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nRake – Rake builds for .NET
Fed up with XML based builds that are hard to maintain, refactor and extend? Rather than trying to fix this with more xml and community tasks, or re-invent the wheel, let's use Rake. Rake is a mature...
View ArticlePodcast from ALM Conference
At the ALM Conference, Richard interviewed me for a podcast on the Ultimate ALM Environment circa 2010 as well as a little on build and deployment automation. Check out the podcast on Talking Shop!
View ArticlenRake now on IronRuby
nRake, the premier project and build template for .NET projects using the Rake build system now has a branch for .NET4 using IronRuby. Projects are also updated to VS2010 format, and Albacore gems are...
View ArticleACS Alm Talk: Presentation Wrap Up & Slides
Thanks everyone who came along last night. It was a fun session, with a lot of lively discussion, especially around project management and software design. As mentioned during the talk, you might want...
View ArticleRuby 1.8 Scoping and Blocks
Quick ruby quiz.. after these two lines execute, what is the value of number? >> number = 5 >> (1..10).each {|number| print number} Well, number will be 10, thanks to the block being run...
View ArticleOdd Date and Time Comparisons in Rails & Hack night
While comparing Dates and Times in Rails (both 2.3 and 3), I came across an odd behaviour: >> Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 9:59") == Date.new(2010, 7, 26) => false >> Time.parse("Mon, 26...
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Rails Refactor & Hack Night
During the RORO hack night last Wednesday, Ryan Bigg (@ryanbigg) and I worked on a Rails Refactor, something I've been meaning to get going for a long time. How often have you wasted time doing renames...
View ArticlenRake Microsoft Case Study
nRake is now the subject of a Microsoft case study. Check it out here: Microsoft Case Study on nRake in PDF format UPDATE: Now on the Microsoft Case Study site.
View ArticleShort Talk on rails_refactor at Rails group
I'll be giving a short talk with Ryan Bigg on Rails Refactor at the next Sydney Rails Group (RORO) meet (Tuesday, Feb 8 from 7pm) . We'll be talking about Rails Refactor's birth at a hack night last...
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VIM is Sydney Rails Devs’ Favourite Editor
Outstanding news! As part of the rails refactor talk at RORO (Sydney Rails Group) tonight (great evening by the way!), I asked for a show of hands on people's favoured editors. I was amazed to discover...
View ArticleRails Refactor is now a Gem!
Rails Refactor, a small command line tool to make rails refactoring more fun, is now available as a gem. To use: gem install rails_refactor More info available on github.
View ArticleVPS Performance Comparison and Benchmarking
What VPS / cloud instance provider gives you the best bang for buck for a small linux server? I've been focusing on evaluating providers at the low cost end, and reasonable latency to Australia -...
View ArticleTalk on Tues: Moving to HTTPS
I'll be giving a talk at Sydney ALT.NET on Tues: After recently moving the Getup site fully to HTTPS, James will share with you security pitfalls, the justification for the move from mixed HTTP/HTTPS,...
View ArticleMoving to HTTPS, Rails force_ssl and Rollback
Background We recently moved the Getup site from mixed HTTP/HTTPS to completely HTTPS. The primary driver was to ensure that sessions were never sent in plain text over the wire, to avoid session...
View ArticleBigDecimal fix for Rails 4 with Ruby 2.4
Rails 4.2.9 works well with Ruby 2.4.2 except for an incompatible change with invalid decimal values and String#to_d. BigDecimal was changed in 1.3.0 (which ships with Ruby 2.4) to throw an exception...
View ArticleRails serving big password protected files – Capistrano Rsync & X-Sendfile
Say you’ve got a few app servers, and you want to serve up some largish files from your rails app (eg, pdfs) behind a login screen. Well, you could put them on s3 and redirect the user to s3 with...
View ArticleFixing ‘Invalid query parameters: invalid %-encoding’ in a Rails App
Sometimes users manually edit query strings in the address bar, and make requests that have invalid encodings. Unfortunately Rails does not handle this neatly and the exception bubbles up. Eg,...
View ArticleImporting Excel 365 CSVs with Ruby on OSX
Up until 2016, Excel for the Mac provided a handy CSV export format called “Windows CSV”, which used iso-8859-1/Windows-1252 encoding. It was reliable, handled simple extended characters like degree...
View ArticleRails: Removing error divs around labels
Rails makes it very easy to style fields with errors on your form. Unfortunately, the same error DIV with class ‘.field_with_errors’ is applied around labels, as well as inputs/checkboxes/selects. This...
View ArticleRails ActiveModel, with nested objects and validation
So maybe you have a model that is not backed by a database table? ActiveModel is meant to cover this scenario and give you the usual ActiveRecord goodness and validation. But the story gets much harder...
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