Merb Routes

Here’s a quick rake task for you, if you want to see merb routes without having to do merb -i

desc "Show routes" 
task :show_routes => :merb_env do
  require 'merb-core/rack/adapter/irb'
  Merb::Rack::Console.new.show_routes
end

In terminal, just do rake show_routes. If you are looking for something specific, you can always do rake show_routes | grep user.

Merb Routes

Here’s a quick rake task for you, if you want to see merb routes without having to do merb -i

desc "Show merb routes" 
task :merb_routes => :merb_env do
  require 'merb-core/rack/adapter/irb'
  Merb::Rack::Console.new.show_routes
end

In terminal, just do rake merb_routes. If you are looking for something specific, you can always do rake show_routes | grep user.

Add that to the Rakefile in your root dir, or better yet, use sake and do:

sake -i http://gist.github.com/raw/1406/bfec026a1e62b048288d9342e3fc0c2bd272fca7

Then you can do sake show_routes in any merb app dir! That’s served up straight from gist, github’s newest pastie based on git.

OpenMoko Freerunner after a few weeks

Well I have had this thing for a few weeks now, and I have burned a lot of hours playing with it :) (Wish I could bill someone for those hours it would have paid for the phone 4 times over!)

I started with 2007.2 the built in image, and upgraded it initially with dfu-util, then with opkg update && opkg upgrade.

I installed a bunch of things and tweaked it to death (literally).

I got Jalimo java installed and working, and wrote the simple SWT app which worked nicely. The only change to the instructions are you need to add -force-depends to the opkg command.

As reported in my other blog article I got WIFI/WPA2 working, and finally got GPRS working.

I have not tried to pair with a bluetooth headset yet, although got far enough to see that the device could be seen using the scan command.

I played with all the varieties of on screen keyboards available, but really couldn't use any of them as they are so small, and my eyes are not that good anymore. I have seen some promising mentions of works in progress for keyboards, but the ones in the Qtopia distribution are the best, plus they have handwriting recognition which is a little fussy but looks like it can be trained.

The GPS problems were fixed by an amazing community and OpenMoko effort, which I have never seen before. There is a S/W fix, and a H/W fix which I suspect most people will not be able to do, soldering surface mount components is not for the faint of heart!

I spent several hours trying to build the OpenEmbedded and the MokoMakefile development environments, so I could start to contribute, but have still not been able to get them to finish building the native toolchain needed to build any of the apps.

I get several errors, some of which I found workarounds to by googling but eventually hit dead ends in both cases which I could not solve and have not been reported or solved by the community. I am using a stock KUbuntu 8.08 Hardy Heron desktop, which should be pretty mainstream, so I don't know what is wrong. The pre built toolchain OpenMoko provides for building apps does work however, but you can't build soft keyboards, or system components that route (at least I couldn't find a way to do it). I'll continue to hammer away at MokoMakefile and see if I can eventually get it going, of course I'll post my findings to the Wiki or dev mailing list if I succeed.

If someone could provide a VMPlayer image of a working OE or Mokomakefile environment that would help a lot of us. (Trolltech/Qtopia do provide exactly that for their development tools).

So after several opkg upgrades and tweaks, I finally killed my highly customized rootfs, X would no longer boot, sound was dead etc etc.

I tried to backup the image using these instructions, but always got an error halfway through, I suspect my flash image of rootfs may have been corrupted. Anyway I lost all that work :(

I tried flashing ASU, but it seems too much a work in progress more so than 2007.8.

Then I tried Qtopia now this is much more to my liking. The interface is clean, intuitive and seems to work pretty well. There are still a few rough edges which Trolltech seem to be taking care of, but it mostly works pretty well. The on screen input methods (which there are several of) are very good, even the keyboard has a nice touch where it zooms into the keys you are touching. It also has the tiny tiny QWERTY keyboard if you prefer that style and your eyes still work.

The downside is of course you lose access to all the applications currently under development for the GTK based 2007.2, but Qtopia does have a growing number of applications, and of course you can write your own.

I am going to experiment a little with trying to run GTK based apps under Qtopia, I know I can do that on my KDE (aka QT) desktop, so why not under Qtopia? I'll update this if I get it to work.

The current show stoppers for me, which stops me being able to use this a phone are...

• Nasty buzzing noise on both ends of the call
• Bluetooth pairing with a headset not easily available.

I'm sure people are working on these issues, and I wait patiently for them to get fixed so I can dump my aging Motorola V600. I'd actually try to pitch in myself but I can't get the development environment to work!

Oh well guess I better get back to my paying job :)

iPhone in nearly every state. 147 out of 188 stores.

From hasiphone.com July 22nd 2pm.

Unix Signals for Live Debugging

It's unit tested, the integration and regressions tests are all green, you even added a set of performance benchmarks, and yet after a couple of hours of production use the process is falling over - we've all been there before. Good instrumentation in these situations is worth its weight in gold. If you're lucky, you may be able to use DTrace, if you're adventurous you may try to attach with GDB, but what if you build this instrumentation into your app right from the start?

System signals for easy debugging

Any UNIX process can respond to a collection of system signals, and what's even better: we can safely define a subset (USR1, and USR2) to invoke arbitrary logic within our process. For example, let's create a worker process which on receipt of a USR1 signal will toggle debug mode on demand:

> debug-mode.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'log4r'
 
# initialize the logger
@log = Log4r::Logger.new 'log'
@log.outputters = Log4r::StdoutOutputter.new 'console'
@log.level = Log4r::INFO
 
worker = Thread.new do
  while (true) do
    @log.info 'Hello!'
    @log.debug 'Debug!'
    sleep(1)
  end
end
 
# put worker into debug mode via USR1 signal
trap("USR1") {
 @log.level = @log.level == Log4r::INFO ? Log4r::DEBUG : Log4r::INFO
}
 
# cleanly shutdown the thread on Ctrl-C / kill signal
trap("INT") { worker.terminate }
 
# run the worker
worker.join
 

debug-mode.rb (Ruby file)

Downloads: 0 File Size: 0.5 KB

In the example above Log4r provides us with a convenient logging hierarchy: DEBUG < INFO < WARN < ERROR < FATAL. By sending our process a USR1 signal (kill -s USR1 pid), we toggle between the INFO and DEBUG levels, allowing ourselves the luxury of performing live debugging without incurring the cost of redundantly logging debug information when we don't need it. Now you have the tools to perform that open-heart surgery.

INFO log: Hello! < process is started
INFO log: Hello!
INFO log: Hello! < process receives USR1
DEBUG log: Debug!
INFO log: Hello!
DEBUG log: Debug! < process receives USR1
INFO log: Hello!
INFO log: Hello!

For bonus points, check what signals your favorite UNIX processes respond to. For example, did you know that kill -s USR1 mongrel_pid will turn on debug mode on any Mongrel process? Make use of system signals, they're there for reason!

ActionScript: Literal XML

One feature of ActionScript I really like is the ability to use XML within the language. In ActionScript there's no need to use strings to represent XML, you can use XML inline just as you would any other literal (numbers, strings, etc).

Recently I was working on some dynamic code that needed to update based on an XML response. We were just getting started on the card, so instead of worrying about the service, how it was triggered, etc, we added a button to the interface that called the response parsing method and passed in an XML literal as an argument. The code is similar to what's shown below.

parseResponse(<user><firstName>Jay</firstName></user>);

var request:XML = <smart_list/>;
request.sort.order = "highest";
request.sort.field = "Average Position";
request.max_results = 10;
request.toXMLString(); // "<smart_list><sort><order>highest</order><field>Average Position</field></sort><max_results>10</max_results></smart_list>"

You See the Invisible Block?

require "rubygems";require "thin";require"markaby"; class Invisible
HTTP_METHODS =[:get,:post,:head,:put,:delete];attr_reader :request,
:response, :params; def initialize(&block); @actions =[]; @with=[];
@layouts={};@views={};@helpers=Module.new;@app=self; instance_eval(
&block) if block end; def action(method, route, &block); @actions<<
[method.to_s, build_route(@with*"/"+route),block] end;HTTP_METHODS.
each{|m|class_eval "def #{m}(r='/',&b); action('#{m}', r, &b) end"}
def with(route); @with.push(route);yield;@with.pop end; def render(
*args,&block);options=args.last.is_a?(Hash)?args.pop: {};@response.
status=options.delete(:status)||200;layout=@layouts[options.delete(
:layout)||:default];assigns={:request=>request,:response=>response,
:params=>params,:session=>session};content=args.last.is_a?(String)?
args.last : Markaby::Builder.new(assigns,@helpers, &(block||@views[
args.last] )).to_s ; content = Markaby::Builder.new( assigns.merge(
:content => content), @helpers, &layout).to_s if layout; @response.
headers.merge!(options);@response.body=content end;def layout(name=
:default, &block); @layouts[name]=block end; def view(name,&block);
@views[name]=block end; def helpers(&block);@helpers.instance_eval(
&block ) ; instance_eval(&block)  end;  def session;  @request.env[
"rack.session"]end; def use(middleware, *args);@app=middleware.new(
@app,*args) end; def run(*args);Thin::Server.start(@app, *args) end
def call(env); @request = Rack::Request.new(env); @response =Rack::
Response.new; @params = @request.params; if action = recognize(env[
"PATH_INFO"], @params["_method"] ||env["REQUEST_METHOD"]); @params.
merge!(@path_params);action.last.call;@response.finish; else; [404,
{}, "Not found"]; end; end; def self.run(*args,&block);new(&block).
run(*args) end; def self.app;@app||=self.new end;def self.call(env)
@app.call(env) end; private; def build_route(route);pattern= route.
split("/").inject('\/*') { |r, s| r << (s[0] == ?: ? '(\w+)' : s) +
'\/*' } + '\/*';[/^#{pattern}$/i,route.scan(/\:(\w+)/).flatten] end
def recognize(url, method); method =method.to_s.downcase; @actions.
detect do |m,(pattern,keys),_| method==m&&@path_params=match_route(
pattern,keys,url)end;end;def match_route(pattern,keys,url);matches,
params=(url.match(pattern)||return)[1..-1],{};keys.each_with_index{
|key,i| params[key]=matches[i]};params;end;end; def method_missing(
method, *args,  &block);  ; if Invisible.app .respond_to?(method) ;
Invisible.app. send( method, *args, &block);  else; super; end; end

No!

beauty is fleeting (or why rails-doc isn’t the answer but something else might be)

So my last post, for whatever reason, spawned a flurry of posts pointing to rails-doc, a project by a team from Nodeta, claiming that it solved a number of Rails documentation problems. It’s a very nice looking project with a sexy theme (their blog design is especially attractive), but I’m sort of having a problem seeing how this solves any sort of problem that hasn’t been “solved” before.

For those of you too new to Rails to remember, there was (and apparently still is a project) named Rails Manual that does the exact same thing in a less attractive shell.  It’s based on a project named Rannotate, which creates a Rails app from your Ruby project’s documentation and enables adding notes to it.  It garnered a little attention when it first came out, but eventually went the way of the buffalo.

So now we have rails-doc.  Like I said, it looks good, but it strikes me as the exact same thing.  It’s basically the RDoc’s with notes, which solves a piece of the problem, but it’s not anywhere near a total fix for the poor documentation situation (even though I think some people are on the right track!).  If I’d known that all we needed was a good looking RDoc app, I could’ve fixed the problem a while ago.

That’s a screenshot of the design that my Google Summer of Code student (Ian Ownbey) and I are currently working on applying to his project Docbox and my derivative project Docdock (which will be on my Github very soon). 

Docbox is like Rannotate and friends (it lets you add notes, browse, search, etc.) except it also lets users actually edit the documentation in their browser.  It will then take their edits and generate a git commit on its own branch on the backend that the developers can cherry pick back into the mainline documentation.  You want to talk about user contribution?  There it is.  I’m waiting for my student to deploy to a slice and I’ll link that demo site here.  The plan is to let you edit the docs on a sample app and see your changes get pushed straight to a Github project so you can see it happen in near real-time.

My project is slightly less glamorous.  Docdock is essentially a client facing application based on Docbox.  Projects like Rails or a company with a closed source Ruby product could use Docdock to have an API site that users can visit, add notes to, and get involved with that looks good but without allowing everyone to edit it.  Larger or proprietary projects probably don’t want their official doc site to be totally editable.  The good thing about Docdock is that it can actually hook into the same database as Docbox, so you can have an instance of Docbox running on the backend for your team and an instance of Docdock running on the front end for your users.  This will probably just create a separate connection to keep everything separate except for the documentation objects, but I haven’t gotten quite that far yet.

So, there you go.  Two documentation tools geared towards user contribution.  Oh, and did I mention they’re both totally open source and applicable to any Ruby project, not just Rails?  I didn’t bring them up before because I didn’t know how interested people would be, but if people get excited about a resurrected Rannotate with dcov and search thrown in, then surely people will find these tools useful.

RubyFringe == Awesome

Nick Sieger though us about Jazz, Giles Bowkett got a standing ovation, Zed Shaw sang “Matz can’t patch” and “Don’t fuck Chad’s community”, Geoffrey Grosenbach was wearing a kilt, Hampton Catlin presented Haml for Javascript, Damien Katz made me cry and Tom Preston-Werner is my new hero.

Better reviews

• http://globalnerdy.com/2008/07/20/rubyfringe-day-1-notes-part-1/
• http://globalnerdy.com/2008/07/20/rubyfringe-day-1-notes-part-2/
• http://globalnerdy.com/2008/07/21/rubyfringe-day-2-notes-part-1/
• http://www.seanr.ca/tech/?p=27
• http://www.seanr.ca/tech/?p=30

Google Introduces Binary Encoding Format: Protocol Buffers

Google caused a stir by releasing Protocol Buffers, a binary serialization format. We take a look at what exactly Protocol Buffers are and what alternatives are available in ASN.1 or Facebook's Thrift. By Werner Schuster

Databases Roundup: Data Sharding for ActiveRecord and Faster Postgres IO

In this databases roundup we take a look at DataFabric, FiveRun's recently open sourced data sharding plug-in for ActiveRecord. Also: a look at speeding up Postgres data access using the asynchronous client API and Ruby 1.9's Fibers. By Mirko Stocker