Today I was on amazon looking for some technical literature (about Kubernetes if you’re wondering), when I suddenly wondered if there was a newer version of my old amazon firestick available …

There was.

All of a sudden … I switched to wondering how I was going to avoid being stuck with trying to offload an extra (older) firestick during a pandemic … when I see this …

When I hit that button, amazon showed me the exact order with my older firestick, offered me a 20% discount and all I had to do was drop it off at the UPS center. The only thing left to do was say … “yes, take my money”.

I did.

Making tricky things easy for your users will never go out of style.

I recently had an absolute bear of a time trying to install the postgis extension for Postgresql 9.6.3 which I’m running because there is an error on upgrade from 9.6 to 10 around the hstore extension which seems impossible to get over unless I blow away all the data related to hstore or try this very tricky migration that basically massages hstore data.

First I tried to simply install postgis with homebrew. Silly me.
That upgraded my 9.6.3 installation to Postgress 11 and installed the extension. It took me 2 hours to pick through the debris, (dyld errors, had to ln -s the new readline library to the old one that postgres expecting after I ran
brew switch postgres 9.6.3

After that, I was able to install postgis with brew via two commands

brew pin postgres
and
brew install postgis --ignore-dependencies

That looked like it worked, but everytime I then tried to install the extension I’d get and error around this phrase (I lost the stacktrace in my glee of finding a fix)

Symbol not found: _AllocSetContextCreateExtended

I turns out what I had to do was uninstall postgis from brew

brew remove postgis

then go to the official postgis source page, pick a stable version (I had issues with 2.4.7. compile error on Mac OS) but 2.5.3 worked just fine.

I downloaded the tar file, uncompressed it then ran
./configure
make
make install

And VOILA! I was able to create the postgis extension for the db I was working on. phew!

A few months ago the creator of my favorite rails server (puma) announced a version of puma called puma-dev. This new server bears more than a passing resemblance to pow, because of its goal of making local rails development stupendously easy.

I was a big fan of pow when it first came out but I eventually stopped using it when it as development on it slowly crawled to a halt then eventually stopped. Having come to Rails development from a PHP background, where the server was always available,

• I didn’t like having to type `puma` or `rails s` to start working on a local application, or …
• having to remember and assign different port numbers if I was working on more than one app at a time. So I was definitely excited about having puma-dev pick up where pow left off.
• it also made playing around with subdomains easier

So I was definitely looking forward to having it pick up from where I left off with pow

Setup is super easy. First make sure to include puma in your Gemfile

gem 'puma'

Then run `puma` at the command line and make sure your app starts up with no problems.
Next install puma-dev

brew install puma/puma/puma-dev
sudo puma-dev -setup
puma-dev -install

To setup yourdomain.dev (for example), you’d just run

puma-dev link yourdomain /path/to/your/app

And voila!

I’ve been using this setup for a few months now, and I must say, I find this immensely useful because I have an apache server running on port 80 for my PHP work, so I can actually access a domain on https://mydomain.dev. It also supports websockets!

Things to note

• puma-dev will spin down the server after a few minutes of inactivity, so don’t be surprised if your app takes a few seconds to startup after you’ve been gone for a while
• To restart the server (in case you’re working on something that doesn’t auto load or isn’t loading correctly)  just run `touch tmp/restart.txt` from rails root

What The Rails Security Issue Means For Your Startup!

There are many developers who are not presently active on a Ruby on Rails project who nonetheless have a vulnerable Rails application running on localhost:3000.  If they do, eventually, their local machine will be compromised. (Any page on the Internet which serves Javascript can, currently, root your Macbook if it is running an out-of-date Rails on it. No, it does not matter that the Internet can’t connect to your localhost:3000, because your browser can, and your browser will follow the attacker’s instructions to do so. It will probably be possible to eventually do this with an IMG tag, which means any webpage that can contain a user-supplied cat photo could ALSO contain a user-supplied remote code execution.)

I learned from my mistake in falling behind when Rails 3 came behind, so I’m trying to get a jump on Rails 4. Skip straight to my summary if you don’t want to watch the 20 minute video right now

#400 What’s New in Rails 4 – RailsCastsShort Ruby on Rails screencasts containing tips, tricks and tutorials. Great for both novice and experienced web developers.

via Railscasts

ActiveRecord
– Array and hstore support for Postgres
– Model.all is now an ActiveRecord Relation vs loading records immediately,  Model.all.to_a now gives you former Model.all behavior
– Model.scoped is deprecated
– Model.none (no idea why anybody would use this)
– Model.not.where() inverts/negates the scope/where clause
– chaining scopes to an active Relation object is possible with an ! at the end of the scope. This option mutates the current Relations object for you, so you don’t have to assign the new chain to a variable
– Model.find_by, Model.find_or_create_by now accepts a hash so that its Model.find_by(name: “Hello), stops dependence on method missing implementation of find_by_xxxx
– Model.find_or_create_by is deprecated but Model.find_by is not
– using an object as an Active Model object is easier, just include a module, used to be a bit more tedious
– in scopes you could pass in another scope as a second argument, now it has to be a callable object (like a lambda) this is to avoid passing in something Dynamic like Time.now by accident
– Model.update_attributes method has been renamed to just Model.update (probably to avoid confusion with update_attribute?)

Controllers
– the placeholder index.html file doesn’t exist anymore, dynamically generated
– turbolinks
– before_filter is renamed to before_action … won’t be deprecated though
– update action responds to PUT or PATCH, PUT might be deprecated
– support for strong parameters is built right in ( checkout Railscast Ep 371), better option that attar_accessible
– means that we don’t need attr_accessible in models but if you want that behavior still, you can use the protected attributes gem
– concerns. Designed to add modules which encapsulates behavior that you want to share among controllers/models. Ryan doesn’t care much for it, will add it in as needed in his apps (see Railscast ep 398)
– ActionController live (will be covered in future ep)

Views
– collections. collection_check_boxes, collections_radio_buttons. Can be used to handle associations or array attributes in forms more easily.
– helpers for html5 input types. date_field vs date_select (for example). Spits out html5 date control or just select input depending on the browser
– support for custom templating with .ruby extension. Probably limited usage for html, but useful for json (more in ep 379)
– cache Digest/Russian doll caching (more in ep 387)

Routes
– concerns, helps remove duplication in routes.
– match method is no longer supported (wtf?) have to change them from that to the right verb i.e get/patch/post
– if you supply constraints to a route its going to turn into a default attribute when you generate the url, so it forces the url to match the constraints. very cool
– new exception page, if its a routing error, you get all the routes in the app listed after it (kinda silly if you ask me)
– you can get all the routes in the app from /rails/info/routes

Other
– ability to specify console config options in application.rb with console block
– config.eager_load is default in production.rb so the entire app is loaded on start instead of autoloading, that helps keep Rails thread safe
– config.threadsafe! has been deprecated (more in ep 365)
– test directory is now structured differently, controllers, models, mailers vs functional, unit directories (big one here)
– Test::Unit now uses minitest under the hood which allows us to use rspec like syntax in Test::Unit

Removed
– Active Resource
– Model Observers
– Page & action Caching
– Disabling cache by default
– all available as gems if needed