If you are a web-developer who recently switched to linux, you are likely to encounter this bug sooner rather than later. In summary, when using firefox on ubuntu to test against local web-app, be ware that this bug prevents cookies from being saved and send back to server properly. The work-around is to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost.
Sometimes, I write these things so that six months from now, when I’ve completely forgotten a crucial part of this post, at least I can find it from the inevitable Google search.
This post is the practical companion to my post about a month ago about keeping up with Edge Rails and new versions. There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.
I should say up front that there are a number of mechanisms for automating or semi automating the update process by linking directly to the external source repository. These tools would include git submodules, subversion externals, a separate program like Braid, and so on. I haven’t found a tool in this space that I would recommend. I’ve found them all kind of finicky to set up and/or run. Plus, I like the idea of having all the extensions in my source tree in sync with my actual code — I feel like that gives me a better chance of dialing back to a specific point in the code and having all the right pieces in place.
Read more »One of the things I most admire about Ward Cunningham’s work is that you can read something like ‘Signature Survey‘ and still find new things to appreciate, even years later.
Ward’s original article discussed a method to tackle large code bases (based somewhat on Tufte’s ideas on data visualization). To quote the original article, he summarized the process as the iterative application of two steps:
1. Inspection. Browse the report looking for startlingly regular or startlingly irregular structure. Examine the source code associated with each (ir)regularity.
2. Projection. Modify the summarization program (the cgi script that generates the report) so as to represent aspects of the inspected code that seem relevant to the inquiry at hand.
The real lesson I took years ago from ‘Signature Survey’ is that, when dealing with any sufficiently complex problem, knowing which questions to ask may not be obvious. And rather than approaching each problem with the same set of questions or criteria in mind, it is useful to let the problem itself guide you to the right questions.
All of this should seems obvious right? It is, after all, a simple idea. Still, if you have never done so, I would ask you to really give this idea some thought. Sleep on it. Think about it during your walk back from lunch tomorrow and take your time with it. Toy with the idea and some current problem you are working on. I’m not kidding– the exercise will be worthwhile in the end, and will continue to pay off.
I was fooling around with Rails Metal earlier today to get a better feel for it. One of the most obvious uses for me is disassociating an upload task from your application; a single Rails instance blocks while waiting for an upload to finish, so particularly for very large file uploads, your application can stop responding to users if all instances are taken up by uploaders.
With Metal, you can spawn separate tasks on different process IDs: then when you need to upload, Rails calls to them and that Metal handles the upload (and blocks), while the application instance itself is free to service other requests. This article was super helpful in describing how to use Rackup to start a Metal piece as a separate process. But in all my searching I didn’t find anything clearly delineated on the Internet for how to make Metal work with file uploads, so this is how I did it.
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I’ve gotten lots of feedback, much of it asking “what’s the alternative?” to using beans and getters and setters. I’ll make a deal with my skeptical readers. I’ll argue the negative, with examples, if they argue the affirmative. In other words, you show me some places where you can’t get around using getters and setters and I’ll show you all sorts of places for the next few weeks, from real open source projects, where people have screwed the pooch with unnecessary getters and setters.
