Tag Archives: Ruby

Why Rails and Their Committers Are Awesome

January 30, 2015 by Karl · 1 Comment

I love keyword arguments when they were introduced in Ruby 2.0, and use them every chance I get. As I was hacking around with ActiveJob today, and thought it would be cool to pass keyword arguments into the ActiveJob#perform_later method.

I thought it should work. It didn’t.

You get an  ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (1 for 0) error. The reason is the hash is converted to string keys upon serialization.

So I was thrilled when I did a bit of searching to see if anyone else had the same issue. Nope. Looked at the ActiveJob::Arguments module. Passing keyword arguments are not supported. I actually get to report a real feature request to Rails!

So here is my ActiveJob should support passing of keyword arguments to perform method.

This this is where the magic began… within a few minutes Sean Griffin (@sgrif) picked up on the issue report. I went to lunch, planning to fork ActiveJob and start hacking away when I got back. But Sean beat me to it. Sean added the ability to pass keyword arguments to ActiveJob jobs, and even backported it to Rails 4.2.1.

Within an hour, it was all done. Check out the full commit.

Want a reason to love Rails and their committers? This is one, of many.

Thank you Sean.

Posted in Rails, Ruby. Tagged with , .

Sinatra-Tailer: a small app for viewing server log files

March 18, 2009 by Karl · 4 Comments

UPDATE (Jan 9, 2015): I have not updated this project in year. While it may work, I doubt it. If you would like to take over the project, leave me a comment and we’ll get in touch.

I was reading Jason Seifer’s: Offline Gem Server Rdocs, which is an apache/passenger served Sinatra app that allows you to view the Rdocs of installed gems without using gem server. Nice. So I installed it on our sandbox server for all to enjoy.

But it got me thinking, there is another think I like to keep an eye on on our servers… log files. Oh, and I was looking for good excuse to play around with Sinatra. So, “with a one, and-a-two, and-a-three…” we have Sinatra-Tailer.

You can read all about it on the github page, but in short it simply performs a tail and displays the last X lines of the log file.

[sourcecode language=’bash’]
tail -n /path/to/my/log/file.log
[/sourcecode]

Features

  1. refreshes the list every X seconds, set by the user
  2. only one config.yml file to edit
  3. supports file globs, so you can grab a whole list of file with one line
  4. specify the number of lines to show
  5. completely unobtrusive js, because I’m cool?

Requirements

Sinatra framework

      (tested on 0.9.1.1, earlier may work)

I whipped this up pretty quickly so I’m sure there are a few bugs. There is some testing for a few unit tests, but nothing functional.

One word of warning, if you want to put this on a production server my recommendation is to put it on a separate port (like 9876) and for heaven’s sake, at a minimum use http basic authentication. From the sinatra readme:

Enjoy!

Posted in Ruby. Tagged with , , , .

Ruby: Send Email Reminders from iCal Calendar

July 21, 2008 by Karl · 1 Comment

This is going to be long, so hunker down for a good read.

Problem: Our Cub Scout den leader sends email reminders to all the parent about upcoming events. I decided to setup a gCal (google calendar) will all the events so that other parents could just check the calendar as they wish, or subscribe to the ical file to integrate with their own calendar. But several of the parents don’t have calendars (shame, shame) and everyone still liked the idea of receiving email reminders. So I decided to write a ruby script to email reminders automatically two days before the event.

Solution: Ruby is a great language to handle this. Especially since there are gems to handle many of the functions we need. Some of the gems we will be using are as follows:

Continue reading →

Posted in Ruby. Tagged with , , , , .