GrokBlok - Home

Fail Early, Fail Often

2008-05-13T16:15:00Z

I was recently having a discussion with someone, and the topic was standing up while you’re working. I’ve recently been hearing a lot about it here and here. This person was mentioning that he had found a standing desk with a treadmill underneath. The proposed benefits are improved posture and increased attention span. I’m intrigued by the idea, but it’s something that I’d have to try out to find out if I like it. Unfortunately, my height (6’4”) purchasing something cheap or rigging up an existing table didn’t seem to be an option. I needed something ~48” high.

I remembered that I had a couple of nicely cut Medium Density Fiberboard pieces laying round that would be a great start. I also had 5 12’ 2×4s, a hand jigsaw, and a screw gun. Long story short, 2.5 hours and $0 later, I had something I could use. Is it great? No. Is it permanent? No. Is it something that I can use to evaluate whether I like to work this way or not without making a large investment? Absolutely. Fail early, fail often. Open Source carpentry.

Utili-Tool, A Camping Application

2008-04-10T15:24:00Z

Something that I use everyday that I’ve just released for public use is the Braintree Tools Site, which is just a Camping application frontend to the Braintree APIs. It’s also a simple collection of tools that will help you figure out if your ‘hashing’ is correct and what response look like. It’s kinda like a sandbox, but you don’t need to go so far as to write your own script. You can just do it from the web.

There is certainly truth in the statement that the best tools are created by the people who actually use them. A major part of my job at Braintree is to ease the task of integration for our customers. I come into contact with people who are using everything from Ruby on Rails to customized PHP to Oracle Forms. The nice thing about our API is that it doesn’t matter. You’re simply making HTTP GETS/POSTS to interact with the Gateway. For me, customer support at it’s most basic is just typing a query string into a browser address bar and looking at the response.

Is This Customer Support?

2008-03-04T21:20:00Z

I hate to be a dick about it, but I needed help installing an EV SSL certificate, so I went to the certifying authorities website and tried to find some articles or tutorials. No dice, poorly documented, inaccurate. They had a feature that let me “chat” realtime with one of their customer support folks. Perhaps I’m really missing something major, but I think this is absolutely terrible.

Malcolm: Hi!!

Malcolm: How can I assist you?

you: i'm trying to install an EV certificate on Apache

you: running Ubuntu

Malcolm: Ok.

you: i'm getting an error in IE7 only

Malcolm: can I have your order#

you: sure: #1234567

Malcolm: Please wait.

you: sure

Malcolm: I did installation check from our end, it seems that the root and intermediate certificates are not installed properly.

Malcolm: please install the root and intermediate certificates.

you: ok, there aren't _any_ instructions anywhere on how to do that

Malcolm: Please wait.

Malcolm: Please go through the below link.

Malcolm: https://support.nameprotected.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=264&nav=0,1,88

you: i've done all that

you: the site works with ssl in every browser BUT IE7

you: it has to do with EV portion

you: your documentation is woefully inadequate

Malcolm: Ok. Please send mail to support@nameprotected.com. We will solve your query.

you: I HAVE

Malcolm: Can I have your ticket number.

you: #987654321

Malcolm: Please wait.

you: what i'm saying is that your documents that i keep getting referred to are not clear

you: on how to install a EV certificate whether it be root or intermediate

Malcolm: Please wait.

Malcolm: could you please tell, at which place you are getting error

Malcolm: while installing the certificate.

you: I'm getting an error in IE7 when attempting to go to the page... it says that the certificate is not validly signed

you: no error in firefox or safari

you: to install the EV certificate, i downloaded the EV-Auto Enhancer for your website and used it as the SSLCertChainFile instead of the one you sent to, as directed by your site

you: for/from

Malcolm: Please go throgh the below link for evssl auto enhancer

Malcolm: https://support.nameprotected.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=1076&nav=0,1,82

you: perhaps you're not listening to me

you: I'VE ALREADY DONE THAT

you: please do not send another link to your documentation as it is completely incomplete

you: do you have a phone support center?

Malcolm: Phone Support will be available on Monday - Friday around 9am - 5pm GMT

Malcolm:

Malcolm: US + 1.555.1212

you: ok, so i've downloaded the file and have it set as the value for SSLCertificateChainFile

you: it's still not working

Malcolm: I have checked your domain in IE7

Malcolm: its working without any error

you: with a green bar?

Malcolm: Yes.

you: to indicate EV SSL?

Malcolm: Yes.

you: try again because i'm getting certificate error:navigation blocked

Malcolm: Please wait.

you: do i need to rename the file to what my original ca-bundle was called?

Malcolm: No.

Malcolm: Now am getting error.

you: k

Malcolm: the error because root and intermediate certificates are not installed properly

you: you already said that

you: then you sent me a link

Malcolm: Yes.

you: which was followed

you: then i get the error

you: which is the root which is the intermediate?

Malcolm: Send your query to support@nameprotectedcom. We will escalate to our next level support

Malcolm: ca bundle file

you: you're killing me

Malcolm: I apologize for the inconvenience caused. send mail to us. We will escalate to next level support and solve your query.

you: great!!!!! thanks for all your help!

Malcolm: Welcome!!

Am I completely missing it?

Scotland on Rails Registration is Open

2008-02-15T13:29:00Z

While I’m not going to be able to attend myself, I did want to mention on behalf of fellow Twitterer, Alan Francis that Scotland on Rails registration is open. It really looks like a dynamite group of speakers including a couple of Ohioans, Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich. Of particular interest to me would be the talk by Paul Dix on creating some collective intelligence in Rails applications. The blurb:

Take advantage of user data to create intelligent Rails applications! This talk will focus on data mining to create complex application behavior and gain insight into the patterns and habits of your users. Examples of these techniques can be seen with recommendation systems like those created by Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, and others. Additional examples include spam filtering systems for email or comment filtering provided by Akismet.

I will focus on techniques for gathering data, specific gems and plugins for performing various data mining and machine learning tasks, and performance issues like how to distribute the work to separate servers. Theory in this talk will be light and the specific algorithms will only get a mention by name. We’ll be looking at real world Ruby and Rails code examples for building recommendation, ranking, and classification systems.

Sounds fascinating. I also found it interesting that one of my former employers, JPMorganChase is a sponsor. If you have the means to attend, I’d really recommend it. I’ll wager there will be scotch, but probably not any Highland Games.

I've Joined Braintree Payment Solutions

2008-02-13T16:35:00Z

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and it’s also been a while since I changed jobs. I’m very pleased to announce that I now work for Braintree Payment Solutions. I’ve been putting all my energy into helping our CEO, Bryan Johnson make Braintree the place for discerning developers, and I think the combination of our support, technology, and services offered place us at the top of the industry. In short, it’s a credit card payment gateway, but it’s way more than that. Here’s the description from Braintree:

Braintree Payment Solutions is a leading provider of end-to-end electronic payment products and services. Braintree processes all forms of electronic payment transactions – credit, debit, electronic check, and electronic funds transfer. The company offers simplified PCI Compliance and credit card storage solutions, risk and fraud management, ecommerce solutions, and rate management. We’re changing the industry one customer at a time and would invite you to experience the difference.

Officially, my role is “Community Developer”, which sounds a bit ambiguous, but it’s actually a perfect title for what I’m going to be doing. I’m in charge of all things developer at Braintree, so I’m focused on Developing the Community and also Developing for the Community. In short, you can check out my work on the Braintree Community Developer Site which will include a blog, support forums, api docs, code examples, and all the information that you’ll need to easily integrate payment processing into your own applications.

The site is currently a little sparse on content, but we’re adding more everyday and I’m completely focused on making it the definitive place for information on credit card processing, payment gateways, and integration issues for developers in all communities. Initially, we’re focusing on Ruby on Rails developers, but we welcome developers from all languages and frameworks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please contact me at developer@getbraintree.com.

Needless to say, I’m very excited to be a part of such a great company and I’m looking forward to helping people navigate through a very complicated industry.

Emacs Shell Ansi Colors

2007-12-13T20:58:00Z

In a previous post I mentioned a funky character encoding issue with my Emacs Autotest output. I finally looked into the cause and came across the solution. I just needed to enable ansi-colors in my Emacs shell.

In your .emacs file, add the following:

   ;; Add color to a shell running in emacs 'M-x shell'
   (autoload 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on "ansi-color" nil t)
   (add-hook 'shell-mode-hook 'ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)

Cheap and easy. Now, you’ll get all the cool ansi colors, like the kids.

Rails 2.0 & CRB

2007-11-19T17:33:00Z

For those of you in the Columbus area, I’ll be speaking at the Columbus Ruby Brigade meeting this evening regarding Rails 2.0. This will be a high-level talk around some of the new things and some of the deprecated behaviours in everyone’s favorite web framework.

validates_acceptance_of howto

2007-11-16T14:24:00Z

We’re really getting things rolling on Gonowdo and as part of that, we’re starting to accept users on a somewhat limited basis. When signing up, I need to make sure that users accept our terms of service. With Rails, this is extremely simple, but after spending a few minutes on mailing list archives and forums I didn’t find a good resource or howto. Hopefully, this post will serve as that for anyone in the future.

The key to accomplishing this is to use an active record validation called “validates_acceptance_of”. Adding this to the User model with a method will create a virtual attribute for that named method, in my case, I used “terms_of_service”. There is no corresponding column in the database needed. This will not allow a model to be saved without it. By default, this method will allow the record to be saved if it is nil. Setting it to true will mean that you must pass this value to the record everytime you want to save it. One other thing, in order be able to access this method from the view, you need to make it accessible by creating an accessor. Here is the example from our application.


  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    # ...
    validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service
    # ...

    attr_accessible :terms_of_service
  end

In the view, you just need to add a control to the form for selecting this checkbox. Without checking this box, the form will throw a validation error and the model will not be saved.


  <% form_for :user, @user, :url => users_path do |f| %>
    <p>... other controls ...</p>
    <p><%= f.check_box :terms_of_service %> I accept the terms of service.</p>
    <p><%= submit_tag "Save" %></p>
  <% end %>

There are several other configurations that you can pass to validates_acceptance_of, similar to other validations. Check the documentation for this method for more information. If you have more stringent auditing requirements, then you may need to think about just using a boolean field in the database and using a regular validation. Extending this further might even allow you to track acceptance of versions of your terms of service as they get updated. Since we’re allowing nil by default, you will need to make sure that create a test/spec to specifically pass a :terms_of_service method. I would keep this in a special test case and not worry about including it throughout your test suite.

Hopefully, this will get you going, best of luck!

RSpec NO NAME error

2007-10-06T12:51:00Z

On Gonwodo, Aaron and I decided to use RSpec for our tests. We were getting a really strange error when attempting to print out the spec docs through the rake tasks. We had actually never written any specifications, just it “foo foo foo” methods in order to get pending tests. The error we were getting was:

A New User
  -- NO NAME (Because of --dry-run)
  -- NO NAME (Because of --dry-run)
  -- NO NAME (Because of --dry-run)

I was able to determine that the rake task does indeed call dry run. Here’s the task,


desc "Print Specdoc for all specs (excluding plugin specs)"
  Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new(:doc) do |t|
    t.spec_opts = ["--format", "specdoc", "--dry-run"]
    t.spec_files = FileList['spec/**/*_spec.rb']
  end

This is actually the expected behavior, as RSpec is attempting to generate the names of the specs using the code internally. The problem with the dry-run is that it never executes the code so the names cannot be determined. In order to have the empty tests generate the necessary spec doc you would do:

./script/spec spec -fs

I’m not sure that I understand why this is the expected behavior because I give the test a name, so I’m not expecting it to be run. If anyone has an explanation, I would greatly appreciate it.

Joining GoNowDo

2007-09-26T12:59:00Z

Today marks the last day that I’ll be working at Cardinal. I’m extremely excited to be working for a new company, GoNowDo. We’re going to be working on solving some interesting problems in the online travel industry. Stay tuned for more information.

Thanks to everyone at Cardinal!

Emacs Autotest Integration

2007-09-18T14:30:00Z

I’ve been read in several places about how to get emacs and autotest to play nicely together. This package runs a shell buffer just giving autotest’s output. It’s a nice way to automatically have that visual representation in the same window. It’s actually quite simple to do.

To begin with, you’ll need to download the autotest.el file and also a depencency, toggle.el. From there, I simply added the following to my .emacs file:

  ;; adding autotest integration
  (require 'toggle )
  (require 'autotest)

Restart emacs, and you should be good to go. Note, I also had to add the unit-test.el file, but that wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the wiki.

Navigate in emacs to a the root folder that you want to run autotest in and you can start this mode by typing:

M-x autotest

. Currently, my output is looking a little funny, I think it’s an encoding thing, but I think I can get the kinks worked out pretty soon. Also, make note that this will read the ~/.autotest file to start. A great resource on this nice piece of integration can be found on the emacs wiki.

That’s one less terminal that I’ll have going, meaning that more of my life will be spent in emacs, which is good.

Nginx iz teh 1337 h4x0r

2007-09-08T04:08:00Z

I spent the evening migrating this mephisto installation from apache to nginx. It was quite easy to install and configure. I’ve also cut down my memory by a few MBs. I’m having a little problem with some of the virtual hosts, but I think it’s an issue with my DNS, not necessarily the configs. My initial impression is that my pages are loading in the 1/2 the time. I’m too tired to post more, I’ll try to get to it tomorrow, including statistics, but if you have a choice, you should be using nginx, NOW.

Prototyping with Camping

2007-09-06T19:50:00Z

As you might know, I’ve been spending a lot of time at work writing some dashboard-type applications using _whytheluckystiff’s Camping Framework. I’ve been experiencing some incredible productivity gains by prototyping with this very small framework, and I think I’m only just beginning to realize exactly how much. I’ve recently undertaken rewriting one of these dashboards in Rails.

The Camping Application

Several months ago, I was tasked with providing some statistics on budget and project management performance for senior management. The maturity of datasources wasn’t very good, many of them were excel spreadsheet laden with macros, access databases, and csv files from 5 or 6 datasources. To further compound the problem, these datasources weren’t always in a consistent data format, so I made the design decision to just create a simple CRUD interface to manually enter the data. All compilation would be handled outside the application for the time being. The benefit of this approach would be that eventually, I could turn the data entry over to someone else.

I developed this solution over the course of about 2 weeks, working on and off until there was a format visually appealing to all parties. I wrote the most basic tests possible using Topfunky’s Mosquito Testing Framework. This solution worked until the application needed to be expanded to the entire organization, not just a subset. It was time to move to Rails.

The Rails Application

In addition to changing the domain to fit the entire organziation, I really wanted to have an extremely clean interface for someone else to enter the data. My goal was to have someone else take over entering the data, and I would just be responsible for the support of the application. Rails also gave me an opportunity to more easily explore automating some of the data entry.

In 2 days, working on it for 8 hours a day, I’m 90% complete, including adding the additional models and unit and functional tests. I realize that it’s a small Rails application, but now if there are enhancement that need to be made I’m on a much better platform.

+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers          |   560 |   395 |       8 |      49 |   6 |     6 |
| Helpers              |    20 |    19 |       0 |       1 |   0 |    17 |
| Models               |   152 |   130 |       7 |      18 |   2 |     5 |
| Libraries            |    14 |    11 |       0 |       3 |   0 |     1 |
| Integration tests    |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
| Functional tests     |   434 |   342 |      14 |      63 |   4 |     3 |
| Unit tests           |   745 |   565 |       8 |     154 |  19 |     1 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |  1925 |  1462 |      37 |     288 |   7 |     3 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
  Code LOC: 555     Test LOC: 907     Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.6

So in proper enterprise +3/-3 format, here are some observations…

Eagles

My models are almost an exact copy from Camping, with more validations and a couple of additional models that I needed to add for the extra functionality.
I already knew the domain of what I needed to create so any reworking could be accomplished on the first pass with Rails.
I already had lots of good data to use for Rails development as I just pulled fixtures down from the Camping app.

Turkeys

I miss clean view syntax of Markaby in Rails. I realize that I could use Markaby, but if support for this application eventually gets turned over to another group, I thought that the barrier to entry would be lower for the JSP-style syntax of ERB templates.
I had to manually copy and paste a lot of code from one Emacs screen to another. There was rumored to be a gem that would transistion a Camping application to Rails, DeCamper, but I couldn’t find any code that had been released. This bears further research.
Rails migrations and Camping migrations aren’t very similar, and I wanted to have the cleanest Rails application possible. I reworked the models enough that it just didn’t transfer very well.

Summary

I’ve been in too many situations where I work on things for too long only to have the organziation go in a different direction. Using Camping to prototype before moving on to Rails gets something for my users to react to before I’m too invested in the outcome of my work. When, and if I do need to move to Rails, the transition is seemless and probably cuts down on the total time to get a finished product into production. I’ve been very pleased with this approach, but I think I can reduce the turn around time even further. I think some possible options would be to use ERB with Camping or Markaby with Rails. Also, I think I should have perhaps gone to Rails a few weeks ago, but time was just too hard to come by. The next time you come across a situation that warrants creating something of immediate use that may or may not be thrown away after an initial pass, you should think about this approach.

Rails Trademark Madness

2007-08-18T01:39:00Z

So, it would appear that the ~~Rails~~ trademark discussion isn’t quite over. On the 27th of July, Dr. Nic Williams registered a trademark for:

Educational publications, namely, training manuals in the field of information technology
Dissemination of advertising, scheduling and managing of training courses and programs for others via a global computer
Arranging professional workshop and training courses

This is in addition to the one originally filed by David Heinemeier Hansson about the usage of ~~Ruby on Rails~~ in Computer software, namely, software framework for developing web applications. Apparently, that one isn’t completely through the door, yet.

What does all this mean? 1) Patent and trademark law seems completely jacked up in the US. 2) It means that the name of a thing is valuable, not the thing itself.

For those of you thinking about filing a trademark on your service, let me ask a question. Are you a great ~~Rails~~ developer, or are you a great developer who uses ~~Rails~~?

A Hot Tip

2007-07-12T21:45:00Z

Here’s a hot tip fresh off-the-press. If you’re an Ubuntu user you know that even Feisty Fawn comes with 1.8.5. If you want to get the latest Ruby release, 1.8.6, beware, there’s an issue with Readline support when you compile Ruby. Readline is a command line processing tool.

Make sure that it and it’s development headers are installed before you compile by installing the following packages in apt-get:

  sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev

I’m not voluteering, but I’d still like the Ubuntu maintainers and Ruby package maintainers to work a little more closely.

Here’s 2 places where I found information about this: