Posted by ryan, Thu Jan 21 09:42:00 UTC 2010
Most of the activity in the group happens on the mailing list. I’ve been lax in making sure the blog stays updated. Please join the list if you’re interested in keeping up.
On Monday, Jan 25, we will be having a evening meeting at Prism. Rather than doing a presentation, this will be more of a coding share/hackfest. Our focus will be on testing but any code discussions are welcome.
Check out the mailing list for more details.
Posted by andy, Fri Aug 14 08:47:00 UTC 2009
I always forget to clean or change the air filters in my house. By the time I pull them down they're a lint-filled mess. Unfortunately, filtering in your Rails code may end up the same way as your users layer in new ad hoc filtering requirements for your most important classes.
How do you handle filtering a list you've presented to a user, with all the combinations and permutations of user-driven ad hoc parameters? And how do you then layer sorting and paging on top of the filtered mess? Check out Filtering, sorting, paging... oh my! for some ideas on clean code to produce the results your users need without expanding the public API of your Rails app.
Posted by ryan, Fri Jun 12 11:41:00 UTC 2009
This month I will be reviewing Slither, an open source DSL I wrote in Ruby for parsing and building fixed-width text files. I’ll walk through the use case for the project and demo it’s use. I also plan to talk about my approach to building and testing the DSL.
In the meantime, feel free to fork or clone the project on Github and take a look. I’d love for you guys to come with questions, suggestions and even patches. I’m looking forward to it.
Presenter: Ryan Wood, sourcescape.com
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Doors are open at 11:45am so we can chat before the presentation begins at 12:00pm. If you’re pressed for time at lunch, feel free to come right at 12:00pm.
Immedion will be graciously hosting our group. Click here for directions.
Posted by ryan, Wed May 20 09:24:00 UTC 2009
“Imagine a world without SQL, a world where your database doesn’t even have a schema, a world where you don’t have to worry about shoehorning your objects into relational tables.” Well this is the world promised by CouchDB, the new document oriented database from the Apache Foundation. So come out and see if it lives up to all the hype!
Presenter: Colin Alstad, Prism Content Solutions
Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Doors are open at 11:45am so we can chat before the presentation begins at 12:00pm. If you’re pressed for time at lunch, feel free to come right at 12:00pm.
Immedion will be graciously hosting our group. Click here for directions.
Posted by andy, Mon Apr 20 14:22:00 UTC 2009
What do you do when your data domain is well-factored but just isn't 'convenient'? For example, suppose you create a data model in which both a Person and a Building have an Address and you've pulled out a ZipCode class so that you can prompt your user to select from a list of previously known city/state pairs. Do you compromise your award winning data model and repeat (gasp!) data? Do you provide a series of convenience methods? No! Teach your objects (and maybe yourself) to delegate.
In this talk we'll look at ways that ActiveRecord simplifies delegation and how you can take advantage of Ruby to build similar delegation in non-ActiveRecord classes.
Posted by andy, Mon Mar 16 12:01:00 UTC 2009
Posted by ryan, Sun Mar 15 22:24:00 UTC 2009
At next meeting, I’m (Ryan) going to be talking about Git, the notorious version control system. Rails and many of the open source projects have moved from Subversion (svn) to Git. I’ll be discussing the benefits and challenges of it. I hope you’ll come out.
Doors are open at 11:45am so we can chat before the presentation begins at 12:00pm. If you’re pressed for time at lunch, feel free to come right at 12:00pm.
Immedion will be graciously hosting our group. Click here for directions.
Posted by ryan, Thu Jan 15 11:03:00 UTC 2009
We will be meeting on the 27th. For the new year I thought we would start having smaller (15-20 min) talks by group members. Please come and share what you’ve been doing in the Ruby or Rails world. If you’ve stumbled on some gotchas or found a cool gem. Come out and share with the rest of us. It will be very informal. No pressure, no preparation (well, don’t spend more that 15 mins or so if you do want to prepare).
Doors are open at 11:45am so we can chat before the presentation begins at 12:00pm. If you’re pressed for time at lunch, feel free to come right at 12:00pm.
Immedion will be graciously hosting our group. Click here for directions.
I’ll be demoing Balsamiq Mockups and thanks to their generosity, I’ll be giving away a license for their desktop mockup product. I look forward to seeing everyone.
Posted by andy, Tue Oct 14 14:30:00 UTC 2008
If you're like me you might slip into a comfort zone and not keep up with all the updates to gems and plugins, especially since github has taken plugin/gem development and forking viral. Usually that's not much of a problem. Unless, of course, the change is to the gem package manager itself.
I'm not sure exactly what changed. What I know is that any time I tried to do a '(sudo) gem install my-cool-gem' it failed with an error that looked like this
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.github.org/
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
Errno::EPIPE: Broken pipe reading http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/...some-poor-gem.gem
As best as google has been able to help me find the problem lay in the the increasingly large number of gems available. The large, uncompressed source of gems times out the connection. Fortunately that appears to be fixed in the latest version of rubygems. Version 1.3.0 was released yesterday. But now you've got a chicken-and-egg problem if you have relied on gems to update itself -- the Broken Pipe problem prevents you from getting the version that doesn't have the Broken Pipe problem.
The simple answer to the question is to install the gem from a local source rather than a remote source. It works the same as the tried and true "gem install my-cool-gem" with just one extra step. Here's what I did specifically to fix the issue with the gem package manager.
sudo gem install rubygems-update -n ~/Gemsupdate_rubygemsOnce I updated to rubygems v 1.3.0 the Broken Pipe Problem disappeared on my Ubuntu box. Hope the same is true for you!