Blog

An update of our production server to Passenger 3.0 worked without problem - kudos to the guys at Phusion! We have changed several parameters and expect our large Rails apps to run faster and better. The main change was that we keep one passenger running for the most used apps, regardless if the app has been idle or not. We’ve had an iPhone layout for StellenAnzeiger for a long time. Intermittently we got Rails “Invalid AuthenticityToken” errors but were never able to pin them down. Of course, when we tested it, it “just worked (tm)”. We had a breakthrough today, when we noticed that the authenticity token we received on the server had spaces in it. It turns out, that the iUI framework we are using for the iPhone like layout changes “+” to " " in input fields. The authenticity token can contain pluses, so iUI mangled it - and the server promptly complained. The fix is a one line patch to iui.js - we weren’t the first people to run into the problem… ...

A few weeks ago we upgraded the RAM on our main server. At that point, I discovered that the external backup drive we use to backup our hosting users home directory was full and no data could be written to it. I never discovered the problem, because df -h always told me that there was plenty of space left. However when I tried to create a file on the drive, I got a ` ...

Preparing for the public demos tomorrow in Lyon… Florian Hanke is here and has been furiously working on his great phony GEM. Phony handles phone number strings and can format them, parse them and do other fun stuff. After this days work, it will be able to tell us, if a phone number is a mobile number, a landline number or a service number. And we need that. Here’s an example of what Phony can do for you: ...

We are using a lot of distributed Sinatra and Rails3 applications in our Mobino project. They speak HTTP-REST and JSON with each other. Because we are using Cucumber and RSpec, we also have some high level integration tests for the APIs. Today I started on cleaning up an API in the Rails app. I wrote a cucumber step to invoke the API. It took me a while to figure out the magic incantation to make the controller retrieve the parameters as JSON: Here’s the relevant part of the step_definition: ...

Much planning done today, little programming. Our “secret” project is starting to look good and will be unveiled to selected companies next week in Lyon at the Game Connection. There’s a splash page for it too: Mobino University wise got to write about the Liskov Substitution Principle.

Thanks to you commenters. The Rails 3 function I18n.transliterate('some String with ümläüts') #=> some String with umlauts (or even ‘uemlaeuets’ if you specify :locale => 'de' as an additional parameter to transliterate) works beautifully. In other news, I think I have the old retro 700 character format nailed down - let’s see if the organisation can handle the test files we are going to send tomorrow. Other than that - a lot of private meetings, not much of real work done. Now writing a summary and critique of Kanban for the university. We have utilized some Kanban features (namely the WIP limitation on the taskboard) in the enterprise Rails project I was involved in in Munich to good effect. There’s a lot of very good literature around about Scrum / Kanban / Scrumban. Very interesting reading - might change our current style of development to Kanban after the next iteration. ...