Adam Parrott's Plexus Blog

How to Remove External Rails Plugins from your Application

Adam Parrott — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:30:26 GMT

There isn't a single command in subversion to remove external plugins from your application so I figured I would post this to help the next person save 10 minutes of reading docs.

Make sure you are in the root of your app and do:
svn propedit svn:externals vendor/plugins

Just delete the line(s) of the plugins you no longer want.

If you get the following error then you need to set your environment variable.
svn: None of the environment variables SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR is set, and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration option was found

You can set your SVN_EDITOR to use TextMate like so:
export SVN_EDITOR='mate -w'

My Christmas Wishlist

Adam Parrott — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:57:43 GMT

With Christmas around the corner I have started looking at all the things I don't need but really, really want. A couple of months ago I bought an HD TV and armed it with an HD TiVo. I promised myself (and my wife) that I would stop there but secretly knew that a regular SD DVD player was an embarrassing item to have in my entertainment center. In my search for more HD goodness, I started looking at HD DVD players and Blu-Ray players. I have always hated the idea of using a format created by Sony because of the cost to the consumer (ie, PlayStation Memory Cards) so my searching was more HD DVD oriented. Today I found the one feature that beats Blu-Ray one million times to one.

That's right. Season One of the Original Star Trek in HD. Only available in HD DVD format. What more could you possibly need to convince you that HD DVD is the format to have?

Mac OSX Open Terminals from Location in Finder

Adam Parrott — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:33:38 GMT

When working on projects I normally have multiple terminals open in the project directory. I found it quite annoying to type cd /path/to/project in every terminal so I wrote this script that can be used in Automator to open my terminals and change to the directory for me.

on run {input, parameters}
set topleft to {5, 25}
set topright to {860, 25}
set bottomleft to {5, 520}
set bottomright to {860, 520}
set locations to {topleft, topright, bottomleft, bottomright}
repeat with loc in locations
  tell application "Terminal"
   activate
   with timeout of 1800 seconds
    set firstpath to item 1 of input
    do script with command "cd " & (quoted form of POSIX path of firstpath)
    tell window 1
     set position to loc
     set number of columns to 130
     set number of rows to 32
    end tell
   end timeout
  end tell
end repeat
end run

Rails Caching non HTML Files in a Different Cache Location

Adam Parrott — Wed, 09 May 2007 00:30:49 GMT

We use page caching in Rails to speed up sites and improve performance. This is a great feature of Rails but can get cumbersome when trying to keep up with which pages to sweep and when. To make life easier we use a separate directory to house the cache. This solution is great for files that end in a .html extension but for other file types you need a new rewrite rule for mod_rewrite. The example below is for caching dynamic images.

RewriteRule ^([^"cache"].+)\.(png)$ cache/$1.png

I am rewriting any request for a .png to have the cache/ added to the beginning of the url. I am also checking to make sure the url hasn't already been rewritten otherwise Apache gets stuck in a loop rewriting the url. Depending on the application, you may need to add a slash in front of cache like so:

RewriteRule ^([^"cache"].+)\.(png)$ /cache/$1.png

Snippets and OpenID Fun

Adam Parrott — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:38:17 GMT

While playing around at lunch today I stumbled across Parsed.org. It is a code geek snippet repository that uses OpenID as a method of authentication for it's users. I found Random Rows from SQL interesting since I recently did something very similar.

Removing Desk Clutter

Adam Parrott — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:59:21 GMT

Ever since I bought my MacBook and made the switch to OSX, I have found the Stickies app to be quite useful. Even more useful would be a web based app that I could access from anywhere. Today I have found it. Save a tree and your desk.
Stikis

Firefox Crashes on Gmail

Adam Parrott — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 17:11:51 GMT

Last week I noticed that every time I tried to compose an email in Gmail, Firefox would have a hard crash. I figured it was something in the javascript and left Gmail alone for a few days since it is Beta. This week I decided to try it again and I experienced the same behavior. In an effort to debug this problem I tried Gmail in all the browsers that I had installed. I had the same crash in Camino and Opera but it worked fine in Safari. After much poking around I found that my Palatino font was corrupted. After replacing the font everything was fine.

Yes. Significant shrinkage!

Adam Parrott — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:05:38 GMT

I decided to play around with reducing page weight today. I wrote this script to strip out new lines and whitespace. There wasn't a huge amount of difference in the individual file sizes but when you subtract 8-10k per file from the total document weight the difference is noticeable.

download shrinker.rb

Rails Caching non HTML Files

Adam Parrott — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:35:00 GMT

Rails page caching is without a doubt the best way to speed up your application and reduce the server load. I decided to cache some XML I was dumping out for a web service and realized that Rails will cache the document as HTML. As long as the controller handles nothing but xml you can do the following as a work-around:

class LinkApiController < ApplicationController

  session :off
  skip_before_filter :check_authorization

  LinkApiController.page_cache_extension = '.xml'
  caches_page :get_stuff

  ...
end

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Adam Parrott — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:24:21 GMT

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