Idle Hacking

Webkit, Ruby and Gtk+

taf2 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:21:45 +0000

The ruby bindings for Gnome are really nice. I’m amazed at how easy this was.

Sure it’s not Chrome, but not bad for an embedded browser. Oh and check out how simple this is:

require 'webkit'
win = Gtk::Window.new
wv = Gtk::WebKit::WebView.new
win.add(wv)
win.show_all
wv.open('http://www.google.com/')
Gtk.main

Try it out! The bindings are on github.

Ruby and Time.now.httpdate

taf2 — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:11:02 +0000

I keep running into this when I need a httpdate. Make sure to always require ‘time’

e.g.

Time.now.httpdate -> raises exception

and

require ‘time’

Time.now.httpdate ->Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:10:45 GMT

Updated Captico Webite

taf2 — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:57:14 +0000

Our new business and our new website. We build websites, market websites and make it easier for businesses to sell their goods online.

Check us out. Let me know what you think of the design and anything else!

hex2rgb Javascript

taf2 — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:58:06 +0000

While experimenting with canvas tag today I needed a good way to take a hex value and convert it to RGBA. I went searching and found some solutions, but nothing that really seemed complete. I wanted a single function that didn’t call eval or pollute the environment with globals… Maybe I could have looked harder but here is what I came up with.

I know hex values don’t include the alpha value in rgba – this function gets you the RGB values so you can mix in the alpha value.

Update:
Duncan posted this solution that is much better than mine!

Why I like Curb

taf2 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:07:36 +0000

Here’s an example of why I really enjoy using curb. Curl::Multi.get interface is just so easy.

High Availability with Unicorn Zero Down Time Deploys

taf2 — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:04:32 +0000

If you have not heard of unicorn and you actively develop ruby applications for the web. It is no doubt well worth your time to check it out. Github has a very good write up about unicorn that is definitely worth reading. Let me first show you this quick video of deploying to our yet to be released client site while sieging.

Now some important things to note, in the github write up they had the QUIT signal sent in the before_fork. I am pretty certain that this is incorrect and it should be in the after_fork.

Here is the unicorn configuration I am currently using:

Also, I have a custom spin script:

In the youtube video I use the reload action

Sitemaps and Siege

taf2 — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:03:05 +0000

If you are like me and always want to test the performance of your sites before releasing them to the public eye and you have an interest in publishing sitemaps to google and friends. This handy ruby script might be just the thing for you.

Assuming you already have your sitemap.xml file, if not try googling…

Next run the ruby script, given the sitemap.xml file as the first argument:

ruby sitemap-to-siege.rb sitemap.xml

That will create the urls.txt file.

Now run siege:
siege -c50 -t1M -f urls.txt

Note on mac you can install siege with
sudo port install siege
On redhat:
yum install siege
Or grab the source.

Updated Theme

taf2 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:19:54 +0000

Okay, I really liked this theme last year when I installed it but today I decided it was time for a change… Well a minor change, I hacked up the theme to support a variable width grid. Setting a min-width and width:%% to allow the content area expand.

Follow up on caches_action and content_for blocks

taf2 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:05:54 +0000

Alright, I worked on a solution today to follow up on my earlier post… This is very raw, but showing some good signs of working. I’ve been testing locally against memcached. One concern, I have with this solution is the content_for block is cached in a separate key, if the action key expires after the content_for key, then some requests might render without the content_for content… Perhaps, before rendering the action from cache we need to check that all fragments are available? This could also make it possible to do a multi get from memcached as well? Let me know what you all think.

caches_action and content_for blocks

taf2 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:57:29 +0000

Today, I realized that using content_for blocks as nice as they are make it much harder to cache. Typically, I won’t cache the layout for my actions so I would end up with a caches_action expression like the following:

caches_action :index, :layout => false, :expires_in => 10.minutes, :if => Proc.new {|c| c.send(:current_user).nil? }

However, I also started to add multiple yield blocks in my layouts. For example:




...
<%= yield :head %>


...
<%= yield %>
...
<%= yield :sidebar %>
...
<%= yield :foot %>

At first glance this is great! Now in each action/view I can customize specific components in my layout. The issue with this layout design and action_caching is that the content_for blocks do not appear to re-evaluate from the cached action into the ‘yield blocks’ in the layout. We could perhaps solve this with some modifications to content_for and some modifications around each ‘yield block’. I’m going to see if there is a solution and post… In the mean time does anyone have any suggestions?