http://www.mokisystems.com/blog Addressing such topics as: web programming, design, ruby on rails, cake php, postgresql, linux, seo Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:18:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Sevier River Water Users Association (SRWUA) in Central Utah are pioneers in the use of the Real-Time Web. For the past 10 years SRWUA has been delivering real-time water flow data to the public via the website www.SevierRiver.org. More that 100 remote, solar-powered, stations record water flow and capacity ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/hydrology-and-the-real-time-web/ http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/stress-testing-your-web-app/ I have been asked to announce that we have recently gone live with manticitycreek.org, a website for the Manti Irrigation and Reservoir Company of Manti, Utah to monitor real-time data from local canals, ponds and rivers. There are a number of different data products for viewing the data, including ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/manticitycreek-org-goes-live/ Moki Systems is seeking a full-time Ruby on Rails developer. The person should be a self starter, willing and able to figure things out on their own. Applicant should have experience with Ruby on Rails, MVC programming concepts, MySQL and/or PostgreSQL experience and the ability to learn new technologies. Any ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/were-hiring/ Whenever I find myself typing the same thing over and over again, I have to come up with some way to avoid the repetition. And one thing I do a lot is fill out web forms that require things like credit card numbers and unique email addresses. For a while ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/linux-clipboard-snippets/ So I had this problem with a record that was being saved even though it failed validation: cc = CreditCard.new(:card_number => 'invalid') >> cc.save => false >> cc.id => 3 That one had me stumped for a while until I realized I was carelessly using update_attribute in my custom writer: def card_number=(num) update_attribute(:crypted_card_number, encrypt(num)) end And we all ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/savings-records-that-fail-validation/ Pipes and Redirection These are standard shell tools, but sometimes I get confused about which one I need. So my way of thinking about it is that pipes are a connection between programs while redirection always goes to (or from) a file. So, for example, in order to find all my session ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/a-few-handy-things-to-know-about-bash/ >> (19.99 * 100).to_i => 1998 >> (9.99 * 100).to_i => 999 Someone please tell me what's up with that! In the meantime: >> (19.99 * 100).to_s.to_i => 1999 http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/ruby-thinks-1999-100to_i-1998/ We ran into a few little gotchas with ActiveRecord's find method when upgrading from Rails 2.1.1 to 2.2.2. The solutions are pretty trivial, so the main lesson here is to test your code so things like this get caught by your test suite and not the client. Gotcha #1 >> Rails.version => "2.1.1" >> ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/a-couple-rails-find-gotchas/ Some time ago I had a situation where a clients SQL database was about 70GB larger than they expected it to be. That is like 10 times larger than they expected. They asked me to trouble shoot the problem; with no clue as to what the problem should be. To begin with ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/how-large-is-an-individual-table-in-microsoft-sql-server/