Code Intensity

DealBase Now With RSS Feeds For Hotel Deals

2009-10-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been extremely busy with DealBase work, so have lagged on blogging, but have some interesting things coming up and hope to post more soon. Recently I added RSS feeds to all of the city/destination and hotel pages on DealBase. This is just one more way for you to keep up to date with all the deals we add to the system. Our other primary way, aside from browsing the site of course, is to sign up for personalized alert emails. This lets you follow one or more cities, and set criteria like class of hotel (i.e. you only want to see 4 and 5 star hotels), maximum price, and so on. You can set a schedule for how often you want the emails (once a week, twice a week, daily, etc.). We'll send you up to the best 10 deals that match your criteria. You can also simply subscribe by just supplying your email address and nothing else and we'll set your initial preferences for our top 10 destinations. We'll continue to enhance this alert service, and I'd love to hear any suggestions people have for additions, changes, etc.

Development of the alert emails has been interesting. One of the most useful tools throughout has been Litmus' email testing service. It's pretty slick. They cover quite an array of email clients, both web hosted (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), as well as desktop (Outlook, Apple Mail, Notes, etc.). They also do spam testing. When you begin a test, they supply you an email address specific for that particular test run, and then you just email them the real email you want tested. You can also paste in an email, but I prefer to do the sending approach to as closely mimic the real thing as possible. I have my IRB and various other bits configured to make it a single command to fire off test cases to a Litmus supplied email address, and the whole process works great, and is truly worth Litmus' cost.

I started off mentioning RSS, and back to that... The RSS does work differently than the email alerts (obviously), and to some degree the web page. It is like selecting the "Most Recently Posted" sort on a page (see below image). Deals are supplied to the RSS feed as they're posted, just like a blog would do. Just one more way to stay on top of deals. Oh, and don't forget we're on Twitter too.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Further Continuous Integration travels: Hudson, and Back to Integrity

2009-08-20T14:28:00.001-07:00

[Update: I resolved the Git issue, and have now switched to using Hudson. The advantages of it's in-progress display, ability to more closely monitor and/or kill a build, and my impression of it being more stable, won the day.]

After switching our CI server to Integrity, there were a few blips, one of which is that we were hitting swap (memory). Hitting swap is not surprising and I'm surprised it hasn't been a problem sooner, since memory is our #1 battle. I figured if I was going to up the memory on our CI server, I might also try Hudson, as that was the main reason for not trying it previously.

The short story is that I tried it, and we're back to Integrity, but I learned some interesting things. The following is both some notes on installation, as well as some reasons why it didn't work out...

Installing Hudson

Our CI box is a slice at Slicehost, running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and I'd just upped it from 256MB RAM to 1GB. Also of note, I've built and install Git 1.6.4 for this system. The following are brief notes on getting Hudson going as it wasn't quite as simple as most folks made it out to be...

First, I followed the directions on the Hudson site for installing Hudson from the Ubuntu package. This amounts to adding the package repository, updating apt-get, and then doing:

sudo apt-get install hudson

This installs all the Java 1.6 stuff you need (and mine seems fine with 64bit Java), and other dependencies. After the install, Hudson is running, on default port 8080. Next up I added a server block/configuration in Nginx for Hudson (and unlinked/removed Integrity). I then went to Hudson in my browser. What I got was an error message about the xstream library. Fixing that was easy, as it turned out: downloaded the latest (1.320 at the time) hudson.war from the Hudson site, and replaced /usr/share/hudson/hudson.war with it. Restarted Hudson, and voila, now it was up and running.

Also, Hudson runs as the user "hudson", so I needed to add an SSH key for that user, and then add the public key to GitHub. And, setup a ~hudson/.gitconfig as needed. Finally, as I found later, do a git clone or an SSH to github so that you get past the whole SSH authenticity question when you first SSH to an unknown server. Note, the Hudson user is not an interactive user, i.e. you can't directly login as that user, so to gen the SSH key, you'll need do something like su to root and do, sudo -u hudson ssh-keygen -t dsa.

Configuring Hudson

Before adding a project, I needed to config some plugins. I went to the Manage page, clicked on Installed, and turned off the Subversion plugin and restarted. Next was going back in to manage plugins, and installing the Git, Github, and Rake plugins, and again restarting. Both restarts showed an Nginx bad gateway error, but simply refreshing got it back (probably just needed more time for Hudson to restart).

Then to configure a build, from the main Hudson page after a fresh install, click the "create new jobs" link. In the ensuing form, enter a project name, and select "Build a free-style software project".

Next:

checked "Discard Old Builds" which then shows you options (so you can put in keep for X days, or X number of builds)

Added URL for Github project, http://github.com/yourproject/yourproject

Select Git as the SCM, and entered by git@github.com:yourproject/yourproject.git URL for the repository

Turned on merge after build option. This will supposedly add tags for the build to your code base and then merge them back in. More on this in a bit.

Next I configured the build steps for my project. All I really did here was take the same build steps I used for Integrity, and added them as individual shell and rake tasks.

At this point, I fired off a build (truth be told, I started with just a single build step to vet it), and things worked, with the exception of the very last step, where I push the Git tags back to GitHub. This is what I saw:


[workspace] $ /bin/sh -xe /tmp/hudson1444107192962944065.sh
+ /usr/bin/git push --tags
XML error: syntax error
error: Error: no DAV locking support on https://github.com/dealbase/dealbase/
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/dealbase/dealbase'

I've now been searching for answers to this, and haven't yielded anything. I've tried the git push directly from a shell, with the same result. If I do this as a different user (e.g. under my user) it works fine. This git push is attempted both as part of a rake task (the ci_tag task), as well as I tried making it just a straight shell command in Hudson.

After a lot of googling, and asking, and no resolution in sight, I've gone back to Integrity...

Comparisons and Notes

First off, I think Hudson looks pretty stellar. There are a TON of plugins for it, and it seems quite mature and polished. The essentially 100% configuration via the GUI is slick. Install, despite a few hoops above, was actually pretty painless. So, here's just a few notes/opinions:

Hudson

You will need some memory to run Hudson, more than with Integrity or CruiseControl.rb. From what I can tell, you probably want a system with 1GB or more. Various other folks I talked to all had 2GB or more systems, and their Hudson processes were taking 1.5GB or more. This is partly just a Java thing. It should be noted, the others were running more than one build with Hudson, and mine seemed to work fine on a 1GB total memory system (didn't seem to hit swap).

Hudson allows you to kill a build while it's running (nice!).

Hudson works with CCMenu/CCTray out of the box.

The git integration has more options in terms of picking branches, doing merging, and various more involved operations, but doesn't have GitHub post-receive hook support out of the box (there are plugins up on GitHub for it, but not listed in the standard plugin list).

Hudson runs as user "hudson", which is a user that has no shell. You could change this, although the idea is you shouldn't have to. However, this complicates setting up SSH keys and various things. And, of course, I had the issue with Git as mentioned above. I could probably change this to run as my user and so on, but part of all this for me is not having to change a lot of defaults and start messing with core configurations/designs of the system. In part, I just don't have time to do that, and to maintain it (these kinds of changes often cause problems when you upgrade versions, etc. - also known as you may forget to redo these changes if an upgrade undoes them :).

The UI and web app itself is quite nice, understandable, well done in general for something like this.

Also, thanks to the Tea-Driven blog for motivating me to try Hudson (and for some tips on Testjour - more on that in another post).

Integrity

I really only have one main complaint about Integrity, and that has to do with indication of a build in progress. It essentially doesn't indicate it - it says it hasn't been built yet, but a build may actually be running. The CCMenu/integritray plugin will show you that a build is running, so this mostly solves my problem, but this seems like a core failure. I may have to look at fixing this. And that is a win for Integrity in that it's Ruby, and thus I'll be more apt to go fix this (while I spent MANY years doing heavy Java work, I don't have interest in working in that code anymore for a task like this).

CruiseControl.rb

One thing that remains an advantage for CC.rb is that it has "build artifacts" - i.e. you can create files and such as part of your build and have those known to CC.rb, where it then links to them in the summary of your build. You may or may not need it, but it's also very handy for simply showing you the Git tag you created on a successful build. I just touch a file in the build artifacts dir with the name of the Git tag, and then I don't have to dig through the output of the build to find my Git tag.

That's all the time I have for today, hopefully this is also helpful to others...

Setting up Integrity for Continuous Integration

2009-08-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

Recently I switched the DealBase continuous integration server to use Integrity instead of CruiseControl.rb. This happened because I'd been having some sporadic failures under CC.rb that didn't seem explainable (no code would change, and tests would fail at random), and also due to some changes in Cucumber between versions, it all conspired to switch.

It should be noted that, as you might guess, the "random" failures were not exactly random, but suffice it to say that the root cause re-inforced my notion to switch. My main beef with CC.rb has more to do with it being somewhat in bed with Rake and wanting to run your CI build via a rake task, and some of the issues (or impurities?) that come up with that. But I'm boring you...

Anyway, Integrity... Setup is relatively easy, and is covered fairly well on their setup page/docs. But the following is what I did, which I'm documenting for myself and anyone else who may find it useful.

I setup my server to use with Nginx and Passenger. I tried using Integrity with Nginx and Thin, but wasn't able to get Integrity to work right (similar to the results defunkt had when they tried it at GitHub). We've standardized on Nginx+Passenger, so this was good anyway. I nuked the Nginx I had already and proceeded (all this being done on an Ubuntu Hardy VPS system at Slicehost):


sudo gem install passenger
sudo passenger-install-nginx-module

I let it install Nginx, and picked the default location. I then re-added our HTTP Basic Authentication and a few other Nginx tweaks as I had in the prior Nginx configuration. Next up was to install some prerequisites and Integrity itself:


sudo apt-get sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install integrity do_sqlite3 thin
integrity install /home/ci/integrity --passenger
cd integrity

Next you'll want to tweak config.yml to customize the domain where you'll access your CI server. I left the rest the same. Then setup Integrity's database:


integrity migrate_db /home/ci/integrity/config.yml

I also added the "integritray" plugin, so that I could continue to use CCMenu to monitor my builds. See the integritray GitHub page for simple install.

Now point Nginx/Passenger at your install, by adding the appropriate server block for a Passenger Rails app, such as:


server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  your.ciserver.com;
    root /home/ci/integrity/public;
    passenger_enabled on;

    auth_basic            "Restricted";
    auth_basic_user_file  /opt/nginx/conf/htpasswd;
}

Finally, fire up Nginx, and surf to your CI server domain/URL. You should see something like this:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Click the "create your first project" link, and enter details about your app. The "Git repository" field should get your GitHub or other git server URL (e.g. your clone URL). For a build script, the following is what I used:


rake log:clear && RAILS_ENV=test rake db:reset && spec --options spec/spec.opts spec/**/*_spec.rb && RAILS_ENV=cucumber rake db:reset && cucumber --strict -q --format pretty features && rake ci_tag

This is one nice thing about Integrity - it's pretty much any command you can give it. Sure, you might want to wrap that up in a Rake task, or a shell script or however you want to do it. I just entered that raw so it's overly obvious exactly what it's doing. I also found this to work better than doing it as a Rake task, as somehow I wasn't getting the environment to switch properly under Rake. The "ci_tag" rake task is my task for tagging/labeling succesful builds in Git, etc.

Next, you'll want to setup a post-commit service hook on GitHub. You can get your Push URL by clicking the edit link for your project in Integiry:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Note, that works even with HTTP Basic Auth, just add your user credentials to the Push URL before pasting it in on GitHub.

Finally, fire off a build. And note, one downside of Integrity is that it doesn't indicate (in the web UI) that a build is underway. It just says it hasn't been built yet. The integritray item and thus CCMenu will show you that it's building though.

Lastly... some have asked why not XYZ CI server? A few notes on this:

Hudson: this looks awesome, but also somewhat overkill for our needs. I have one project to build, and I'm doing it on a very inexpensive slice that has only 256MB of RAM - I doubt I could even start Hudson in that little RAM, being it's a Java web app, etc. Secondarily, I'd prefer to have the app be Ruby so I can hack on it (I've made at least very minor tweaks to every CI server I've used to date).

cruisecontrol.rb - this is what we were using, and it worked well, with minor exception to some random failures and the Rake-oriented build process. I'd really say this is minor though, and would suggest folks try it out. You can of course refer to my previous writeup on setting up CruiseControl.rb :)

CI Joe/cijoe - this is actually what I started with when I looked at exploring alternatives. I had problems getting the build working properly, which seems odd. In hindsight that may have wound up being due to some problems during our switch to a newer version of Cucumber. But, one thing I didn't like is that there is no state maintained, so if you stop and start cijoe, it loses track of all its previous builds. This may or may not matter much to you, but I didn't like that. I also didn't want to spend time writing notifiers/CCMenu integration type stuff for our needs. I will ay that cijoe setup/install is pretty cool.

Run Code Run doesn't have a viable plan for us yet, plus I've heard having it run custom rake tasks and such doesn't work (wrong?). Furthermore, I didn't really want our private code on their servers and didn't see a need to outsource this.

others... either hadn't heard of them, they didn't work well with Rails, or whatever - upshot, Integrity worked, got it up and running fairly fast, and didn't need to spend any more time on this.

Moving Further Into the Cloud

2009-06-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

A little bit ago, I went back to using multiple computers again. For a while I'd just done everything with a MacBook Pro, which was nice - only a single machine to maintain, always had everything in one spot. But alas, twas time for more performance, so I got a Mac Pro, which is now my primary work machine, with the laptop relegated to basically iCal and Things for the bulk of the day (as my 3rd monitor), and then any portable needs, or working on the couch or deck, etc.

Anyway, my main thing against multiple machines, after having spent many years with anywhere between 2 and 5 machines (mostly while working for Adobe), was the maintenance and synchronization of those machines. So, now that I'm back to 2, I am back to wanting/needing my data on whatever computer I'm using. These days this also really extends to my iPhone to some degree as well. It's my truly portable computer. So, with all the "cloud" computing/services these days, this is to some degree easier. I'm not that big a fan of Google having all my data, but I will use the services that are the best in class, or best for my needs, and no doubt some of that is Google, but there are many others.

I have not gotten all my data truly available on all the computers I want it on, or as well as I'd like yet, but I'm getting closer. Also, I agree with Al3x in that if the data is important, only having it on a free cloud service is not wise. I haven't fully followed that, but that is part of my plan. Here's some notes on what I've done so far...

Email

This one is easy. I use Gmail for all my email accounts (about 15 if you count across various domains and so on). Right off, this is one case where this is the only place my data/email lives, so I'm only solving the accessible from anywhere issue. But, I'm also of the mind that I could pretty much lose all my email and be fine. If there are truly important things in it, that data tends to wind up getting put in somewhere else (EverNote, etc., see below) as appropriate. Gmail is so much better than any other Email. I even use it for some non-traditional things, like all our recipes are stored in a Gmail account. Makes it easy to trade recipes amongst friends and family, great for searching, and again, I can get to it from anywhere I can access the web.

Further, I use MailPlane as my actual mail client. It is a very rare day that I use a web browser to view Gmail. On the iPhone I just use the regular iPhone mail client, which has some drawbacks, but for my needs is ok.

Notes and Misc Data

This is the place that recently changed and has become an outstanding solution. I used to use 37signals Backpack, but now use EverNote. EverNote is really quite amazing. I hadn't noticed the Notebooks before, and that's been a great feature for me to do high level organization. Then, the searching is quite good (and of course Backpack essentially didn't even have searching). But, what really swung this over was their desktop client, web storage, and then iPhone client. This gives me great desktop performance, but then access from any web browser, as well as iPhone, AND I get the data stored locally and off-site (i.e. on the web). Furthermore, it sync's across computers. So, I feel like the data I have here is very safe (since it's in at least 3 places). Even better, this allowed me to stop paying for Backpack (my use of EverNote is nowhere close to their paid account). I don't mind paying for software at all, but I had felt that I wasn't getting the solution I wanted from Backpack, so didn't want to pay for that any longer.

Code

GitHub and Git. Do I need to say more?

Bookmarks

Two things here: .Mac and Delicious. I use Safari as my primary browser, and leverage it's Bookmark Bar for common stuff, so sync that across machines and iPhone with .Mac. Delicious gets all the other bookmarks.

RSS/News Feeds

Another recent change was to stop using NetNewsWire which I've used forever, and switch to Google Reader. Specifically what made this work well was creating a Fluid app with the Helvetireader styling. NNW had sync via NewsGator, but it really just didn't work well. It didn't seem to keep the list of feeds in sync, and then it's sync during feed download just didn't seem to cut it. So now, with the fluid app, and then just plain Reader (via browser) on the iPhone seems to solve this all nicely.

Documents

So far this is a mix of using DropBox and Google Docs. DropBox is awesome for keeping files in sync across machines, and then also available on the web. I've been ramping up my use of DropBox.

Things that Aren't sufficiently solved yet

Calendar and Address Book

Update: I'm now using .Mac to sync Address Book, seems to work great.

I'm using iCal and Address Book. Primarily this is due to the super easy sync with the iPhone. I can sync two computers with BusySync or some other things, but haven't seen a great solution yet, as well as haven't investigated that much. Even with .mac I think you still have to have a primary calendar and you're publishing to the other, etc.

I've used Google Calendar in the past, but didn't like it that much, and part of all this is ensuring sync is brain dead easy and solid. My wife and I sync calendars with BusySync, but that has been spotty. The various Google/iCal sync things I've tried have been iffy in the past. And, the real key is, how well will it sync Google cal to the iPhone calendar? An area I need to learn more about.

Address Book, not sure of my options here either. Sync's nicely with iPhone, and .Mac so far.

Music and Photos

I've yet to see an iTunes sync thing that works really well. We tried TuneRanger but it was not good when dealing with two existing libraries. Also, we have a lot of music, so keeping it backed up on S3 or similar actually starts to cost real money. Of course these days, the primary need for this is to sync to my iPhone. Most of the time at home I'm listening to Pandora or some similar thing. I use Pandora a lot on the iPhone, but I also listen to various podcasts, and then there are times when Pandora isn't feasible (crappy/no signal, or I'm needing to use another app on the phone while listening to music).

These same issues hold true for photos/Lightroom libraries. With Lightroom so far, for each calendar year, I have a Lightroom catalog, and then at the end of those years, I burn DVD's with the photos. Of course, the DVD's are just sitting in our house right now, not in a safe deposit box, etc. (we used to do that, but haven't since we moved to Oregon - lazy). But my bigger concern here is that I'd like my Lightroom library to stay in sync across my two machines, so I can use the burly Mac Pro when working at home, but then have my MBP when on the road.

I guess that's it for now. What solutions do you like? What are people doing for large data (GB's or TB's of music, photos, video, etc.)?

Passenger Fails to Regenerate Cached/Aggregate Assets for Rails

2009-05-12T15:01:00.001-07:00

At DealBase, we've been testing Nginx with Passenger, and have mostly had good results. There are two issues that have come up, hopefully only one of which may broadly affect others.

The first issue, which likely affects anyone using this, is that it appears that if you combine and cache CSS or JavaScript via tags like this in Rails:


  <%= stylesheet_link_tag :standard, :cache => 'standard' %>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :jquery, :cache => 'jquery_all' %>

The ":standard" and ":jquery" symbols are expansion symbols for multiple CSS/JavaScript files defined in a Rails initializer. On the first request Rails gets, it's supposed to combine all the files as per the expansion symbol definition, and then produce a "cache" file, so you have a single file that is included in your HTML.

This worked fine for us under Mongrel, but it didn't seem to regenerate under Passenger after doing a deploy, even with a restart to Passenger. We had to do a second restart of Passenger, and then hit the server at least twice, if not more to see it get picked up.

Thanks to a tip from Engine Yard, one solution can be found on the overstimulate blog, where they detail how you can add a rake task that you call during deploy to regenerate those cache files. This is really even a nicer solution under Mongrel and others, as it will mean it doesn't occur during your first request.

The second problem seems confined to my MacBook Pro laptop (no problem on my MacPro tower). That is, I simply cannot get Nginx+Passenger to work. It installs fine, Nginx runs, but I get some odd permissions problem from Passenger:


2009/05/12 11:57:52 [alert] 19611#0: could not create /var/folders/7m/7m7ezMSTHdiBHz5bzVyNDE+++TI/-Tmp-//passenger.19596/control_process.pid (13: Permission denied)
2009/05/12 12:01:19 [crit] 19611#0: *1 connect() to unix:/var/folders/7m/7m7ezMSTHdiBHz5bzVyNDE+++TI/-Tmp-//passenger.19596/master/helper_server.sock failed (13: Permission denied) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: dealbase.dev, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "unix:/var/folders/7m/7m7ezMSTHdiBHz5bzVyNDE+++TI/-Tmp-//passenger.19596/master/helper_server.sock:", host: "dealbase.dev"

The first line of those two lines occurs when I start Nginx. The second happens when I try to surf to a page from my app in my browser (which makes sense given the first error :) If anyone has any suggestions on this one, let me know!

Front End Rails Developer Job at DealBase.com

2009-03-11T09:49:00.001-07:00

At DealBase, we have an opening for a part-time front end Rails developer at DealBase.com. The opening is for US residents only, and for individuals, no agencies or recruiters please. Most likely you'd be working remotely/telecommuting. The job posting, which is posted in several places, such as Rubynow, Working With Rails, and Rubyjobs.in, covers all the details, but I'll relist it here for ease:

DealBase.com, a startup hotel deals site, is looking for a stellar front end web developer who will adapt our current look/feel to new features, leverage JavaScript for useful and fun features, and is eager to apply their skills to enhance the user experience of our site. We're looking for you to share your knowledge and make an impact, be passionate about your work, and up-to-date on the latest technologies. If this is you, and you enjoy working with a small, distributed, agile team, then we'd love to talk with you.

Requirements for this position:

Deep knowledge of XHTML and CSS

Familiarity with browser capabilities and restrictions for all major browsers

Solid JavaScript skills

Experience with/demonstrated use of Git

You use and demand MacOS X as your primary development environment

Comfortable at the command line

Basic skills for image editing and optimization for the web

Exposure to and basic knowledge of Ruby on Rails

Great communication skills

Attention to detail

Ability to work both independently and on a team

Eagerness to share ideas and problem-solve creatively

Experience working on consumer oriented web applications/consumer focus

Quick learner, and good at digging in to problems

Agile development practices

You are based in the US.

Individuals only (no multi-person firms, agencies, etc.)

Nice to have:

jQuery experience

GitHub experience

MySQL experience

Use of test frameworks, TDD, and BDD

experience with Linux

If you'd like to work with us at DealBase.com and think you're a good fit for this position, send us a resume and sample work, or let us know where we can see your resume and work/code, by emailing jobs@dealbase.com. Please note, we are only considering candidates based in the US.

I'm excited to find a great developer to work with. DealBase has been an awesome company and app to work on, and we're already experiencing great success. We have some pretty cool features planned, and it'd be ideal to get some real CSS and JavaScript ninja skills making those features even better. So, if this is you, please do get in touch, making sure to send email to the right email address as outlined in the job description.

Deploying per-server crontabs with Capistrano

2009-03-02T22:20:00.001-08:00

There's been a couple cool writeups/solutions to deploying your crontab files when you deploy with Capistrano, which I think is great. I can't find the first one I saw (mention in comments and I'll update), but on GitHub, javan has the whenever gem that is really more about allowing you to define crontabs with Ruby/Rails' time methods so you don't have to remember the crontab file syntax which none of us ever seems to be able to remember. You can of course integrate this with Capistrano (and that's covered in his Readme). The point of all this: no more having to remember to go put in or uncomment a crontab entry once you deploy a certain build, and keeping your crontabs under version control. However, for us, none of the solutions out there worked quite right, and I just use what I find to be a simpler setup.

First, we have multiple servers with different crontabs per server. Also, we have some environment variables that get defined within the crontab so that they work properly on our Engine Yard slices. I just found that, while yes, I sometimes don't remember all the crontab syntax perfectly, I also don't do this often enough for that to be an issue, and would rather just have the real deal right there, so I knew exactly what I was going to install on my server. Lastly, I didn't really want to have yet another gem dependency for something pretty straight forward like this (IMHO).

So, get on with it you say, what's the solution? Two pieces. First, I create a crontab directory within my Rails app's config directory. In that I store crontab files named by the hostname of the server - the same thing you'd get by doing a hostname on the server. You could add an extension or whatever you want, but the hostname is what makes this work easily, so you want that somewhere in your file naming convention. We only have a couple servers and I know them well, so I just went with pure hostname for now. The contents of each file are exactly what you'd see in the crontab file on the server, for the user you set it up under.

Second, a simple Capistrano task to affect the given crontab file on the server, with an after hook to run it:


task :write_crontab, :roles => :app do
  puts "Installing server-specific crontab."
  run("cd #{deploy_to}/current/config/crontab; crontab `hostname`")
end
after "deploy:restart", "write_crontab"

That's it. You can obviously tweek this for your own setup, for example, maybe you need to run it on all roles, or different roles, or what not. Your run command might need to be more robust (or run a shell script or rake task) for example if not all servers have crontabs or you have something more dynamic. But, as you can tell, setting this kind of thing up is pretty straight forward, and it's great to keep your crontab setups in version control. Thanks to you guys that stimulated the idea in the first place.

MySQL Performance Issues and acts_as_versioned

2009-02-04T17:53:00.001-08:00

Recently we ran into an interesting performance issue with MySQL. We have an automated process we run at night a few nights a week that does data harvesting for hotel rates and such. This data is versioned so that we can look at historical values. However, this script had begun to really crawl. Originally it took a couple hours to run. But it had gotten to the point where it could take almost a day.

I tracked this down to being a SQL MAX call used by acts_as_versioned to determine the next version for one of these records. The problem is that it had to sift through nearly 10 million records. In testing this on my local machine, just one of these SQL queries could take 45 seconds! Think about doing this across oh say 100,000 hotels, ya, not good.

The good folks at GitHub ran into this same thing (with a table of 36M records) on nearly the same day. Their approach is similar to the approach I'll be taking on another table (which isn't currently affecting us this way, but will have different benefits), which was to split it into two tables, one with older data. I could have done this, and would have, but the reality was that we simply didn't need to keep these versions, as we weren't using the data. So, luckily, I was able to just no longer version this particular model, and throw out that table. After doing that, I ran the script and it took just over an hour. Yea!

So, this is something to note if you use acts_as_versioned with models that have frequent changes and a decent number of those models to begin with (think multipliers). One of the things I'll be looking into in the future is whether that MAX needs to get done, or whether acts_as_versioned can be smarter about how it does it. On first glance you'd think you could just use the version number on the original model itself, but that number isn't guaranteed to be the latest number, since you can rollback versions and so on.

Renaming a GitHub Account and Forked Repository

2009-01-13T23:52:00.001-08:00

Today I finally bit the bullet and renamed the DealBase GitHub account and repository because it was previously named after an early incarnation of the business name (before we'd actually decided on a name). I had expected this to be a bit tedious. In particular, I had started the original repository under my own GitHub account, and then forked it into the company account. Being a private repo, you can't delete the original repository without it deleting any forks (and back in the day ;-) you couldn't even delete repos on GitHub). But, as it turned out, it was pretty easy and didn't take long or involve that much fixing or things that use the code base.

I did ask the GitHub folks for some tips, so these steps factor that info in. Also, before you do any of this, you should of course heed the typical disclaimers, make backups, etc. That said, first, rename the account. You can do this in your Account page on GitHub. Look at the bottom of your account page for this:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

You don't even need to re-clone your repo for this. Once you've done the rename, you can simply edit your local .git/config file to fix up the account name. Do this anywhere you have cloned the repo - for example on your continuous integration server, deployment scripts, cached copies of code on your staging and deployment servers, Tracker-GitHub post-receive hook service, etc.

Now on to renaming a private forked repo. If you just need to rename a repo, you can do that on the Edit page for a repository and then repeat the above steps:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

But, if you have forked a private repo, it's slightly more involved, but don't fear!

First, make sure you (and anyone else working on the project) have no work in progress, or that you somehow save off that work outside of the repo.

Do a pull from GitHub so you have the most up to date codebase.

On GitHub, delete the original repository (not your forked copy, but from the location you forked it from). This will cascade and delete your forked copy as well. You'll find this right below where you can rename it on the repo's Edit page:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Optionally rename the directory, on your local machine, of the codebase/repo.

Now create a new repository, with your new choice of name, on GitHub.

Then, follow the instructions to import an existing repository. In doing so, on your local machine, go into your codebase, and use that. This will preserve the full Git history and everything from the repository, pushing it up to GitHub just as it was before, but under the new name and rooted at the [new] account.

Fix up all things that use the GitHub account, as mentioned above, like CI servers, deployment scripts, and so on.

That's it, you're done. Pretty straight forward and shouldn't take much time. Thanks again to GitHub for making life so much better in source control land!

My Setup and Software

2009-01-05T22:20:00.001-08:00

I too read Al3x's interview the other day, and like John Nunemaker, figured I'd share my setup, as I enjoy reading what others use and often can pick up a few interesting tools or tidbits.

Unlike Mr. Nunemaker, my desk is too messy, IMHO, to photograph right now :) However, many similarities aside from that. On with it...

I use a 17" MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM as my only machine these days. Like Alex and John, I really like having just a single machine, and I no longer work for a corporation where I'd worry about that. DealBase is cool and wouldn't try to make some wacko claim to some work not relevant (and we've explicitly discussed my use of a single machine, etc.). I have my MBP open on a laptop arm from Ergotron, and then my primary monitor is a 30" Dell. Really love the big monitor. I do my main work o the 30", and then the laptop screen has TweetDeck, iChat, Things, some Fluid apps, and other things that I tend to more glance at, and aren't primary work items.

Further, I use a wireless Apple keyboard, and like John, I just love this thing. I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for a keyboard that was just a keyboard (but with arrow keys). I hate normal keyboards that take up so much extra space on the right side (my mouse side) with stuff I rarely use - which only exacerbates problems with having my arm/elbow canitlevered further out to use the mouse, sometimes causing arm strain after long days of coding. I use Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse, which I like quite a lot.

Transitioning to music... I use JBL Creature speakers, and listen to a variety of things, or nothing. Pandora, via a Fluid app, iTunes (my own playlists, or various Ambient "radio" stations), etc. Either that, or we have a whole-house NuVo Concerto audio system, so sometimes I have that on either with XM satellite radio, or to a playlist from the iPod we have hooked into it. The NuVo setup is nice because it fills my office with sound a bit better (via in-ceiling speakers), but I have more variety via the computer.

As with Alex and John, I am absolutely in love with my iPhone 3G. It is even better than expected. It has essentially replaced my 80GB iPod in the car, typically because it's more up to date, and I like it's UI better; I can remotely work on servers if I have to via iSSH, play games if I'm bored, use InstaPaper to read things I've set for reading later, sync with Address Book and iCal, and of course Twitter, via Tweetie. So, yes, I use Apple's Address Book and iCal, for great sync, simplicity, etc.

Ok, onto dev stuff. My primary work is on Rails-based web-apps, although I dabble with other things as well. DealBase is my day job, and I'm also involved with Bring Light.

Yet again, like Alex and John, I spend the bulk of my time in TextMate, iTerm (a better Terminal, IMHO), and Safari. And actually, I do my development testing in nightly builds of WebKit/Safari, and all my other browsing in standard Safari. I do pull up Firefox for testing, and to use YSlow and sometimes Firebug (although I've been finding the dev tools in WebKit nightlies work well). I've used Emacs - did so for about a year when working with Linux as my desktop. I ditched it back then in favor of Visual SlickEdit, but these days TextMate just rules. I don't get the Emacs passion - why do you want to press two keys for everything, especially the most common things? Yes, I know, you can setup different bindings, etc., but come on the most basic things like saving, opening, copy, paste, etc. should be "single" key (and by single I mean some meta+key) strokes by default. I do fire up vi all the time at the command line on remote servers, and even occasionally on my MBP for some real quick edit. Also, I spend the bulk of my day in my text editor, so yes, appearance matters, and TextMate kills others. I've also used a lot of IDE's in the past, from IDEA, to Eclipse, to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is actually quite good if you have to suffer in that world, but I find Eclipse just plain crappy. IDEA was great for Java, and their Ruby setup will be something to keep an eye on, but generally, the setup I have now works well.

I have all my code for nearly everything I do (e.g. both private and open source/public) on GitHub, and truly love it. Git has been a huge win, and gives me the best of, as well as improving SVN and Perforce. I'm using GitX for most of my commits and history browsing these days.

I use RSpactor for continuously running our RSpec suite, and we also use RSpec stories (but haven't converted to Cucumber yet). I recently added speech output to RSpactor, and that is my preferred notification instead of Growl. We use Pivotal Tracker for tasks/stories/features as well as bug tracking. We used to use Lighthouse, but having it all in one place was nicer, and Tracker wins big time in my opinion. If you want GitHub post-receive hook for Tracker, I recently whipped that up, and its been a real nice addition. We too use Hoptoad for exception notification, and really like it. Also, New Relic is in use at DealBase. I also like viewing Google Analytics with Analytics Reporting Suite, a slick AIR app.

I really like Navicat as a GUI for database stuff. It's proprietary/pay software, but honestly, it's worth it to me. I can do all this stuff command line fine, but the GUI simply makes it a heck of a lot faster to view the results, quickly re-sort on a column, mess around with queries, etc. Also, it has great SSH support, so I can tunnel into all my server's DB's with ease.

I have CruiseControl.rb setups for all my Rails apps, and make use of CCMenu for a nice little status menu item showing me what's going on with those.

I pretty much can't live without LaunchBar. Same goes for 1Password.

Skitch is quite handy for showing sharing and annotating screen shots, and we use Google Docs and Gmail. Speaking of email, I am a huge fan of Mailplane, which is a Mac app for Gmail. Integration is superb, and I can quickly switch around my 15 or so Gmail accounts with ease. I find it superior to a Fluid app for Gmail, since the integration is better and it handles multiple accounts.

I host most of my own web apps on Slicehost, and DealBase is at EngineYard.

I also use Backpack some, although not nearly as much as I used to, and access it about 99% of the time via Packrat. MarsEdit is my blog authoring tool of choice. NetNewsWire is my RSS reader.

All of my photography and photo processing, etc. are done in Adobe Lightroom. I use the Flickr plugin for it as well.

Various other bits:

TextPander

WeatherDock

Pukka

Flickr

Del.icio.us

xScope - a great screen ruler app

Photoshop CS3 (look for my name in the about box too :)

JungleDisk - I do some backups with this

SuperDuper! Still my favorite backup, although I use TimeMachine too

CSS Edit and XyleScope sometimes

Last.fm - is running all the time, but I really don't actually make use of it, kinda silly.

Acrobat Pro and Reader

XCode (or TextMate) if I'm working on an Objective-C/Cocoa app.

iStat menus

YouControl Tunes

p.s. One other bit I can't live without but really isn't computing hardware/software, is my espresso setup. I use an Expobar Brewtus II machine, Macap MC4 stepless doserless grinder and a variety of cups (mostly Nuova Pointe and Illy). I use only totally fresh beans from a variety of places (favorites include Blue Bottle, Ecco Caffe, PT's, 49th Parallel (unfortunately not often, since shipping from Canada makes it a bit cost prohibitive), etc.). Coffelab tamper and Bumper stand and knock box. My espresso bar is kept clean (unlike my desk). The pictures are a bit older, so don't show bottomless portafilter in use these days.

Whew, that's more than plenty. What's your setup?

Speech / Talking Results for RSpactor

2008-12-30T09:28:00.001-08:00

After discovering that autospec was taking up a lot of CPU while it was "idle", I looked for alternatives. I found RSpactor, which doesn't take as much CPU, and is better since it's a dedicated window with nice GUI results and so. My only gripe was that I'd gotten used to the spoken results output I'd rigged up for Autospec.

I really prefer the spoken results because it is not visually distracting, and doesn't require me to be paying attention to the area of the screen where they pop up (I use a 30" monitor, plus the 17" laptop monitor, so I'm not always looking at the right spot for the Growl notices, and I don't like the monitor-wide growls). Lucky for me, RSpactor is open source and is up on GitHub.

I thought it was an Objective-C Cocoa app, but as it turns out it's a RubyCocoa app. I'd built RubyCocoa apps before, so was familiar with that, plus of course know Ruby. It wouldn't have mattered either way (I'm fine working in ObjC as well), but this did make things a slight bit faster.

Anyway, did a quick bit of work and got a new preferences panel for Speech added, and then rigged that up to test results, so that I now have my desired spoken results. A slight improvement comes along in that it (optionally) speaks the number of passing/failing/pending tests - just insert a question mark in the string/phrase you want spoken for each and it'll say the number at that spot.

~~I've sent a pull request to RubyPhunk, but no guarantees it will get added to the main line. In the mean time, if you're interested, grab it from my RSpactor fork on GitHub.~~ Update: RubyPhunk integrated my changes into the main RSpactor code.

DealRank™, Similar and Nearby Hotels and Deals, and "Interesting" Deals

2008-12-29T11:24:00.001-08:00

Over the last couple weeks, we've built some cool new features on DealBase.com. Three in particular...

Interesting Deals Pages

This is fairly simple, but one of my favorites. There is a list of these pages on the home page in the right hand column, under "Interesting Deals". You can find the cheapest deals, the best deals at 5 star hotels, and so on. But, my favorite to check out is the Most Expensive Deals page. This is where we list the most expensive hotel packages, and you can get a glimpse of what the uber-rich might plunk down for. Deals currently as as much as $110,000/night, yes per night. But go take a look and check out what those deals include. Things like private jet for transportation, $40,000 in jewelry, and so on. Oh, how about it includes a trip to Russia, and you know, to make it extra cute, a "Presidential Puppy"! Crazy.

This page is just a lot of fun to explore and see what some of the hotel's come up with.

DealRank™

DealRank™ is our new way of ranking deals to show you the best value. This is an algorithmic/mathematical determination based on various criteria for deals. It factors in the nightly rate, percentage savings, and various other aspects. We expect this to be one of the best ways to sort deals and help you evaluate what is truly a great deal. Each person looking at hotels has different reasons and criteria for evaluating deals. Some want the absolutely best price, some want the best overall value, some are looking to get the biggest savings, or the most extras thrown in, and so on. DealRank™ should help provide a more holistic view on this. We've done a lot of testing and tweaking here, and will continue to do so as the site evolves, but I am pretty darn happy with the results so far. We still have many other ways to sort deals (see the sort menu in the upper right of any deal listing page), but this is our new default.

Check this out on say the New York City hotel deals page, where previously the most economical deals didn't always rise to the top (percentage savings wise, NYC tends to have the best deals at more expensive hotels).

Similar and Nearby Hotels and Deals

Another quite useful feature is the list of similar and nearby hotels or deals (depends on the what kind of page you're on) listing at the bottom of some pages. This factors in various criteria, but one thing for sure is that all of the listed hotels/deals are always within a 50 mile radius. I personally used this when looking for deals on a trip I took the other weekend.

An example is similar and nearby hotels on, one of my favorites, the W hotel in Seattle. Amazon put me up in this hotel. If you've never stayed at a W, they're pretty cool. While working for Adobe for many years, I stayed at the Fairmont Seattle a ton, and you'll see that listed as the second hotel in the list of nearby hotels. But, the W is more edgy, they tend to have cool bars, upscale, swank rooms, etc. Seattle is a favorite place of mine to travel to.

I'm working on a particularly cool feature right now, that I can't wait to get out there. Will take a bit longer as we want to get the UI right and make it of utmost use, but I think it will be something of great value to everyone. Stay tuned.

Browser Testing Services (BrowserCam, CrossBrowserTesting, etc.) - What I Really Want

2008-12-11T16:43:00.001-08:00

When testing web apps for a general/wide-ranging audience, one must test across a slew of different browsers and operating systems (and different versions of each). This is a real pain, even if you have an army of testers at hand (which most of us don't). I employ various tools to help me with this (CrossBrowserTesting.com, BrowserCam, VM Ware with different VM setups, etc.). But, the reality is that I don't feel like these really stack up to what I need. More specifically, BrowserCam, and its competitors do not. CrossBrowserTesting is actually pretty awesome and does what it advertises quite nicely, it's a favorite tool right now.

What I'm after is a way to see what a survey of pages on my site look like on different browsers and OS's. This is by no means a definitive test of a site, but more of a quick visual inspection of appearance, without having to fire up a dozen different pages across maybe 30 different browsers/OS configurations. We use an automated test suite to test the bulk of other things, but appearance can't be tested that way.

BrowserCam helps, but honestly I find it quite lacking as a tool in this arena. Note, I'm picking on BrowserCam, as that's the one I use, but the others (BrowserShots, Litmus, etc.) all seem to suffer some or all of these problems, and further, they don't seem to have projects or ways to establish a standard suite of tests. Getting on with it, all of this really boils down to two primary things:

Ability to edit the settings on a project's images. As far as I can tell, once you select the URL's, image size, browsers, etc. for a project, there is no way to change any of that! What if I just want to change the window size? Can't, I have to create a new project (or add new images to the existing one, replicating all my previous work. This seems like an obvious hole.

Automation. I want to be able to automate regeneration of the project. I'd like something like a simple URL/HTTP API to do this, so that I can, from a command line, use curl or similar to issue a single HTTP request that will regenerate a project's images. Thus, the API would need to use HTTP authentication or similar, and specify which project to regenerate. With this, I would be able to automate requesting a regeneration of the project as part of/after deploying my application.

I'm currently looking into creating my own script to drive the automation, but it's looking non-trivial due to the way BrowserCam's pages work: everything winds up on the same URL, actions/links are all JavaScript that post forms, with a lot of params and a bunch of params that will take some time to ascertain if a) they're required, and b) all the info in the parameter is needed, etc. If someone's already done this, let me know! Also, suggestions for tools to drive the automation? I've used the Ruby Mechanize library in the past for things like this, and this may work if I can determine the params, etc., and if Mechanize can even drive the JavaScript links (not sure it can - anyone?). I can't use something like Selenium or Windmill because this needs to work from a script/command line, and not rely on a browser.

Finally, if anyone knows of a service similar to BrowserCam that solves these, even if it supports a few less browsers, do let me know. At very minimum it would need to handle Internet Explorer and Firefox, preferably also Safari, and cover Windows XP, Vista, MacOS X 10.5, and one popular Linux flavor. Nice to haves would include Opera and various others.

GitHub Post-Receive Hook for Pivotal Tracker

2008-12-02T16:23:00.001-08:00

Over the holiday, I whipped up a quick GitHub Post-Receive Hook for use with Pivotal Tracker. This is just a small web service, implemented in Sinatra. It was my first time using Sinatra, so any suggestions on improvements are of course welcome (as are they in general, this is open source). I've put the code up on GitHub in the somewhat painfully named tracker_github_hook repo.

The service supports multiple GitHub repos and Tracker projects, so you can run a single service that integrates multiple projects. The service will figure out which commits go to which projects based on a config file on the server that associates a GitHub repo URL (make sure to use the http version of the URL, not https), to a Tracker project ID. For example:


tracker_github_hook:
  github_url: http://github.com/chris/tracker_github_hook
  tracker_api_token: a1234b56789c0defa12b3c4def56a78b
  tracker_project_id: 123

You will need to take care of running the service within your particular server setup. I'm personally running it via Thin/Rack, behind Nginx. I have it setup on the same server that runs our continuous integration system, so these two are differentiated by subdomain.

It should be noted, I will not claim this thing is secure. You run it at your own risk, etc.

Aside from getting the service running on your own server, you'll need to add the URL to it as a GitHub post-receive hook for each project you want to integrate. To do that, go to the Admin tab of your GitHub repo, and then the Services tab. At the top you'll see where you put the URL in. The URL is just the root of the service. Also see GitHub's docs on post-receive hooks as it illustrates just how I built this, how to set it up, etc.

Hopefully others find this useful. Or, what I really hope is that the Pivotal guys get with the GitHub guys and add a standard integration service, where it's automatically configured on the Tracker side, and you just need to turn it on on the GitHub side much like the other service integrations.

Using View Helpers and Controller Actions from Rails' script/runner

2008-11-19T15:22:00.001-08:00

Recently I coded up a controller and view that produces a large data file. It was done this way because it needs to generate the proper URL's and take into account a fair bit of stuff at the view level in our application (like pagination, and the custom URL's we have, so extensive use of our URL helpers and other things at this level). The action takes a long time to run (about 3 minutes), so of course I page cache it. However, 3 minutes breaks the web server and/or Mongrel timeouts in our environment, so won't get served up in production and staging environments.

The solution, and I'd love to hear other ways, as I certainly won't claim this is the best way, was to create a small script/runner script that simply executed this route within our app. However, script/runner doesn't normally give you controller and view layer access, plus it doesn't have the context of a web request, so it won't know say the host it's being run against and so on. However, one can leverage an Integration::Session and manually set the host to get that. Thus, the script becomes as simple as:


#!script/runner

require 'action_controller/integration'
 
session = ActionController::Integration::Session.new
session.host = 'www.yourdomain.com'
 
session.get_via_redirect '/controller/action'

Note, I'm using get_via_redirect here because the particular action I call does a redirect after it expires the cached page of the action it's redirecting to. If you don't have a redirect going on, then you can just call get instead. This does not output anything of course, but for us, just caches the resulting page, which is exactly what we want.

Video of DealBase CEO's Demo/Presentation at PhoCusWright Show

2008-11-18T23:10:00.001-08:00

Sam Shank, the CEO of DealBase, the hotel deals site I work on, unveiled the site officially at PhoCusWright 2008. The video of his presentation (as well as all the others) is now available. Go here, and then if you hover your mouse over the video you'll see a slide/icon for each company that presented along the top - scroll to the right until you find DealBase, and then click it to watch. Presentation is about 5 minutes, and is nearly all demo and discussion of our advantages, strengths, how the site works, and business model aspects, etc.

I think the demo went great, and I've continued to hear tons of praise and useful feedback. The demo was completely live, no smoke-and-mirrors; Sam was not kidding when he told the audience to go check out the deal he just posted during the demo.

We somehow (I'm truly surprised, but of course I am a bit biased) didn't get picked as a top 6 for the show, but for example, others disagreed as well. Tim Hughes, author of The Business of Online Travel blog, listed DealBase.com in his Top Six pick of 2008 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit finalists. Regardless, interest has been outstanding, and we're really excited. We're still cranking away with new features, and various other improvements. It's a lot of fun!

DealBase - Check out the new features

2008-11-14T12:24:00.001-08:00

Since doing our initial public access to the DealBase.com site, you know, the web site that has the most hotel deals on the web (50x more than anyone else), we've been working hard on improving the experience for users. Today we rolled out the latest major revision to the site, which includes some pretty cool stuff. First, let me list these things out, and then I'll cover a few interesting technical bits that occurred along the way.

New home page: yes, a brand new, much nicer home page. This really helps tell you what's great about the site. It also has a new search box that I call the "omniscient search" - a single search field that auto-completes on our deal locations and hotels, which is much nicer than the separate search boxes we had before. This same search box is also used everywhere else on the site.

Deal filtering: this was a big one. Seems fairly simple on first blush, but lots of interesting stuff going on in the background. You can now filter deals on any deal listing page, by various criteria. You can combine filters too. So, for example, you can narrow down the deal listing by dates, prices, and hotel ratings, allowing you to, for example, look for 4 star hotel deals valid from April through August of 2009, in a certain price range, for a given city. Very handy. Here, take a look at the deals for Hawaii page as an example.

Deal sorting: in addition to the filtering, you can now sort the deal listing a myriad of ways, from most percent savings or most dollar savings to high or low rates, or most recently posted, etc. Combining this with filters allows you to really narrow down what deals are best for you.

Various UI/visual improvements. Meagan, our talented designer, has done a lot of work here.

Speed improvements. Various database queries and other operations for the site have been sped up, sometimes in small amounts, sometimes in extremely drastic ways.

More deals: we should probably have about 10,000 deals on the site by the time you read this. This is very exciting for us, and shows how serious we are. These are all very real deals, no link bait, no BS. These are true deals, checked by our team of editors. This gives us about 50x more deals than any other hotel deals site.

Comments! You can now comment on deals. No login required (just like the rest of the site). Comments do get reviewed, and we'll be watching for spam and so forth, but this is a great way to tell other people about a good deal or a hotel you like, etc. Comment box is at the bottom of a deal's page. For example, check out this wild personal fireworks show deal at the Ritz-Carlton in New York.

Chrome browser support. DealBase works and looks great in Chrome.

And now, since this is a geek blog anyway, a few technical bits...

We're running Rails 2.1.2, which is the latest release of Rails as of this writing. We try to stay up to date regardless, but this was a key release, as it fixed some tricky ActiveRecord named_scope issues when using SQL JOINs. Our filtering and other work requires various JOINs and the fixes here prevented us from having to explicitly hand craft a bunch of queries. Thanks Rails team.

My current favorite gem is Ryan Bates' scope-builder. This is just so nice for building up big, conditionally chainged named_scopes. As you can imagine this is heavily used in building up combined filtering and sorting of deals.

More jQuery goodness. I continue to love jQuery, and use it extensively. It is used heavily in the filtering features, pulling in some nice slider UI elements, and also using it for the "updating" status and dimming effects when the AJAX filtering operations are running.

One issue we ran into with Chrome was using the :cache feature of Rails' javascript_include_tag. If we used this to combine and create a cache file of a bunch of separate JavaScript files, Chrome failed to properly load/parse the resulting JavaScript file. This broke pretty much everything JavaScript wise in Chrome, but the simple fix was to not use :cache to achieve this.

As a helpful, and economical testing tool, we've been using CrossBrowserTesting.com to give us VM's of a slew of different OS and browser combinations. I tend to run VMWare Fusion and do a lot that way, but it's also a pain to keep up a bunch of different VM images, or have to fire that up for a quick test, etc. We're also using BrowserCam.

Finally, another shout-out to the Hoptoad service/folks. This continues to be an outstanding service for us. It works really really well, and it's free, so to me it is the winner amongst the competitors.

We've done a fair number of modifications to our tagging plugin (acts_as_taggable_on_steroids), although they're all particular to our app, so not sure if any will get contributed back. Things like enforcing all our rules about tag naming and so on. The same goes for the will_paginate plugin. But in this case, I'm hoping to contribute these back as soon as I can properly contribute the patches and ensure they'll work in any app.

I'm sure there's more, but that's what I can think of for the moment. It's been a busy couple weeks, and I'm really excited about the state of the site these days. We've been getting some great feedback, and I've had a few friends book deals they've found on the site (one friend saved $800 on a trip!). If you have feedback, don't hesitate to add a topic or question in our Get Satisfaction feedback system. This tells us what things you'd like to see, or any problems you're finding, etc.

Speed Up and named_scope acts_as_taggable_on_steroids Finds

2008-11-04T10:14:00.001-08:00

I use the acts_as_taggable_on_steroids plugin for tagging. I've been happy with it, but recently have been adding a lot of searching, sorting, filtering, etc. functionality to an app, and needed the find by tag functionality to work as a named_scope, so that I can have it within a chain of many named_scope finders.

This turned out to be trivially easy to do (without having to copy the SQL and put that into my named_scope). To add a "tagged_with" named_scope to your model that is already acts_as_taggable, you can just do this:


  named_scope :tagged_with, lambda { |tags| YourModel.find_options_for_find_tagged_with(tags) }

I've been doing a lot of benchmarking and performance improvements to our SQL as well, and decided to see if this was any different in performance compared to just doing YourModel.find_tagged_with that acts_as_taggable_on_steroids adds. As it turns out, the named_scope version, which is really identical at the core, is faster, especially if called more than once (per thread/Rails request)! Here's the benchmarks to prove it:


Single query/1 Iteration:
           user     system      total        real
named_scope       0.040000   0.000000   0.040000 (  0.045085)
find_tagged_with  0.020000   0.010000   0.030000 (  0.108233)

10 Iterations:
           user     system      total        real
named_scope       0.030000   0.000000   0.030000 (  0.040282)
find_tagged_with  0.420000   0.030000   0.450000 (  2.040245)

I repeated these multiple times and got the same/similar results each time. So, for a single query, it's only about 2x faster, but if you start issuing this same find multiple times per request then I believe it's the Rails query caching that kicks in with named_scope, but apparently not with the generic find with all the options (I'd love to hear some commentary on this from someone who knows the details).

Regardless, using a named_scope is nice because now you can more easily chain a tag find together with other named_scope items.

Mocked by Default, but Unmocking in Some Cases with RSpec

2008-09-16T15:28:00.001-07:00

Uh, ya, another great blog title, but we'll get over it. We use geocoding in our app, and that's a relatively costly operation time wise, especially when you may be doing it hundreds or thousands of times when your test suite runs. I can't stub out the objects that use it in many cases, so I wanted to stub out the actual geocode call unless I truly needed real geocoding (which is only when I'm testing the actual geocoding itself, and thus is a very small part of the test suite).

We use RSpec Specs and Stories and I wanted to mock out the geocoding by default, but unmock it in a few places. I asked about this on the mailing list, Googled and so on, but didn't find a solution that was working. So here is what I wound up doing...

In my spec_helper.rb file, I added:


Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each) do
      # Setup fake geocoding unless told not to
      unless @do_not_mock_geocoding
        fake_geocode = OpenStruct.new(:lat => 123.456, :lng => 123.456, :success => true)
        GeoKit::Geocoders::MultiGeocoder.stub!(:geocode).and_return(fake_geocode)
      end
  end
end

What this does is mock the geocoding unless a test has set the @do_not_mock_geocoding variable to true. One caveat, at least from what I've found, is that you need to set that to true in a before(:all) block in your tests, so that it happens before the before(:each). This is minor, as you can just have something like:


describe "with real geocoding" do
  before(:all) do
    @do_not_mock_geocoding = true
  end

  # your tests that want real geocoding
end

The impact this has had on our test suite is tremendous. I had already had some partial mocking of the geocoding in place, but was sweeping the system to put it in because the time it took to run our test suite was out of hand at about 13 minutes! Now that I've got this in, it runs in 2 minutes! Geocoding is used in two of our most core objects, which is why it has such a big impact on the test suite. This is one place mocking has really proved to be a massive value!

Use the Lighthouse API for Mass Ticket Changes

2008-09-13T00:57:00.001-07:00

Lighthouse is a nice issue tracker/bug database. We're using at at DealBase and some of my other projects. However, one thing it doesn't have, is a way to set the state of a bunch of tickets at once, or assign a slew of tickets to a certain user, etc. I need to do this regularly, as anytime we do a deploy to our staging environment, I need to go mark any bugs that were set to 'fixed' to now have a state of 'deployed', and then assign them to someone else to be verified. Lighthouse API to the rescue...

You can whip up a quick Ruby script to automate operations like this. The following is the script (tweaked to protect the innocent) I use to mark all tickets that are set to "fixed" to now be "deployed" and assign them to another user for verification. Obviously you can change this pretty easily to affect various other changes. I recommend playing with the Lighthouse API in IRB to see what the attribute names are for Tickets and so on.