Jake Scruggs

writes ruby/wears crazy shirts

Dec 7, 2010

Oracle Foreign Key without Index Test

We've been having some Oracle deadlock issues that have been hard to reproduce locally. After a lot of investigation and solving of important problems that happened not to be THE problem we figured out that while we've been pretty good creating integrity constraints in the database we have not been very good about making sure that every foreign key has a corresponding index. And that can lead to problems.


So we had a situation were our documents table had a foreign key on the accounts table that was not indexed. So updating an account row lead to a whole table lock on documents (instead of just a row lock which would have happened if there was an index) and that was very bad when we had two separate processes where one was doing a bunch of accounts stuff and the other was doing a lot of documents stuff. Deadlocks for everyone!

The sad thing is that if we had just drank the Rails cool-aid about having no integrity constraints in the db we would have been fine but we got into trouble by only implementing constraints and not the indexes they work much better with.

So we found this cool bit of SQL that helped us find all the foreign keys missing an index here: http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:4530093713805#26568859366976

And that help us solve the deadlock problem. But what about the future? If only there was a way to run this check periodically and automatically... Time for a test!



As an additional bonus, the failing output of the test tells you how to write the index you need. Big thanks to Dave Bortz for tracking down this problem -- I just swooped in and wrote the test. And took credit in this here blog.

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Aug 28, 2010

Ruby Kaigi 2010 Day 3

Last day of Ruby Kaigi! Sad to see it go, it's been a great conference. As per usual Tweets are in bulleted italics and the rest is after the fact commentary.

First I've got to show you the commemorative fans they were handing out:


It's the creators of Ruby and PHP


It's Matz and... Someone else (sorry if it's obvious - I don't know). And of course they are programing in the bath.
  • BigDecimal: You can handle numbers as large as can fit into memory as opposed to the IEEE double #rubykaigi
  • BigMath is the Math module for BigDecimal #rubykaigi
  • Lots of different rounding modes in BigDecimal #rubykaigi
  • BigDecimal.mode is global per process - not thread safe #rubykaigi
  • So BigDecimal is Fiber unsafe #rubykaigi
Bummer.
  • .@mrkn implemented a solution storing mode in thread local #rubykaigi
Oh good. Wait, is that in 1.9.2 or trunk. I'd have to be in 1.9.2 right? To the Google! ... Yep, seems like it made it in: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3285
  • You can now change modes in a block (added to trunk yesterday) #rubykaigi
  • Effective digits/ Significant digits determines which digits to keep and which to round off #rubykaigi
  • BigDecimals don't know their own effective digits #rubykaigi
But I think the point of talking about sig figs was that it's coming soonish in Ruby. 1.9.3?
  • It is dangerous to mix floats and BigDecimals #rubykaigi
  • BigDecimals can't convert from rational, integer, or float. just strings #rubykaigi
  • And you can't do BigDecimal(BigDecimal) !! #rubykaigi
That is one crappy interface. Taking in only strings is frustrating and weird. How did this happen?
  • Now a preview of the future of BigDecimal #rubykaigi
  • No library for irrational numbers in Ruby #rubykaigi
  • Perhaps we can represent irrational numbers as algorithms and on convert when needed. #rubykaigi
  • BigDecimals don't have real significant digits implemented right now. #rubykaigi
  • The issue of BigDecimal not being able to handle anything other than a string as input will be fixed as it is a bug #rubykaigi
The irrational numbers thing sounds pretty cool. Since I mostly sling around strings for my day job I don't know that I'll ever use it. But purely for Ruby pride I like to see ruby challenge Python's rising dominance in the sciences and maths.
  • I really don't like the lack of travel time between session. You should have at least 5 minutes to change sessions. #rubykaigi
Look, this has been a great conference and any slights I've tended to overlook because they've really done a heroic job of keeping the admission price down but that lack of a passing period is just... Well I don't see why they did it. Just having the time as a buffer in case talks run over is reason alone. Moreover, no passing period traps people in sessions that they'd rather not be in and restricts choice.
  • Apparently there is a lot of chatter in IRC by ruby commiters that NArray should be added to strd lib. #rubykaigi
  • NArray is 28x faster and uses 8x less characters in 1.9.2 #rubykaigi
  • NArray is faster than what? Array, I assume, but I may not be following the translation correctly. #rubykaigi
Translation is volunteer and best-effort so it adds some challenge to attending sessions in a foreign language. So if I make any mistakes in this here blog, that's what I'm blaming it on.
  • Pwrake is parallel distributed Rake - being developed here in Tsukuba. #rubykaigi
Just a little tidbit dropped at the end of the NArray presentation -- sounds pretty cool. Masahiro Tanaka is using it drive his workflow in his scientific research.
  • yarv2llvm tries to speed up Ruby by implementing type inference (yarv is the vm for 1.9x) #rubykaigi
  • There are times in Ruby when type can not be inferred and in those cases yarv2llvm is often slower than Ruby 1.9x #rubykaigi
  • Fixnum overflow to BigNum is one of the hardest problems to solve #rubykaigi
  • Btw, I think the title of this talk: "How Did Yarv2llvm Fail" is wonderful. Way to keep everything above board. #rubykaigi
Great talk and very honest. The type inference thing looks promising but there are a couple of tough hurdles to clear. Maybe some day. Until then there's always Mirah.
  • Ruby AOT complier is "mostly compatible" with Ruby 1.9 #rubykaigi
  • AOT == "Ahead of time"
  • Ruby AOT compiler is passing 7847 of 7850 Ruby Spec tests as of now. #rubykaigi
  • On average Ruby AOT compiler is 3.5x faster than 1.9 for common benchmarks #rubykaigi
Cool, let's all move to Ruby AOT!
  • It doesn't fair quite so well in the real world Ex: Rails. Slightly slower than 1.9 #rubykaigi
  • Something about cache misses makes it slower #rubykaigi
  • The Ruby AOT compiler team wants to reduce the generated code size to increase speed. #rubykaigi
  • Rails can be compiled in 77 min and size of compiled code is 92MB with Ruby AOT #rubykaigi
Oh. Never mind. Plus, compiling. Boo. Hiss.
  • This memory profiler's gui looks amazing! #rubykaigi
  • Seriously, this is the sexiest profiler ever #rubykaigi
  • Can attach to running Ruby programs from another machine #rubykaigi
  • Designed to have as small as possible impact and be easy to use #rubykaigi
I gotta tell ya the audience was chomping at the bit to get a hold of this profiler. You can run it in production for christ's sake! And the GUI is to die for.
  • Not available yet!?! #rubykaigi
  • Needs to get patch accepted into ruby core - maybe in 1.9.3. RATS! #rubykaigi
Very cruel of Tetsu Soh not to mention this up front. I'm sure it was an oversight but everyone was crazy disappointed. Still this was one of the best talks of the conf. Tetsu Soh is one to watch.
  • Dear Ruby Core please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please accept Tetsu Soh memory profiler patch #rubykaigi
Indeed. I'm famous (on the internet (in one corner)) so you should listen to me.
  • Lots of requests to publish Tetsu Soh's memory profiler on Github. I agree! #rubykaigi
  • Automatic sliding doors in Japan trigger much latter than Americans would expect leading to a lot of stopping and hand waving
I'm not the only one who noticed this so I'm not crazy.
  • More awesome techno in the #rubykaigi main hall. I want, nay, need the playlist.
Please post it on the 'Goodies' section of the Ruby Kaigi site. Or tweet about it. Something.
  • Shay Friedman has spent the first five minutes of his talk apologizing for being associated with Microsoft. Stop. #rubykaigi
There was this weird hostile vibe coming from Shay. I felt like he hated us for liking Apple products. The weird thing is that there are a lot fewer Apple computers here than at a normal Ruby Conf. Maybe he thought we were all Microsoft haters and so he might as well fire first. Seemed like a mistake.
  • Just saw a nice hello world creating windows and dialog boxes in IronRuby #rubykaigi
  • IronRuby currently passes 85% of Ruby Spec. #rubykaigi
  • IronRuby 1.0 is 1.8.6 compatible. 1.1 (coming soon) will be 1.9.2 compatible. #rubykaigi
  • Windows Presentation Foundation's view templates are written in xaml which is like html. #rubykaigi
Another markup language because we needed more. I feel like the IronRuby team really needs a win. They've been the slowest progressing Ruby VM for a long time now.
  • <script language="ruby"> Whaa? Gestalt hides a hidden bit of Silverlight in the page so you can replace Javascript with Ruby. #rubykaigi
Pretty neat trick that. Of course it means making your site dependent on silverlight. No worse than depending on Flash I guess.
  • IronRuby.Rack is Rack implementation on ASP. Currently in beta. #rubykaigi
It's all coming along, I'd just like to see something working at this point in its life.
  • If key is symbol then only one instance - less object creation. Which is why everyone uses symbols. Or because everyone else does #rubykaigi
So did you know why everyone uses symbols? Or did you just do it because that's the convention. Yeah, me too but then I learned. I'm not going to say how long ago that was.
  • Presenter's computer went down and it's taking forever to reboot. Stupid Mac. #rubykaigi
That's one of those rough moments where you really feel bad for the presentor. But he handled it like a champ -- continuing the presentation while he waited for his machine to boot back up. Well done. I wish I got more out of the talk but it was one of those inspirational talks that are hard to translate. The Japanese speaking audience seemed to love it.
  • Please use the overburdened network to download the english version of the slides. Umm... What? #rubykaigi
Huh. Why did that seem like a good idea. Since when does asking a room full of people to download something all at once ever work. And yet, it seems it happens once a conference. Repeat after me: Never ever depend on the network at a conference.

Funny story time. All through the conference I spent a lot of time staring at the IRC screens on either side of the stage where the translations happen. But since it's just IRC, anyone can join the room. There was this one guy who posted A LOT and everyone of the posts seemed to be either:
888888888888
or
wwwwwwwwww

I later found out that 888888 means clapping and wwwww means laughter. OK but stop cluttering up the screen that I'm trying to read translations off of. Then I found out who sora_h was: He's 14 and his name is Shota Fukumori. He got up and gave an entertaining lightning talk. Turns out he's a Ruby commiter so he's got that on me.


Young programmer


And, all of a sudden, it was time for the final keynote by Chad Fowler. He gave a talk about how to live a remarkable life and it was good stuff.
  • The two things that are necessary to live a remarkable life are: To have intention and a system of realizing that intention #rubykaigi
  • Living intentionally means being mindful of your actions. It's easy to coast through life. #rubykaigi
  • "My co-workers laughed at me when I learned Ruby" - Chad Fowler #rubykaigi
  • "You don't want to be in a situation where you are competing on price" - Chad Fowler #rubykaigi
  • Programming Cobol is like working in a hospice. There's a market for that. - Chad Fowler #rubykaigi
  • "Always be the worst musician in whatever band you're in" Pat Matheney #rubykaigi
  • "If you're playing things that sound good then you're not practicing" lesson from music that applies to programming #rubykaigi
  • "I needed a project that was useless" - Chad Fowler #rubykaigi
  • "Was today better than yesterday?" All you have to do is get a little better every day #rubykaigi
  • "Passion is a resource that you have to conserve" - Chad Fowler #rubykaigi
Lots of gems in there.
  • RubyKaigi 2011 will be in July and in Tokyo. #rubykaigi
There was something about the theme being "The Last Ruby Kaigi" but I think it was sort of a joke making fun of some guy who posted a rant about how the Ruby Kaigis need to end. I didn't have enough background to get it.

Oh, I forgot to talk about the guy hawking "The Last Google Wave Book Ever Published." It seems he had been working on a Google Wave book and it was printed on the same day Google announced the end of wave. His response? To shamelessly promote the book at Ruby Kaigi in a lightning talk, at some sort of hallway session (with 30 people gathered around), and pretty much everywhere else. And I actually saw some people carrying the book around. Did they buy it? Who knows -- his positive personality was so powerful I wouldn't be surprised if they did.


The Last Google Wave book ever published


Ruby Kaigi was an excellent time. I thought it might be crazy intimidating but everyone was super nice and there were enough english speakers so that I could always get my ideas across. Go if you have the chance.

Also, check out my every growing set of Ruby Kaigi photos at Flickr:

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Ruby Kaigi 2010 Day 2

Holy crap am I tired. It's been a long awesome day. It started out with some excitement:

  • Just found out I have an hour time slot when all I prepared was 30 minutes. Ok, time to write some more. #rubykaigi
  • Panic! Maybe I'll talk about metric_fu a bit. #rubykaigi
I must have looked at that schedule 20 times and never realized that I had an hour slot. Everyone else had 30 minutes so I thought I did too.
  • Attendees of "The Importance and Implementation of Speedy Tests" will also get "Metrics Based Refactoring" at no additional cost! #rubykaigi
I did something I almost never do: Look at crisis as an opportunity (crisi-tunity). I had to write "Metrics Based Refactoring" anyway for Windy City Rails so why not write it now. In less than 4 hours. While watching my friends present at a conference. Looking over those sentences now I can't believe I didn't freak out.
  • Ted Han used publicly available data to settle reviewing bais accusations against "The Edge" of hating the PS3 #rubykaigi
  • Turns out there was no bais. Math to the rescue! #rubykaigi
  • bais? bias? baise? no idea.
You are probably not surprised to find out that I can't spell. Even Eito Katagiri, who did a wonderful job translating my slides, found a bunch of spelling errors and English is not his first language.
  • I just pulled out a table in the main hall and the table police where all over me. My mistake. Sorry. #rubykaigi
There were announcements everywhere about not doing this and yet I did. In my defense: I'm an idiot.
  • They're giving out an award to the person who committed most to Ruby 1.9.2: Yusuke Endoh #rubykaigi
A very nice gesture. Lots of class here at Ruby Kaigi.

Time for Matz's keynote!

  • Matz is talking about Ruby 2.0... again. #rubykaigi
This topic is a staple of Matz's speaking career. I think the first time I saw him talk, years ago, he was talking about Ruby 2.0. Someday...

  • "Right now ruby is just good enough" - Matz #rubykaigi
  • Matz hates local variable propagation (the lack thereof) but no one else seems to care so he's abandoning it. #rubykaigi
  • Ruby's private is not private: it can be accessed from subclasses and overridden by accident #rubykaigi
  • Monkey patching modifies the class globally. #rubykaigi
  • Classbox is the solution to global monkey patching #rubykaigi
Lots of talk about the mysterious 'classbox.' What is it? Well here's a paper on the subject:

And some pertinent lines from the abstract:
...Unfortunately existing approaches suffer from various limitations. Either class extensions have a global impact, with possibly negative effects for unexpected clients, or they have a purely local impact, with neg- ative results for collaborating clients. Furthermore, conflicting class extensions are either disallowed, or resolved by linearization, with consequent negative effects. To solve these problems we present classboxes, a module system for object-oriented lan- guages that provides for method addition and replacement. Moreover, the changes made by a classbox are only visible to that classbox (or classboxes that import it), a feature we call local rebinding. To validate the model we have implemented it in the Squeak Smalltalk environment, and performed benchmarks.
Now for more Ruby 2.0 preview:
  • 5/2 => 2 should be 2.5 or 5/2 (rational) #rubykaigi
  • Inheritance in ruby is more for connivence than for other merits #rubykaigi
  • Matz is thinking about moving mix-ins to a traits like solution which would have conflict detection (unintentional overrides) #rubykaigi
  • You could declare the 'mix' and specify how to deal with conflicting methods. #rubykaigi
  • mix Foo, [:*] would copy all constants from the mix, or you can specify which ones you want and rename them #rubykaigi
  • mix raises error on method/constant name conflict or removing #rubykaigi
  • From Matz's slides "Ruby 2.0, just started, small step from 1.9, should be done soon" #rubykaigi
  • Ruby 2.0: Traits, Classbox, Keyword arguments, a few other nifty features #rubykaigi
  • There some fierce discussion going on in IRC about the proposed changes in Ruby 2.0 #rubykaigi
The debate on 'mixes' got pretty hot and heavy. Keep in mind that all this IRC chatter is displayed behind Matz while he was giving his keynote because the translations are done in IRC. So you'd be reading a translation of what he said right along with people discussing it.
  • My presentation on "Speedy Tests" and "Metrics Based Refactoring" starts at 13:30 (10 min) in room 200 #rubykaigi
  • The 'slides' from my presentation on "Speedy Tests" http://is.gd/eHNTN #rubykaigi
I think the talk went very well. Especially considering that I wrote the second half fairly fast.
  • I just disparaged integration tests in favor of unit tests. Next up is @p_elliott talking about how he only does integration #rubykaigi
  • .@p_elliott does a lot of things to make his integration test fly. I would like to see one of their suites. I could learn a lot. #rubykaigi
So I asked Paul how long their suites take and he said that they develop on 8 core machines and use Specjour to utilize 4 more cores so they tend to run between 5-8 minutes. Pretty damn fast for full stack integration testing.
  • Hey, someone else made the 30 minutes vs. 60 minutes mistake. I feel better now. #rubykaigi
Except he found out at the end of his presentation when he asked: "How much time do I have left?" and go the response: "25 minutes." Yipes. Luckily there were a lot of questions.
  • .@nusco did a really good job explaining the basics of Ruby metaprograming
  • RT @sudhindraRao Whatever works in #java does not work in #ruby. Even huge classes are maintainable. @rubykaigi
  • .@nusco's favorite metaprogramming trick is method_missing. I thought he was kidding but he was not. #rubykaigi
When he said method_missing I grabbed the microphone back and responded: "Really?" I couldn't help myself. I tend to avoid method_missing. There's usually a way to do what you want with other programming tricks.
  • Modules are extremely decoupled and can be tested in isolation so they are very flexible @nusco #rubykaigi
Good point.

  • Lightning Talks! I'm excited! #rubykaigi
Talking very fast does not lend itself to translation. But still they were very cool. Even better there was a lady in a kimono who would 'gong' you if you ran out of time.



The gong lady stikes

That is awesome.

After the lightning talks a few of us went back to the hotel to drop our things of before the party and we ran smack into this huge festival that happens once a year in Tsukuba. Here are some pics:




Festival 11

Festival 4


Festival 6

The party was super nice. And they had a fantastic spread of wonderful foods and drinks.

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Aug 27, 2010

Ruby Kaigi 2010 Day 1

Here I am in Japan at RubyKaigi 2010. Wow. Generally I tweet a lot about the conf live and then publish those tweets here (in italics) and provide slightly more commentary. So lets get it on.
  • So my flight leaves at noon for #rubykaigi, takes 13 hours, and arrives at 3pm tomorrow... Wait -- that can't be right. #looksitupagain
  • Before today's trip to Japan the furthest from the U.S.A. I've ever been is: Canada. #howisthatpossible
  • In cab. It has begun.
  • Someone once said "If you've never missed a flight you're spending too much time in airports" #atgate2hoursearly
Yep - can you feel the panic in those first couple of tweets? I was totally freaked out. The actual trip turned out to be easy. I met up with Chad Fowler, Yehuda, and Woody at the airport and we took a bus straight to Tsukuba. I went to an exotic foreign land and the first thing I did was take a bus through 100 minutes of strip malls. But I was in Japan. And Yehuda held forth on 'snowmen' and encodings for most of the way so that was interesting.


Yehuda Katz Holds Forth on the Bus


  • So it's 7:15 am in Chicago, meaning I've been up for over 24 hours. So that's like 36 old man hours.
  • My first meal in Japan was near 60 bucks. And I'm not even in Tokyo yet. I'm gonna need a bigger wallet.
  • Also, I almost got run over by not one, but two bicyclists using cell phones to text.
  • And 7-11's are everywhere.
So I survived the first day and even had an excellent dinner. It was a bit pricey but worth it. Many thanks to Makoto Inoue for helping organize this get together - it was exactly what I needed.

  • Donuts are cute in Japan: http://is.gd/eFXCR


Donuts are cute at Mr. Donut

Ate second breakfast/lunch at "Mr. Donut" which is really nice here in Japan. Of course you can get noodles.

  • Good news: #rubykaigi has a non-freezing temperature. I was worried it would be 91 outside and 50 inside. Which tends to make me sick
  • Some nice low-key techno playing in the #rubykaigi main convention hall.
  • RT @headius Ruby 1.8.8 will release this year and be the last 1.8 release. Some debate still about whether to backport 1.9.2 features. #rubykaigi
Ah, Charles got to got to the secret Ruby Core meeting so he's in the know. Actually I could have probably gone too but I wasn't sure if just anyone was allowed.

  • Btw, the advice I received to stay up as long as possible after my flight to Japan was good. Feeling no jet-lag.
  • I adjusted my Japanese rent-a-phone to display am/pm and now it reads "0:32pm" I guess they really like military time here
It's the little things that are the most endearing.

  • Getting an introduction to #rubykaigi in japanese with translations coming in IRC which is displayed on side screens. #lag

We get a lecture on proper use of wifi


  • Next up at #rubykaigi is a panel on Rails 3/ Ruby 1.9.2 (replacing canceled keynote)

First panel


  • Ah, the translations are back. Mostly. #rubykaigi
  • RT @headius I can't decide if it will be more or less exhausting to attend three days of conference sessions I can't understand :) #RubyKaigi
  • .@wycats is fearless - he's critiquing Ruby 1.9.2 while sitting 5 feet from matz on stage
So Leonard was doing the translation from Japanese to English and Matz was doing the translation from English to Japanese which lead the a moment where Matz had to translate Yehuda's (nice) criticism of Ruby 1.9.

  • One of things @tenderlove really likes about 1.9 is using encodings is painless. You have to think about it but it's easy. #rubykaigi
  • Secret to getting commit rights on Ruby or Rails? Submit patches with tests over a consistent period. #rubykaigi
  • .@tenderlove doesn't think that ActiveRecord got the same amount of love that ActiveSupport did in Rails 3. #rubykaigi
  • Specifically @tenderlove doesn't like ActiveRelation's integration in ActiveRecord in Rails 3. "It needs help" #rubykaigi
  • .@wycats' response: "There's always 3.1" #rubykaigi
  • .@tenderlove feels less able to bounce around the whole project when developing on Ruby as compared to Rails. #rubykaigi
  • .@wycats brought up something for Ruby core, saw a lot of discussion referencing his name but he could not participate. #rubykaigi
Ah the perils of trying to develop across (real) languages.

  • Wait, Sarah's talk is going to be in Japanese? #rubykaigi
  • Oh, just the first part -- well done. #rubykaigi
She learned a lot of Japanese just for this presentation. Good for her.

  • Rails wrapping of Javascript is kind of a disaster - mostly because javascript is changing fast. #rubykaigi
Good point - I hadn't really thought about why wrapping SQL works so well while wrapping Javascript works out so poorly.
  • Step one to writing testable Javascript: Get it out of the view. #rubykaigi
  • Pivotal uses Jasmine to test their Javascript: Bdd/RSpec like syntax and no dom is required. Can run in browser or headless. #rubykaigi
  • There's no time between sessions to escape one and go to another. Good thing I don't mind appearing rude. #rubykaigi
Picture a lot of me saying "Excuse me" to people who don't understand english.

  • OH "Social games are just CMS with bad UI's" #rubykaigi
That's really funny.

  • MySql 5 only supports 3 bytes for UTF8. huh. #rubykaigi
  • A 'u' with an umlaut is two code points that represent one character. #rubykaigi
  • UTF8 and UTF16 are both encodings of unicode. #rubykaigi
  • In Ruby 1.8 and C a string is just an array of bytes. #rubykaigi
  • "Corruption is normal" - @wycats #rubykaigi
  • force_encoding is not the way. If you have to use it you probably have a deeper problem. #rubykaigi
  • Dear internet: Take all sweeping statements with a grain of salt.
Two sessions in a row on encodings. We all feel like we need to know more about encodings. And then we ignore that feeling until it bites us in the ass.

  • jugyo has a lot of Growl-themed ideas. #rubykaigi
  • Had an outbreak of super-sleepiness. Purchased a strange energy drink from an even stranger vending machine and I'm good. #rubykaigi
  • TermColor can do blink! Now that's progress. #rubykaigi
  • Cinatra is Sinatra for command line apps. #rubykaigi
  • "write code like writing blog entries" - jugyo #rubykaigi
Watching Jugyo talk is always entertaining - I loved his lightning talk at last years Ruby Conf.

  • .@tenderlove has changed into a crappy suit -- It's business time! #rubykaigi
  • And headgear? #rubykaigi

@tenderlove 1

That, my friends, is awesome. I can't compete in shear crazy and acknowledge my superior.

  • The number of languages (code) vs. the number of languages (speak) is completely off. #rubykaigi
  • "People are interpreters with forgiving parsers." - @tenderlove #rubykaigi
  • .@tenderlove enjoys programming the most at hack nights. Challenging and fun. #rubykaigi
  • PHP and Ruby living together: Webrick serving up WordPress. You are one weird dude @tenderlove #rubykaigi
Webrick serving up PHP WordPress. Think about that for a moment.

  • Making some last minute changes to my #rubykaigi presentation: "Speedy Tests" Come see it tomorrow at 13:30 in room 200
Hey, I just found out I have an hour time slot when I had thought I was going to present for 30 minutes. I guess the crowd is going to get some bonus metric_fu coverage. As I'm going to present in 4 hours I better go write some more content. Panic!

Oh yeah, go check out my Ruby Kaigi photo set on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakescruggs/sets/72157624815648014/

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Jul 20, 2010

Using Git Inside a Git Hook

Using Git Inside a Git Hook can cause problems. In my previous post: "Signal 13 Problems with Git Hooks" I describe how we are trying to automatically merge certain types of branches into a branch that is designed to hold them all. Anyway, that means we want to run some git commands inside of the git hook. We change dirs into another directory where we have a clone of the repo and start telling git to merge some stuff and we get a bunch of


remote: fatal: Not a git repository: '.'
But if we run the exact same commands as the git user everything works fine. Huh. Eventually we got our linux guru over and he noticed that the environment under which the git user runs is totally different when inside a hook. Gitolite does a bunch of things to the env, but the one that was screwing us up was the setting of the GIT_DIR. After we figured that out, the solution was as easy as:

ENV.delete 'GIT_DIR'

in our ruby script that is triggered by the 'post-receive' hook. And now I must get back to the fun.

comments (1)

Signal 13 Problems with Git Hooks

Ran into a gotcha in Git today when trying to write a post push hook. We want our designer to have a fast turn around time with clients so we're writing some hooks to merge all of the 'theme' branches he works with to get merged into a special preview branch which is then deployed to the preview site. And all this should happen after he does a 'git push.' Seems like a 'post-receive' hook is just what we want.


Except that every time we tried to create one we got these errors on a push:


error: git-shell died of signal 13
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
error: error in sideband demultiplexer

If the 'post-receive' file even existed in git_dir/hooks/ on the git repo box, we got this error. We checked permissions, gitolite docs, git docs, google, etc and no help. We finally realized that Git was piping in some information to our 'post-receive' file and since we were not consuming it, that was causing the explosion.

So, I present to you, a stub of 'post-receive' file written in Ruby:


#!/usr/bin/env ruby
STDIN.readlines.each do |line|
rev_old, rev_new, ref = line.split(" ")
# You will get in here as many times as branches were pushed
end


rev_old is the old commit hash, rev_new is the new commit hash, and ref will be something like: "refs/heads/test_branch" Useful information.

Git often passes things into it's hooks, check the git book docs to find out what.

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Jul 17, 2010

Ruby Midwest 2010 Saturday

So day 2 begins. I got to bed early-ish as I am old so I'm fresh as a daisy and ready for more Ruby. As per my established practice, Tweets are in italics.

  • Keynote by Yehuda Katz (@wycats) is up next at #RubyMidwest
  • I'm wondering why you can't give a technical keynote? Everyone says so. #RubyMidwest

Why is that, exactly? It's a technical conference. And a single track one at that. So I say tech it up, baby.

  • Things that seem really easy are actually huge blockers to new users @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • .@wycats started Rails dev on windows - me too. #RubyMidwest
  • "What the F** is that thing with raw_host on it?" Ex of a small thing that is a blocker to a noob @wycats #RubyMidwest

Yeah, I had a few of those. I had no idea how to do public static final in Ruby. When I figured it out it lead to one of my early blog posts: Public Static Final for Ruby

  • RT: @RubyMidwest Big thanks to @mbleigh and @intridea for hosting the OMGWTFBBQ dinner/lightening talks/hack night! #rubymidwest
  • RT: @RubyMidwest great roundup of the first day of @rubymidwest from @jakescruggs http://bit.ly/arfY9m #rubymidwest (via @ajsharp)

Oh yeah -- the Ruby Midwest Twitter account liked my post. Go me.

  • .@wycats got into the 'subversive' side of the Rails community through Data Mapper because he had a legacy DB #RubyMidwest
  • "Because of the craziness of what I was doing, Merb was much more appealing to me than Rails" @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • Building the Merb Server (never finished) pushed him hard into areas he didn't understand and made him much better @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • RT: @tswicegood "If you're gonna do something open-source, pick something hard." /via @wycats #rubymidwest

Good advice. Hard to work up the nerve to follow it but good none-the-less.

  • Bundler has been much harder than Rails - It's a hard social problem. @wycats #RubyMidwest

Yeah. I'm the advocate for Bundler on my Rails 2.3x project and I've heard a lot of "Stupid Bundler!" and it was almost never Bundler's fault.

  • Strength of the Rails community: We demand a very high level of external api excellence. @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • "User experience includes the command line" @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • We've spent a lot of time making the command line an enjoyable experience. Not so true in other communities. @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • .@wycats spent a bunch of time making Bundler's error messages more informative. #RubyMidwest

Good man. It really helps.

  • People were confused by "Locking gems" so that inspired 0.9 => 1.0 @wycats #RubyMidwest

Yep, I kept having to explain to my team that we lock because we're in production.

  • Now, in 1.0, you get a lock automatically in Bundler. @wycats #RubyMidwest

Nice!

  • People have a right to expect basic use of a product to not require a manual @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • Oh the other hand, with advanced features you should expect the users to read the manual @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • Sign of a mature project: Successful maintainer hand off @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • Another sign of a mature project: Survives several Ruby/Rails releases @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • Another sign of a mature project: Incorporating real world crazy bug fixes @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • .@wycats Sass is battle tested while Less is not. #RubyMidwest

Oh no he di'ent! Let the flame war begin.

  • New things should be able to disrupt, but points should be given to things that are mature @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • .@wycats "Merb was massively immature when it got a lot of mind share. It should have been much harder than it was." #RubyMidwest

Really honest of him to admit that. Also, while I'm at it I should point out that it's really cool of him and Chris Wanstrath to show up to a small first year regional Ruby conference. Stand up guys, they are.

  • RT: @j_root #rubymidwest you heard it here first Yehuda Katz said that less css is clown school... and that Sass 3 rules its nuts. :) #misrepresent

It should be noted that @j_root used the hashtag #misrepresent AND a smiley emoticon so he's just trying to stir up trouble. Bring it.

  • RT: @j_root #rubymidwest Yehuda spits mad fire, holding the entire oss community to the flame. you can run but you can't hide, gems... bam pwnt

I'm not sure what "bam pwnt" means but I like the cut of this @j_root's jib.

  • "User confusion is an actual bug" @wycats #RubyMidwest

Good point.

  • OSS users: put pressure on the established projects to incorporate the new hotness instead of immediately jumping ship @wycats #RubyMidwest
  • .@wycats Reminds me of Winston Wolf. He just gracefully handled a "Why were you a dick to me online" question #RubyMidwest
  • To be fair, I don't think the question asker meant it to come out that way. But it kinda did. #RubyMidwest

Remember the scene in "Pulp Fiction" where the Wolf showed up and effortlessly dealt with Vince Vega's guff? It was like that but better. Do NOT throw down with the wycats - he will destroy you.

  • Next up "User Experience for Library Designers" - Wesley Beary (@geemus) at #RubyMidwest
  • Rename! talk is now called "eXperience Driven Design" @geemus #RubyMidwest

You can't sneak those renames by me -- I'm wise to your tricks. Of course, I've had some of my talks renamed behind my back by organizers. I'm looking at you, Ray Hightower. But I kid the Hightower -- He's alright with me.

But seriously, I'll cut you if you even think of renaming one of talks again. I'm kidding! Sorta.

  • Slide from last night's Lightning Talks: http://is.gd/dvOJw "This is actually a simplified diagram" said the speaker #RubyMidwest

Funny stuff. If you're a Ruby nerd. And you probably are.


What? Windy City Rails picked me to talk? Thanks guys. Especially Ray, who didn't take those previous jokes personally.

  • RT: @brntbeer @geemus is killing so far with funny slides #rubymidwest
  • Writing a test framework is a good way to learn if nothing else. And it probably will be nothing else. @geemus #RubyMidwest
  • Fog has 124 versions in just over a year. Holy crap! I thought metric_fu's 24 was pretty good over 2 years @geemus #RubyMidwest

What the what!?! 124 versions? For real real and not for play play? Damn. I am humbled.

  • Fog is "The Ruby cloud computing library." btw @geemus #RubyMidwest
  • "Encourage Contributors" Damn Straight. He gives out T-Shirts! @geemus #RubyMidwest

124 versions and T-Shirts? This is the best open source project ever. I may even use it someday.

  • RT: @Arlen Wesley Beary: "When you're writing a library, the expert, is YOU. You are trying to help the rest along." #rubymidwest
  • Who wants to design a metric_fu T-Shirt? That would be cool. #RubyMidwest

Seriously -- design a shirt for MetricFu and I'll name a major release after you.

  • RT: @lpillow The dirty secret to project naming: spend as much time coming up with the name as coding the project. @geemus #rubymidwest

Funny.

  • "Practical Projects in Mongo DB" with Alex Sharp (@ajsharp) starts soon at #RubyMidwest
  • MongoDB is schema-less: great for rapid agile development @ajsharp #RubyMidwest
  • Mongo stores documents (in binary json) not rows @ajsharp #RubyMidwest
  • Auto-sharding is coming soon. But I've heard that before. @ajsharp #RubyMidwest

Pretty sure I saw a talk on Mongo a year ago that was promising Auto-sharding. Either they announced that feature way too early or it's proving harder than they thought. Money on the later.

  • Mongo writes are "fire and forget" @ajsharp #RubyMidwest
  • No Joins or Multi doc transactions in Mongo @ajsharp #RubyMidwest

Hmm, could make like interesting.

  • RT: @mattyoho @blowmage #rubymidwest has been a really great conference. Major kudos to the organizers; it's been smooth as butter.

Here here! If any organizers come to Windy City Rails I'm buying the drinks.

  • .@ajsharp uses Mongo to create detailed super search-able logs that help him track down bugs #RubyMidwest
  • "I don't care about storing data, I care about persisting state" @ajsharp's argument against SQL #RubyMidwest

Good quote and a good point.

  • "Pragmatic Guide to Git" by Travis Swicegood (@tswicegood) coming up at #RubyMidwest
  • It's going to be an Intro to Git talk. @tswicegood #RubyMidwest

Intro to Git is not really my thing (been using it for a few years) but he did a good job.


Slides!

  • Can't say I've ever understood applauding people who win books at conferences. Great job being lucky! #RubyMidwest
  • Maybe it's just something to do while the winners make their way to the front. Clapping for book winners, that is. #RubyMidwest

I say that at the next conference we all sit in stony silence while the lucky one slowly makes his or her way up to the front. Who's with me?

  • "Interoperable Web" by Michael Bleigh (@mbleigh) next at #RubyMidwest
  • ostatus is a collection of web standards, like the hall of justice (superfriends) @mbleigh #RubyMidwest

Great "Super Friends" Theme to this talk. Remember the classic 70's-80's cartoon? Well I do because I'm old. Get off my lawn.

  • RT: @adamstegman Interoperable Web wins best slide of the conference. Unicorn, hearts, rainbows, leg warmers - unattainable dream. #rubymidwest

The leg warmers on the unicorn is what really made the slide for me. Why would a Unicorn need leg warmers!?! That's just silly.

  • pubsubhubbub - is webhooks with standards. you can subscribe to events @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • superfeedr provides a free hub server for public stuff @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • webfinger takes this point of view: "email = identity" And hooks everything up through that @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • redfinger is a ruby wrapper for webfinger @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • Salmon - if someone comments on a blog post on an aggregator (not the blog itself) then it can show up on the blog @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • activity streams - adding verbs to rss feeds. Ex: followed, posted, favorited, closed, updated, tagged, etc. @mbleigh #RubyMidwest

God Damn does this stuff sound sexy. Everyone needs to support all of this right now. Without me doing any work.

  • OAuth 2.0 flexible multi-profile token authorization. @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • In OAuth 1.0 you had to go the website for auth. What if you couldn't (no browser), or their wasn't a website? @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • OAuth 2.0 provides 4 ways to auth: Web server, user agent, native app, and autonomous @mbleigh #RubyMidwest

Good and needed improvements.

  • RT: @LuigiMontanez .@mbleigh is giving an incredible presentation on the Interoperable Web at #rubymidwest -- a peak into the very near future
  • "Start thinking in standards" to make the web one big distributed info machine. @mbleigh #RubyMidwest
  • Here are @mbleigh's slides on the Interoperable Web. http://bit.ly/bZfm8r (via @LuigiMontanez)

An exciting talk. Assuming any of it gets adopted. If not we'll look back and weep tears of regret into the pillow of despair.

  • So I may have to calm down a bit on the tweeting as my talk is up after the next one and I should review my presentation. #RubyMidwest

I don't think I did, really. I'm out of control. I'm on an airplane right now so I'll have to quit the over tweeting cold turkey. By working on my blog post. Kinda like methadone.

  • "memprof" by Aman Gupta (@tmm1) next at #RubyMidwest
  • Ruby MRI has a "stop the world" GC. @tmm1 #RubyMidwest

Boo.

  • More objects == Longer GC run @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • So, of course, less objects == better performance @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • Avoid leaked references (sometimes called memory leaks, but not really the right term) @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • bleak_house not only tells you what is 'leaking' but also where it is leaking @tmm1 #RubyMidwest

Sounds good.

  • RT: @chadmontplaisir @tmm1 "God was known for a long time to have memory leaks" #rubymidwest

The God project has lead to a lot of unintentional humor. And for that, we thank you God.

  • memprof - easy to use, no patching the vm, detailed (file/line) object contents, refs between objects, simple json output @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • RT: @samullen I feel more smarter just by listening to @tmm1 #rubymidwest

See what he did there? They bring the wit here in the heartland.

  • http://memprof.com/ has gotten better since I last looked at. Nice visualizations of where your memory is going @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • http://memprof.com/ is built using Mongo @tmm1 #RubyMidwest
  • RT: @chadmontplaisir @tmm1 Procs are a good way to memory leak because they keep all the variable references within the creation scope. #rubymidwest.
  • RT: @chadmontplaisir @tmm1 Take away: Looking through the trash gives you a better understanding of what your application is doing. #rubymidwest

True dat. Optimize, always optimize.

  • My talk is in less than 10 minutes... Panic! #RubyMidwest

Well, it was a quiet crowd. Afternoon on the second day and all. The Twitter seemed to like me and a bunch of people sought me out after the talk for more info or just to thank me. So I guess it went well. There was a moment, at the end of the talk, when I looked up from my computer to see tumble weeds rolling across the floor. I shouldn't worry about it I suppose.


I used Prezi.com for my presentation. It's a canvas based presentation system and it's pretty cool. You put all your ideas on a big canvas., sort and arrange them, paste in some pics or whatever, and define a path through said canvas. Lots of fun to work with.

  • Someone (not wearing a name tag) just turned me on to this: http://is.gd/dw6lp factory_data_preloader More speed! #RubyMidwest

That guy turned out to be Kyle Ginavan. I'm totally going to try out factory_data_preloader when I get back to work on Monday.

  • RT: @mattpetty "test suites should be reliable, repeatable, and understandable" -@jakescruggs #rubymidwest

My favorite quote from my talk and I completely made it up on the fly. Felt good saying it.

  • @lpillow It was a pic of a little girl making a frowny face. Honest.

Someone though one of my images or diagrams was pornographic. I've looked through the presentation 20 times and I can't see it. If you find something, let me know.

  • "jQuery and Rails, Sitting in a Tree" by Adam McCrea (@adamlogic) is happening now at #RubyMidwest
  • Neat bit about stealing non-obtrusive javascript from Rails 3 to use in Rails 2x @adamlogic #RubyMidwest

To be honest, I was a bit burnt at this point and coming down from the post talk high so I didn't cover this one as much as I should. Sorry Adam - say hi to Joe for me.

  • "A New Set Of Wheels: Leveraging Ruby For System Administration" by Josh French (@joshfrench) #RubyMidwest
  • GrepFu looks pretty cool. Ruby wrapper for command line searching tools. http://rubygems.org/gems/grep-fu @joshfrench #RubyMidwest

Check out the GrepFu - it looks well worth investigating. Luke Pillow, a Ruby Midwest organizer, said he uses it ever day.

  • Well, I gotta go catch a plane back to Chicago. Thanks #RubyMidwest I had a great time and learned a ton.

And I'm on that plane right now. It's like a conversation with my past self. Hey, past self, don't eat that airport BBQ - they're gonna put mayonnaise on brisket.

Too late.

I did get to sit in the airport sports bar and listen to two young ladies in interesting outfits argue about whether it was lying to omit the fact that you didn't sleep in your hotel room last night. It took a very long time to decide.

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