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Quick tip - use anonymous blocks!
In tracking down a memory leak in one of our Rails apps today, I ran across an interesting post detailing the difference between anonymous and named blocks in Ruby, and the performance differences therein. …
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Re: Simple RoR+MySQL optimization
I recently ran across a rather bare post espousing some generic “optimization” techniques for Rails apps. It offered no education, no explanation, no benchmarks. So, I thought, why not put those claims to the test? …
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Your friendly neighborhood DNS man
So there’s been this gossipy story making the rounds on the social news sites, that the McCain camp has unbelievably registered voteforthemilf.com and are redirecting it to their site! They’ve got traceroutes and everything! Oh! The sexism! Oh! The gall! Oh! The huge manatee! …
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Stop using social information as passwords and security questions!
I have a friend who recently had several of his online accounts compromised. The attackers weren’t particularly clever, didn’t use any special tools, didn’t install any viruses on his computer. All they needed was to see his public Facebook profile. From that, they were able to divine his birthday and security question answer - all that was needed to get into the mail account - and from there, they had access to every account online that he’d registered to that email address.
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Powerful, easy, DRY, multi-format REST APIs
Rails’ baked-in REST support is great. Build your app right, and you can expose a programmatic interface to your users for free. …
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Hold the RJS, please.
Rails does a great job at many things, but one of the most consistent stumbling blocks I see in #rubyonrails is RJS. It complicates many things that just don’t need to be that complex, especially when using a Javascript helper library like Prototype or jQuery. …
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Stupid attachment_fu tricks, part 1
attachment_fu is fantastic, but it’s a bit limited for some purposes. Ever wanted to upload data from a URL instead of making people upload files? It’s a common problem! …
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site_config - painless custom configuration for your Rails project
site_config is a little plugin that addresses a problem lots of people seem to need to solve in their Rails apps: per-environment configuration variables. …
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Jabberish: making Rails talk back
Ever wanted to do IM from Rails? xmpp4r-simple makes it really easy to talk to Jabber clients (such as Google Talk users) from Ruby, but it’s not quite a cut-and-dried solution for your Rails apps. Fortunately, there’s Jabberish. …