expat += hack

adventures in monospace by emanuele *mekdigital* tozzato, a señor software artisan like no others in town.

[mekdigital]

RemoteRedis: mount a tiny Sinatra app in your Rails app to provide a tiny, restricted API to Redis

This is a very specific corner case, where a few hundred thousand jobs needed to be executed on some dedicated workstations, but instantly report  to the production app and keep Redis up to date. This was a long migration of s3 assets from attachement_fu to paperclip. 

Projects would have to go from not migrated to migrating and migrated; while the workstations were trying to consume 7 years worth of assets and thousands of projects, the production app could also trigger the instant migration of a not migrated project if a user was accessing the project. 

Setup in your project

The simple App

An example of usage

[mekdigital]

because you don’t have bundle reinstall

you can always type 

rvm gemset empty && bundler install

[mekdigital]

Sending (mass) text messages notification on Heroku with Google Voice and Rails, without background jobs

Sometimes you have to compromise a little bit, because of restrictions to what your client is willing to invest in a new feature that dictate the need for creative engineering. 

The case here is to be able to send a batch of text messages to users to inform them that some of their items have been updated. 

In the normal world, this would be a perfect candidate for a new background job, but that's not free so let's think about another solution. We have 24 hours from requirement to production. 

In the system, a user can have many items which can be updated by the admin. Usually, only the first update matter and that's the one we want to notify. The system is very busy and we need to look after our admins and prevent them from accidentally flooding users.

We want to tell the user how many items have been updated and which, but we know that updates can involve an arbitrary number of items, so we need to apply some sort of truncation on long lists.

We are going to be using the simple googlevoiceapi, gem which uses Mechanize to interact with Google Voice. 

This is the implementation:

it works very well, but it makes me feel slightly dirty... :) 

[mekdigital]

@pivotaltracker, I hacked the tracker..

and made "Sense of Urgency(TM)" unbeknowingly available to all my colleagues at the office !

[mekdigital]

Sublime Text 3 CLI

Let me put this here, so I don't need to google it ever again... Thanks to http://olivierlacan.com/posts/launch-sublime-text-3-from-the-command-line for the article! 

[mekdigital]

My (free) PostgreSQL 10,000 on Heroku is maxed out, how is that possible?

Simple! Open the terminal and run this script to get a quick peek at the row count of each table!

thanks to this original post: http://linfiniti.com/2011/06/listing-the-number-of-records-in-all-postgresql-tables/

[mekdigital]

Assertion failed: calling set on destroyed object

Today everyone was freaking out about an EmberJS component generating a huge chain of errors when navigating from one resource to the other and resizing the window; basically every subsequent call to didInsertElement seemed to instantiate parallel worlds of runloop trying to interact with destroyed objects forever.  It wasn't the case, and the solution was as easy as keeping in mind that every $(window).on in a single page application needs to be accompanied by a $(window).off !

[mekdigital]

I can post this and nobody will even notice! :)

You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. After the avalanche, it took us a week to climb out. Now, I don't know exactly when we turned on each other, but I know that seven of us survived the slide... and only five made it out. Now we took an oath, that I'm breaking now. We said we'd say it was the snow that killed the other two, but it wasn't. Nature is lethal but it doesn't hold a candle to man.