badurowie.org

Back from PyCon PL’09

Łukasz — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:34:00 +0000

Last weekend we went to attend the PyCon PL’09 conference. This year it was located in Ustroń. The most positive change was comparing to last year was to accommodate everybody in one place, as it made it easier to integrate with the python folk, and talk/have a beer after/between the talks. There were a few interesting talks. I liked Wesley Chun’s “Python References and Memory Model”, although I knew most of the material. “Pair programming & TDD in practice” by
Konrad Deląg & Krzysztof Goj was also cool because it involved workshops (nevertheless nothing new to me there). Marcin Mierzejewski’s “Python and Orange – how to predict the future” about data mining using python was very interesting. I was actually surprised that there is no market for this stuff in Poland. The talks were OK, but not revolutionary. In my opinion the crowd (well perhaps excluding the two physicists there) and the talks were dominated by web development (Django). I would very much like to see more non web related talks.

This year’s pros and cons.

Pros:

common accommodation
good food
international speakers
better organization
lots of lightning talks

Cons:

problems with the power for computers
really bad WiFi
too little non web related talks

Since most of the cons can be worked on, I’m really looking forward to the next year’s edition.

Java platform gems in Rails

Łukasz — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:02:44 +0000

I’ve recently ecountered a problem with freezing java platform gems in a Rails application I’m working on. The problem was, that the Rails::GemDependency class would assume that a gem’s version is the last part of it’s directory name:

      directory_name_parts = File.basename(directory_name).split('-')
      name    = directory_name_parts[0..-2].join('-')
      version = directory_name_parts.last
      result = self.new(name, :version => version)

For java platform gems, directory names often look like e.g. RedCloth-2.2.2-universal-java. In this case we would end up with the version variable to be set to ‘java’, and the attempt to create a new object would result in an error. Since I really needed those JRuby compatible gems, I’ve prepared a small patch and filed a ticket in the Rails project. Both can be found here: https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/3356. I hope this helps somebody with unpacking the java platform gems into the Rails’ vendor directory.

JRuby bliss

Łukasz — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:21:41 +0000

I’ve been fiddling with JRuby for about a month now and I have to say it’s
great. For those of you who don’t know what it is – it’s an implementation of
the Ruby language written in Java. Most people are familiar only with the
Matz’s implementation in C (MRI = Matz’s Ruby Interpreter also known as
CRuby). Having Ruby available on top of the JVM is a big leverage. I was
surprised how easy it was to incorporate Java code into Ruby code and vice
versa.

The most work I do is web development with Rails. JRuby supports Rails since
version 0.9. Right now it runs all Rails test cases, is ~~compatible~~ partialy compatible with Ruby
1.9 and improved performance. The existing Rails applications
I’ve worked on run significantly faster on JRuby than on CRuby (JVM rocks).
You also get to compile your Ruby classes to Java classes or use your
favourite Java libraries in you Ruby apps.

The only downside at the moment is the Gem compatibility issues (not all Ruby
code runs on JRuby, however can be adjusted in most cases). JRuby doesn’t
support the use of native extensions which in consequence forces you to swap
some gems for others or to find pure Ruby (which means JRuby compatible)
implementations.

The bottom line is, JRuby provides you with exciting new possibilities. I’m
looking forward to see the next releases by the JRuby team.

My dark color theme for NetBeans

Łukasz — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:03:03 +0000

For quite some time, I’ve been really frustrated with the look and feel of my source editor in NetBeans. I really liked the color schemas I have been using in my vim work flow. In fact it was probably the only thing (perhaps besides speed) that kept me using vim instead of NetBeans. I didn’t settle with themes such as Aloha or Dark Pastels, and tried to “port” Nick Moffitt’s Railscasts vim theme into NetBeans. You can see the final outcome on the screenshot above. I would gladly package it as a NBM file, however I don’t know how one could build a NBM file (yet ). The bottom line is, working with NetBeans is a bit more enjoyable now.

Tagged: NetBeans, Ruby

Easy as a piece of capistrano

Łukasz — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:25:36 +0000

While working on MoneyTracker in a mythical free time, I was using plain old git for updating the code base on my “production” server. I quoted the word production, because the application is nowhere production state, and I’m it’s only user. Either way it gets deployed on a regular basis. I thought this would be a good enough reason to get familiar with Capistrano. A few documents and 15 minutes later I had my deploy.rb file ready and working. The only catch I had to face was the fact that I host my app on MegiTeam, where they have a custom way of restarting applications. I found a blog post about it here and was ready to go. Now with a click of a button I can get my app deployed from GitHub’s MT repository to my account at MegiTeam with less hustle. Cool. For all of you who might experience problems with deployment @ MegiTeam here’s my deploy.rb:

set :application, "MoneyTracker"
default_run_options[:pty] = true
set :repository,  "git@github.com:lbadura/moneytracker.git"
set :scm, "git"
set :scm_passphrase, "my_password" #This is your custom users password
set :user, "lbadura"
set :deploy_to, "my_remote_path"
ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true
set :branch, "master"
set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :git_enable_submodules, 1
set :use_sudo, false
set :gateway, 'my_remote_host'
server "my_server", :app, :web, :db, :primary => true
namespace :deploy do
  desc "Restart app"
  task :restart, :role => :app do
    run "restart-app #{ application }"
  end
end

The ‘my_something’ strings should represent your hosting environment parameters.

Tagged: capistrano, deployment, hosting, rails, Ruby

Image science

Łukasz — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:11:46 +0000

A common belief is that temporary solutions last the longest. A simple bash script that used to handle my image resizing needs was an excellent example of such a solution. It was hard to find a good enough reason to write anything more sophisticated than a five liner in bash to resize a directory of images downloaded from my camera. Not until I started to use NeatImage for removing noise from my photos. It would be nice to be able to automatically rename and move files processed by NeatImage, and then resize them to a given percentage size, to finally upload them to my Flickr account. In a couple of hours I managed to write a simple script to do the resizing for me. It’d go faster if I’d known the OptionParser or the ImageScience classes beforehand . Nothing to regret though, works way faster than the bash & ImageMagick duo. ImageScience doesn’t have ImageMagick’s bells and whistles, however is perfect for image resizing in Ruby as it utilizes the fast FreeImage library written in C. What’s left to do is to add some error handling, and implement additional options (e.g. sending to flickr). You can find my script on GitHub : http://github.com/lbadura/ruby-tidbits/tree/master/image_resizer/image_resizer.rb, feel free to fiddle around with it.

Tagged: image_science, Ruby

Don’t trust the environment.rb either

Łukasz — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:41:28 +0000

In case somebody is wondering why the heck the new rails 2.2 l18n support doesn’t work, it just might be because of the screwed up default environment.rb:

18n.load_path << Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}')]

results with:

can't convert Array into String (TypeError)
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:176:in `extname'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:176:in `load_file'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:13:in `load_translations'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:13:in `each'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:13:in `load_translations'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:79:in `init_translations'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:94:in `lookup'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n/backend/simple.rb:33:in `translate'
 .../i18n-0.0.1/i18n.rb:160:in `t'

so change the ‘<<’ operator to ‘=’:

18n.load_path = Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}')]

Tagged: l18n, rails, Ruby

Note to self: don’t trust the comments

Łukasz — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:57:48 +0000

I recently decided I would write my very own web application to handle my personal finances since Google Apps Spreadsheet just isn’t cool anymore. The general idea isn’t new, in fact there are a few apps out there that can do the job, but this way I can learn some of the different tools in the Ruby world. I intended to use Ruby On Rails since I’ve gotten to know it over the past year, however then I changed my mind. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn (otherwise it would be dumb to pick something I don’t know in favor of tools I am familiar with), and picked out Merb as a framework of choice, Sequel as the ORM and Haml to handle the views. The first thing that struck me, was the lack of documentation, and on top of that, even the comments in Merb code were misleading. I couldn’t get Haml to handle the *.haml files. The gem was installed, and the dependency was set according to the comments in the ‘config/init.rb’ file:

# dependencies "RedCloth", "merb_helpers"
# OR
# dependency "RedCloth", "> 3.0"

It actually should have looked like this:

Merb::BootLoader.after_app_loads do
  require "merb-haml"
  require "merb_helpers"
end

Somehow I have this feeling it’s going to be a long & rough ride .

A few words about RuPy 2008

Łukasz — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:48:38 +0000

Last weekend I visited Poznań for RuPy 2008 conference along with a good Code Sprinters representation & Piotrek Czajkowski.

The conference was held in UAM’s Collegium Mathematicum, which was pretty hard to get to. I really enjoyed the conference though, thanks to some interesting talks. I really enjoyed Zed Shaw’s talk on getting statistical results while measuring web app performance. It was interesting & funny (in spite all of Zed’s Ruby & Rails negativity ). I also really liked Micheal Foord’s talk on IronPython & Silverlight 2 (not to mention his lightning talk about Resolver One) since I missed it on SFI conference held in Cracow. Adam’s talk on functional programming in Python also went really good, and gathered many people in the auditorium. Unfortunately I didn’t see the PyPy talks which were said to be excellent. Overall the talks were a load of fun. There were some glitches though. First of all, in my opinion speaking in English shouldn’t be mandatory for speakers, as majority of the talks presented by Polish speakers was terrible to listen too. Because of the language barrier speakers couldn’t speak up their minds. So I think it would be best to let the speakers choose the language they speak in. There were some exceptions though for example the “A need for REST” talk by Łukasz Piestrzeniewicz. The second thing I didn’t like, was the lack of transportation from the place where the conference was held to the city centre (we had to use cab’s all the time) as the information on RuPy official site were a bit misleading.

Photos are available in the Code Sprinters Flickr Pool.

Hello world

Łukasz — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:37:52 +0000

New ~~site~~ content is coming soon.