Red Squirrel Stumblog

copyplist failed ... exit code 71

I got this error when trying to compile an iPhone project in XCode. I found the answer to my problem on StackOverflow, but I couldn’t upvote or thank Jimmy for his solution, which is related to a Ruby install. Thanks Jimmy!

If before_update is being called on create...

It’s because you have an update in your after_create.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_update :audit_info
  after_create :generate_key

private

  def generate_key
    update_attribute(:key, generate_stuff)
  end

  def audit_info
    AuditLog.big_change!(self)
  end
end

Yep, audit_info will get called when you User.create.

If you want Ruby's strftime to give you single digit hours

Then the undocumented %l (yes, a lower-case L) is your friend.

Time.now.strftime("%I:%M%p")
# generates 05:00pm
Time.now.strftime("%l:%M%p")
# generates 5:00pm

That’s just evil that l looks so much like I.

Rails transactions don't rollback in tests

Here’s a discussion, and here’s the simplest solution:

# in your TestCase
self.use_transactional_fixtures = false

Porting Ruby number_with_delimiter to Perl

Ruby:

def number_with_delimiter(number)
  parts = number.to_s.split('.')
  parts[0].gsub!(/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d))/, "\\1,")
  parts.join '.'
end

Perl:

sub number_with_delimiter {
    my $number = shift;
    my @parts = split(/\./, $number);
    $parts[0] =~ s/(\d)(?=(\d\d\d)+(?!\d))/$1,/g;
    return join(".", @parts);
}

I want a US phone number that I can SMS, which will push that message to a URL

Tweet me with ideas

Dreamhost Subversion stops working after enabling Passenger

The solution to this is to just setup a subdomain for your Subversion repository.

A quick way to find slow Rails actions

tail -10000 log/production.log | egrep "Completed in [0-9]{2,}"

via RailsMachine support

Grouping by Object#hash

I liked this little idiom from Tobias.

servers = [ 'memcache1', 'memcache2', 'memcache3' ]
servers[ 'product-1' % servers.size ]

"Net::SMTPFatalError" with "553 5.0.0" and "User address required"

If you ever get this combination of errors while sending email, you should check the raw data for your “To:” field. I stupidly checked only the email address, rather than the raw data, which included the name, which, for some odd reason had backslashes for the last name. In other words, SMTP doesn’t like to send email to “John \\” <john@example.com>, in fact it hates sending email to these sorts of people and will do its best to ruin your afternoon if you attempt it.