main):049:0" 

irb(main):050:0"  Yohanes Santoso

irb(main):051:0" 


irb(main):052:0" 

irb(main):053:0" HEREDOC

=> "\n\n Aditya Agustyana\n
\n\n\n Andry S. Huzain\n
\n\n Arie Kusuma Atmaja\n
\n\n Budi Susanto\n
\n\n Hendra\n\n
\n\n Hendy Irawan\n
\n\n JRuby Inside\n
\n\n Julius Sirait\n
\n\n\n Kojack\n
\n\n Muhammad Rofiq\n
\n\n Niwatori\n
\n\n Pak Bambang\n\n
\n\n Ruby Indonesia\n
\n\n Ruby Inside\n
\n\n Yohanes Santoso\n
\n
\n"

 irb(main):054:0> Hpricot(doc).search('li/a:nth(1)').each { |e| puts "* [#{e[:href]} #{e.inner_text}]" }; nil

* [http://adityakircon.blogsome.com Aditya Agustyana]

* [http://andryshuzain.com/ Andry S. Huzain]

* [http://ariekusumaatmaja.wordpress.com Arie Kusuma Atmaja]

* [http://thinkruby.org Budi Susanto]

* [http://hendrastation.wordpress.com Hendra]

* [http://www.adaruby.com Hendy Irawan]

* [http://www.rubyinside.com/ JRuby Inside]

* [http://julius.sirait.net/ Julius Sirait]

* [http://www.kojack.web.id Kojack]

* [http://www.mrofiq.com Muhammad Rofiq]

* [http://www.diki.or.id/blog/public/chicken-on-rails Niwatori]

* [http://bpdp.wordpress.com Pak Bambang]

* [http://www.ruby-id.web.id/rss/ Ruby Indonesia]

* [http://www.rubyinside.com Ruby Inside]

* [http://microjet.ath.cx/WebWiki/WelcomePage.html Yohanes Santoso]

=> nil

 irb(main):055:0>

jadi deh

PS: Sayang yach nggak dibikinin screencastnya.. Mungkin ini yang dimaksud mas Arie dengan coding2 sulit? =))
Hayo sapa yang mau ikutan gathering 19 agustus??

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Web 2.0 User Interface Design, Rethink-ed

ceefour — Thu, 24 May 2007 11:30:00 +0000

Seriously, on a more conceptual level, user interface is not just about flashy effects and visual treats.

Enter: Bill Higgins’ The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design. (via Ajaxian)

Observe:

There’s a lesson here for software designers, and one that I’ve talked about recently – we must ensure that we design our applications to remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application.

…

Just like Windows/Mac/Linux apps have a native look and feel, so too do browser-based applications. The native widgets of the web are the standard HTML elements – hyperlinks, tables, buttons, text inputs, select boxes, and colored spans and divs. We’ve had the tools to create richer web applications ever since pre-standards DOMs and Javascript 1.0, but it’s only been the combination of DOM (semi-)standardization, XHR de-facto standardization, emerging libraries, and exemplary next-gen apps like Google Suggest and Gmail that have led to a non-trivial segment of the software community to attempt richer web UIs which I believe we’re now lumping under the banner of ‘Ajax’ (or is it ‘RIA’?). Like the web and Java before it, the availability of Ajax technology is causing some developers to diverge from the native look and feel of the web in favor of a user interface style I call “desktop app in a web browser”.

The magic belongs to the user.

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And This is Still Needed, for God Sakes!

ceefour — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 08:32:41 +0000

This is far from being a Ruby post.

But it got me smiling (although evilly).

// set the shitty parameter stuff (I hate Crystal Reports!!!) ParameterDiscreteValue pdv = new ParameterDiscreteValue(); pdv.Value = title; workSessionsByEmployee.ParameterFields["RangeTitle"] .CurrentValues = new ParameterValues(new ParameterValue[] { pdv }); crystalReportViewer.ParameterFieldInfo = workSessionsByEmployee.ParameterFields; workSessionsReportTableAdapter.FillByRange( absensiStainDataSet.WorkSessionsReport, begin, end); ... workSessionsByEmployee.SetDataSource(absensiStainDataSet); ... private void crystalReportViewer_ReportRefresh(object source, CrystalDecisions.Windows.Forms.ViewerEventArgs e) { // and this is still needed! For God sakes!!! e.Handled = true; }

Yes, it came from a client’s Visual Studio 2005 (C#) project that I wrote (pity who?), only a few months old.

What it does is filter the report based on a date range. Kinda’ painful to me. I scoured the net, MSDN, whatever, but that’s the best technique I could find at that time (that actually works).

I wonder how similar functionality could be implemented the Ruby way?

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Lazy Loading BLOBs in Active Record

ceefour — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:20:04 +0000

One of the performance-hurting issue in current Active Record is that it doesn’t allow you to lazy load BLOB columns (and sometimes, TEXT columns), which can contain huge data. Usually there’s nothing wrong, theoretically, with loading all columns. But let’s see how we can improve performance by lazy loading these columns…

Using Views to Lazy Load Columns

My workaround is not to create a separate table, but just create a separate view (I’m using PostgreSQL, but I believe you can do that too with recent MySQL). This view doesn’t contain the blob fields. I use set_table_name in the model to use this view. Since the view is updatable (in PostgreSQL you have to create several RULEs on the view to make it insert/update/delete-able), Active Record doesn’t know it’s dealing with a “fake” table.

Whenever I want to load/update the actual content all I had to do is issue a select_value(“SELECT content FROM photos WHERE ID=?”, …) something like that. Usually you won’t need finder features just to load the lazy blob, only the corresponding ID(s).

The steps:

Create a database view based on the original table, omitting the columns you want to lazy-load.
Make sure the view is updatable.
Use ActiveRecord::Base.set_table_name class method in your model to use the database view you just created.
Add accessors on your model to read/write lazyloaded columns using plain SQL.

Perhaps there is already a plugin to handle this, but a quick Google search didn’t reveal this.
Caching Processed Images

The next thing you may want to do is cache some BLOBs (or processed BLOBs) to files so Apache (or whatever your web server is) serves them directly, which is much faster than Rails processing.
I don’t actually cache all images, since my photos table contain huge blobs (usually over 100 KB each). I only cache the thumbnails. At first request to a photo thumbnail, my app will process it using rmagick, then save the generated thumbnail into some folder in RAILS_ROOT/tmp. I have a special RewriteCond/RewriteRule directive in .htaccess so that if a requested thumbnail is already there, Rails won’t be ran at all and Apache serves it directly. This makes thumbnails *very* fast. (I symlink in RAILS_ROOT/public/tmp_thumbnails to the tmp/thumbnails folder)

Were I able to use memcached maybe I’ll use that too. Unfortunately not all hosting services provide this luxury.
Steps:

Create a temporary folder. Example: #{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/thumbnails
Make a symbolic link in public to that folder: (how about Windows?)
ln -s tmp/thumbnails public/tmp_thumbnails
Make sure your controller/action works correctly. Save the resulting output to a file in your tmp/thumbnails folder.
Edit your .htaccess as such:
# Make sure the file exists
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/tmp_thumbnails/$1.jpg -f

# Rewrite the URL so it points to the file, not Rails
RewriteRule ^thumbnails/(\d+)$ tmp_thumbnails/$1.jpg [L]

Sorry for the too theoretical vague steps.

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Mimicking ON DELETE NO ACTION / RESTRICT in Active Record

ceefour — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:46:24 +0000

Active Record associations (has_many, has_one, belongs_to, has_and_belongs_to_many, etc.) only allows you to set :dependent as :destroy, :delete_all, or :nullify.

In the “real world”,some DBMSs (like PostgreSQL, which happen to be my favorite) allow you to have NO ACTION / RESTRICT during delete or update. Putting this on the DBMS will work most of the time. However, when you do testing with transactional fixtures, this will very likely cause problems. A failed statement will cause the transaction to “hang”, which can cause nasty error messages.

Besides, you want to handle these kinds of stuff in your Active Record model, don’t you? Here’s one quick way, use the “before_destroy” handler:

class Role :nullify # should be restrict

private
def ensure_no_users
raise ‘There are still users in this role.’ if !users.empty?
end
end

Note: You must put the “before_destroy” before the association (has_many). Otherwise it won’t work as advertised.

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So Hard Just to Be A Star…

ceefour — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 02:18:04 +0000

Overheard from Bugzilla:

Setting the default application on Vista doesn’t seam to work.

…

——- Comment #27 From Seth Spitzer [:ss] 2006-09-20 09:45 PST [reply] ——-

doug / robert. here come questions. please forgive my Vista / COM ignorance
in advance!

1) for non-Vista, in nsWindowsShellService::SetDefaultBrowser(), we write the
existing settings to MOZ_BACK_REGISTRY, and then in
nsWindowsShellService::RestoreFileSettings(), we restore them.

So for Vista, shouldn’t that mean we should be calling ClearUserAssociations()
in nsWindowsShellService::RestoreFileSettingsVista()?

2) nsWindowsShellService::SetDefaultBrowser() takes a bool, aForAllUsers.
Shouldn’t this be passed through to SetDefaultBrowserVista(), and if false,
shouldn’t we calling SetAppAsDefault() with the appropriate ASSOCIATIONLEVEL?

3) I am guess thing that the IApplicationAssociationRegistration interface is
duplicated in nsWindowsShellService.h so that will compile on versions of
versions of windows without shobjidl.h. is that right? But I think we should
move it to nsWindowsShellService.cpp (instead of having it in
nsWindowsShellService.h)

4) Any reason not to use CComPtr?

Phew!! So much just to be the default browser? I can understand the security issues involved , but I didn’t realize it has to be that difficult.

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Google’s Results are More Becoming Unpredictable!!

ceefour — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:25:15 +0000

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is becoming more and more difficult nowadays. Other than the obvious fact that there are lots of search engines, several big ones (the ubiquitous Google included), and also meta search engines and a host of other complications.

Now it’s becoming more common for search engines to have their own “sliders” for manipulating the search results. Google has Personalized Search (Beta) and others like MSN Search has something like this too.

When you think Google’s Personalized Search or “Search the Web” or “Search only in…” or SafeSearch are the only ones manipulating your results, well I thought the same way… But was I ever been more wrong:

Google “tiki jne” in English language: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tiki+jne
Google “tiki jne” in Indonesian language: http://www.google.com/search?hl=id&q=tiki+jne

When Google says “language”, I thought it means “user interface language”. But I never thought it would alter the search results as well. Go ahead and try it.

This has quite some implications. Since “Google in your language” has been here for a very, very long time (and many people are using localized Google unintentionally), it’s very true that the results you see in your language (or default English) will be entirely different than what the rest of the world sees.

And from what I looked for, it seems there’s no way to change this behavior (i.e. setting language to Indonesian but using the universal search results). As more and more things get personalized, you know there’ll be nothing universal in the future.

Conclusion

I’m not sure how to conclude. This may be good or may be bad. It sure is bad for some people, but I guess it’s a blessing for many others. Since Google and other search engines are more into this type of stuff in the near future, and they’re the experts, this has to be the way it should be. Even AdWords and AdSense are becoming more and more personal over time.

SEO is getting trickier, but it’s also getting easier at the same time because the search engine maker guys are making it easier for you to target YOUR personalized potential customers without you knowing it. I think that’s a win-win-win solution (win for you, win for your customers, and win for search engines).

Technorati : google, internet, search, search engine, seo, web
Del.icio.us : google, internet, search, search engine, seo, web

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