# Disables Globalize's ActiveRecord logging
module Globalize
 class DbViewTranslator
   alias_method :orig_fetch_view_translation, :fetch_view_translation   
   def fetch_view_translation(key, language, idx, namespace = nil, original_caller = nil)
     ActiveRecord::Base.silence do
       orig_fetch_view_translation(key, language, idx, namespace, original_caller)
     end
   end
 end
end

This tip is originally from http://www.artweb-design.de/2007/9/16/disable-globalize-viewtranslation-sql-logging, but I had to adapt it a bit to work with my globalize version.

If this does not work with your version of globalize, then just check how it’s implemented in “lib/globalize/localization/db_view_translator.rb” and adapt the patch.

It’s common knowledge that using Ruby Enterprise Edition on your server is a good idea, but how many of us use it on our development boxes?

I recently started using Ruby EE in my development environment and it has decreased the time it takes to run my specs with about 20% as compared to Ruby 1.8.6.

We've been using this script at work to show the build status using lava lamps =).

To control the lamps we use a TellStick which is a transmitter that plugs into USB and lets us control wireless remote switches.

Just wasted a bit of time figuring out why my tests ran just fine, while trying to enter a state when actually using the app failed. Turns out that because I do not touch the database in my state machine specs I had no chance of discovering that I had written “aasm_event :foo! do” instead of “aasm_event :foo do” (see that extra “!”?)... D’oh. Hope this can be of help to anyone else that accidentally adds an ! to a aasm_event :).

I used the following to allow logs larger than 100KB in CruiseControl.rb:

 # Number of times more logging than the default 
 MORE_LOGGING = 5

 Build.class_eval do

   def contents_for_display(file)
     return '' unless File.file?(file) && File.readable?(file)
     if File.size(file) < 100 * 1024 * MORE_LOGGING
       File.read(file)
     else
       contents = File.read(file, 100 * MORE_LOGGING)
       "#{file} is over #{100 * MORE_LOGGING} kbytes - too big to
        display in the dashboard, output is truncated\n\n\n#{contents}"
     end
   end

 end

If you call some code that print warnings to stderr (like Kernel.warn) that can be safetly ignored, you can use this trick to temporaraly turn off stderr:

  $stderr = File.open('/dev/null', 'w')
  code_that_prints_to_stderr
  $stderr = STDERR

Or you cound wrap it in a block:

  def disable_warnings
    $stderr = File.open('/dev/null', 'w')
    yield
    $stderr = STDERR
  end

  disable_warnings do
    code_that_prints_to_stderr
  end

Update: Just learned that if you’re in the context of a rails app you can do:

  silence_warnings do
    code_that_prints_to_stderr
  end

One way of speccing parameter filtering.

    filter_parameter_logging :password

    it "should filter password" do
      before_filter, after_filter = {}, {}
      before_filter['user'] = { 'username'=>'foo', 'password'=>'bar' }
      after_filter['user'] = { 'username'=>'foo', 'password'=>'[FILTERED]' }      
      controller.filter_parameters(before_filter).should == after_filter
    end

I’ve written a basic merb client for hoptoad (an online exception logger), you can find it at: http://github.com/joakimk/hoptoad_notifier_merb