Don't bury it in your back yard!
Posted by matijs 22/04/2011 at 09h30
Let’s look at dynamic method generation. I need it for GirFFI, and if you
do any kind of metaprogramming, you probably need it too. It was
already shown a long time ago that using string evaluation is preferable to using
define_method with a block.
That is, if you care at all about speed.
Posted by matijs 13/12/2010 at 23h14
On twitter, @clemensk asks:
Hey SQL experts, is it somehow possible in pure (My)SQL to extract a nested set from a table full of paths (think: Category 1 > Category 2)?
To do this, you need to do two things: Extract the names of the nodes, and
calculate values for lft and rgt. Here’s my take on the latter part:
Posted by matijs 10/12/2010 at 09h29
If you’re going to do this:
<typo:code lang=“ruby”> def foo= f @foo = f + “ bar” end </typo:code>
Then don’t first do this:
<typo:code lang=“ruby”> attr_accessor :foo </typo:code>
But instead do this:
<typo:code lang=“ruby”> attr_reader :foo </typo:code>
That way, there won’t be “method redefined” warnings all over the place.
Let’s make this more general: Before you release your gem, make sure it runs without warnings. They should stick out like a sore thumb when you run your tests, anyway.
Thanks.
Posted by matijs 16/09/2010 at 17h22
If you still have commits with messages like ‘Oops, I forgot this file’, you’re doing something wrong. Just use git commit --amend.
Posted by matijs 27/06/2010 at 21h10
In some of my Rails projects, I have been a contented user of the memory_test_fix plugin. However, I rather dislike the use of Rails plugins, because I find updating them later on rather difficult, and I don’t like including external libraries in my own source tree (hence, I don’t like the practice of vendoring gems much either). When the concept of ‘gem plugins’ was introduced, I created a fork on github and created the necessary files to build the plugin as a gem, and have Rails properly load it.
Posted by matijs 15/04/2010 at 05h42
You can implement a programming language in assembly. C is an example. This has the advantage of being able to leave your language and use assembly when necessary. You drop down to assembly for speed.
You can also implement a programming language in lisp. CLPython is an example. This has the advantage of being able to leave your language and use lisp when necessary. You drop down to lisp for expressiveness.
If lisp is the ultimate language, does this not make it the best option for implementing other languages?
Posted by matijs 11/04/2010 at 12h22
Because URL shortening services can go away at any time, I decided to install my own. In the spirit of your-own-dogfood, and to make hacking it as enjoyable as possible, it had to be in Ruby (this ruled out YOURLS, which otherwise does exactly what I want). There are tons of URL shortening projects in Ruby on GitHub. Unfortunately, they all lacked one feature: password protection for the adding of URLs. In the end, I picked a nice simple one and changed it to my liking. The result can be found in my fork of turl.
Why is this safer than using one of the existing services? The reason tr.im went under is that they couldn't make it pay for itself, and there was a lot of abuse from spammers. Both problems are absent for my own service: I don't need to make any money off of it, and I'm the only one who can create new short URLs.
Some observations on developing this software:
For a small project like this, putting everything in one file is very, very nice. Ramaze allows you to do this (as do other frameworks), Ruby on Rails does not. I wonder how seamless the transition is if your project starts small like this and then gradually becomes big enough that you need to split it into different files.
Ramaze's documentation needs some love. Everything is documented well in
principle, but with the split-off of the innate library, it took me
ages to find the documentation for the a method and friends.
I really like the idea of [Sequel][sq]::Model where you define the
table schema right in the model. I'm not sure how or how well it works
with migrations, but for a small project like this, it's nice and clean.
Ramaze could use some more options for session storage. In particular, something file-based shouldn't be too much to ask for. I'm using the LocalMemCache option, and keep having to log in.
I really like Ramaze, and am eager to try Sinatra. I have been ignoring these more light-weight frameworks for far too long.
Posted by matijs 02/02/2010 at 09h20
Daring Fireball quotes Zeldman:
Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.
Exactly. And good riddance.
Posted by matijs 29/01/2010 at 12h47
Learning about monads is hard, and there seems to be no magic pill. Probably one reason is that they have several different uses. Many articles focus on one of those uses, making it hard to get the whole picture. On the other hand, articles that try to directly explain what monads are leave the reader wandering what they're good for. Some links.
Posted by matijs 13/12/2009 at 18h58
You have been running a Typo blog [since 2005][since], but you still can’t quite get your Apache configuration right. In particular, you still get the occasional
Not found: http://www.matijs.net/blog/2005/07.html/24/from-bryar-to-typo
Note the weird 07.html part.