Good luck to the merged Rails team and hopefully Rails 3 will kick ass! Let’s hope git will really deliver on this gig! Try to refrain from using git blame too much when resolving merge conflicts. 
4 Comments - Tags: awesomeness, bloat, community, conflicts, git, merb, merge, rails
My personal domain vanbergen.org is almost 10 years old. Besides the accompanying e-mail address, I’ve never used it extensively, but its one of the oldest pieces of my “legacy” that can be found on the Internet and it is the starting point of my online identity.
Lately, major internet companies have embraced the OpenID standard to allow other sites to login with the login credentials of these major sites, basically running an OpenID server. (Curiously, they do not support consuming OpenIDs themselves, so I still have to trust them with my password. What’s up with that?) I can use most of the sites I have an account on as OpenID identity. For example, my Flickr page is an OpenID identity URL. With more and more sites supporting consuming OpenIDs (including Floorplanner!), I will not have to remember all those passwords and the internet will become a better place because of it.
It would be nice to use my 10 year old domain name as my OpenID identity. This is actually very easy because of delegation. I do not have to run my own OpenID server: I can just add a header to my site that points to the OpenID server that I will be using. I have chosen to use my Google Account as OpenID server. To accomplish this, I simply added the following tag to the <head>-section of the vanbergen.org site:
<link rel="openid2.provider"
href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud" />Now, I can simply enter “vanbergen.org” when my OpenID identity URL is requested on a site. How neat is that? That site will check my personal site for this tag and will redirect me to the Google Account page, on which I can confirm that I want to login to that site. Note: the site has to support OpenID 2.0, because Google does not offer an OpenID 1.0 provider. Luckily, most sites do.
I do not know what happens to the sites I have registered on with OpenID if I decide to change my OpenID provider and I change the value on vanbergen.org accordingly. Does anybody know if my existing OpenID accounts will keep working in this case?
1 Comment - Tags: consumer, delegate, Google account, openid
Because Jaap finally convinced Gert-Jan, we have moved to the Git version control system for the main Floorplanner repository. Now we can use branches for different functionality far more easily. As an easy reminder to some common Git tasks I will need regularly, I have written down some Git recipes. This is basically meant for me and my fellow developers, but maybe it can help you as well. Suggestions to improve my workflow are welcome!
Because I will be using branches more regularly now, it is nice to know what branch I am currently working in. git branch will provide this information, but it can be more direct by including the current branch in your terminal prompt.
To display the current git branch in my terminal prompt, I have added the following to my Bash configuration file ~/.profile:
parse_git_branch() {
git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ \[\1\]/'
}
PS1='\[\033[01;37m\]\w\[\033[00;35m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\] \$ 'I use a black, semi-transparent terminal with white text, and pink branch names. Change the colors to your own liking!
If you want to help out on a branch that somebody else started and has pushed it to the remote repository, you can checkout this branch and make it “track” the remote branch.
$ git checkout -b newbranch origin/newbranch
In this example, origin/newbranch is the branch in the remote repository. Locally, this branch will be called newbranch. A simple git pull will update my branch with the latest changes from the remote branch later on, git push will send my changes to the remote server.
Sometimes I want to start a new branch myself if I want to work on a new feature or on disruptive refactoring of the main codebase.
$ git checkout -b feature
The feature branch is now available locally. After some time, I want to share my current changes in this branch with other developers. I should make the branch available in the remote repository so other can access it like I described above.
$ git commit -m "Added initial version of %feature%" $ git push origin feature
The feature branch will now be available to other developers as well. Note that the local feature-branch is not tracking the remote branch of the same name. This can be enabled by changing the configuration of the repository.
After work is completed on my feature-branch and it is tested thoroughly, I want to merge the branch with the master branch of the project. To make sure the merge with the master branch is seamless and all possible merge conflicts are handled beforehand, we first run git rebase. This ensures that the changes in the feature branch are relative to the latest commit to the master branch and can therefore be applied by a “fast forward”. It is best to run git rebase from time time to time while you are developing in the feature branch to make sure your work does not divert to much from the main development in the master branch.
# make sure that the current branch is seamlessly # mergeable with the master branch $ git rebase master # switch to the master branch $ git checkout master # now, merge the feature branch $ git merge feature # publish the merge to the remote server $ git push origin master
I can now delete the local and remote feature branch, as the changes have been incorporated in the master branch:
$ git branch -d feature $ git branch -d -r origin/feature
2 Comments - Tags: bash colors, branches, checkout, git, origin, pull, push, remote
I just released version 0.2.0 of request-log-analyzer, our tool to analyze request log files that are generated by Rails and Merb for performance tweaking. This new version supports the new log format of Rails 2.2, which has changed slightly.
An updated gem should be available any minute now. Run sudo gem update to upgrade the newest version.
No Comments - Tags: log files, merb, performance, rails, request-log-analyzer
I would like to thank you all for helping us build our thumbnail database!
I presume this statement might be in need of some clarification, so bear with me when I go into the technical details on this one.
For every design that is saved on Floorplanner, we create a thumbnail in JPEG format. We use these thumbnails for the gallery, and now we have included them on everyone’s dashboard. However, for various reasons, we do not have a thumbnail available for every design. However, with your help, we are improving the thumbnail database while you our browsing the site!
The thumbnail images are stored on Amazon AWS S3. We know the URL that a thumbnail of a design should have, but we do not know if it actually is available. In the latter case, the result is a nasty image not found placeholder on the dashboard. This of course is not acceptable! We cannot know if a thumbnail exists other than doing a request to the URL and see whether we get an image back from Amazon, or a HTTP 404 status. This is a very time-consuming procedure to run server side so we chose to find a client-side solution.
We found that javascript can be used to check if an image exist. An AJAX call cannot be used, because cross-site calls are not supported. However, the javascript Image object can be used for this purpose.
var img = new Image(); img.onload = function(event) { // image was found and loaded successfully document.getElementById('img-tag').src = img.src; }; img.onerror = function(event) { // An error occured while loading the image document.getElementById('img-tag').src = '/images/thumb-unavailable.jpg'; } // Setting the src property will trigger the events. img.src = 'http://link.to.amazon.s3/design/thumbnail.jpg';
A nice thumbnail not available image will be shown if the thumbnail file cannot be found on S3. This is much nicer, and the check is completely done client-side! However, we found a way this could even be better by changing the onerror event handler. Instead of displaying a thumbnail not available image, we can simply load a small instance of the Floorplanner application to display a small version of the design. Moreover, we can instruct it to generate a thumbnail JPEG and save it to S3!
So, every time you see a small Floorplanner loading on your dashboard, you are creating a missing thumbnail. Next time, the thumbnail will be available on S3 and there will be no need to start the Floorplanner application. A nice example of distributed computing, mixed with a hint of SETI@home. I like it!
No Comments - Tags: client-side, Floorplanner, image, Javascript, S3
Some time ago, I wrote about putting HTTP status code to use for your Rails application. For my reinvigorated project, I wanted to apply the same technique. Instead of re-implementing it once again, I created a Rails plugin called http_status_exceptions to easily add this functionality and I have put it on Github. For more information on how to install and use the plugin, see the project’s wiki.
No Comments - Tags: gem, github, http status codes, http_status_exceptions, plugin, rails
I just started working on an old Rails project after having neglected it for 15 months. Most of the view files still had the good old .rhtml extension. I was too lazy to rename these files by hand, both on my file system and in the git repository. I used the following Bash commands to do the job:
First, I renamed all the partials to the .erb extension. Note: I am not using .html.erb, as some of these partials are used in js-formatted responses as well:
for i in `find app/views/**/_*.rhtml`; do \ git mv $i `echo $i | sed s/\\.rhtml$/.erb/`; \ done
The remaining files could now be renamed to .html.erb with a similar command:
for i in `find app/views/**/*.rhtml`; do \ git mv $i `echo $i | sed s/\\.rhtml$/.html.erb/`; \ done
Note that this technique works with Subversion as well: just substitute git with svn in the command above. A regular rename is possible as well by leaving out git altogether!
Now my file names are Rails-compliant again, I can start refactoring all the code that is not up to current Rails standards anymore. Ah, the virtues of developing with a rapidly evolving framework…
I have been using git for a while now, and I believe I have the the basic workflow under control. Committing, reverting, using local branches for major refactoring work: been there, done that! However, I recently got some collaborators on my github-projects, I had to start working with other remote repositories and branches.
I found this blog post, which was really helpful. I am sharing some others things that helped me in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully, this saves other people some time Googling. If you know a better ways to accomplish these tasks, please let me know!
Because I had some troubles discovering how to properly work with remote repositories, I am sharing what I found. The most important things to remember:
git checkout local-branch.git pull remote-name remote-branch in your local branch.
Bart is implementing Merb log parsing for request-log-analyzer. He has put his progress in a separate branch of the github project. My local repository does not yet include this branch, but I want to check it out. Note that I am using a different name than the branch name on the github project.
$ git branch merb origin/generic_base $ git checkout merb
When the new functionality is finished, the following commands will merge the changes in the merb branch to the master branch.
# goto my local master branch and merge the merb-branch $ git checkout master $ git merge merb # push the changes to the master branch on github $ git push origin master
Wes Hays is helping me out on the scoped_search plugin. He implemented OR in the query language in his own fork. I wanted to merge his changes back to master branch:
# add a reference to the remote repository $ git remote add gbdev git://github.com/gbdev/scoped_search.git # create a local branch for the fork to follow a remote branch $ git branch gbdev-fork gbdev/master $ git checkout gbdev-fork
Now, my local gbdev-fork branch contains Wes’s code. Because Wes’s repository was forked from my repository, git will know that most of the history of my master branch and gbdev-fork branch is the same.
After some testing, I was ready to include his changes by merging the gbdev-fork branch into my local master branch:
# go back to my master branch, and merge the changes $ git checkout master $ git merge gbdev-fork # push the changes to the master branch at hithub $ git push origin master
You can create tags locally, but you probably want to send them to the remot repository as well:
# create a local tag "tagname" with the given message. $ git tag -a "tagname" -m "message" # send your tags to the remote repository "origin" $ git push origin --tags
4 Comments - Tags: branches, git, merging, remote
Since I announced rails-log-analyzer some weeks ago, quite a lot has happened! Apparently there is some interest in such a tool: on this blog we get a lot of traffic looking for more info, the github project already has 22 watchers and it even has been forked!
In the mean time, Bart and I worked hard to add new functionality and refactored the internal design. As a result, I have released request-log-analyzer 0.1.0 today!
gem sources -a http://gems.github.com sudo gem install wvanbergen-request-log-analyzer
request-log-analyzer [LOG FILES*] request-log-analyzer -c 20 -z log/production.log
Please let me know what you think! If you have any problems using the tool, do not hesitate to contact me!
13 Comments - Tags: "rails-log-analyzer", Logger, production.log, request-log-analyzer, statistics
My friend Bart from movesonrails.com just blogged about Rails log analyzer, a command line tool to get performance statistics for your Rails application by parsing its log file.
What started as an exercise for me to write a command line ruby program, has been extended and improved by Bart to be actually useful! We decided to release it under an MIT license. You can found the source on github. The project’s wiki contains usage information and an example of the output it will produce.
5 Comments - Tags: "rails-log-analyzer", rails, request-log-analyzer, statistics
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