just got back from a vacation in Australia, some things worth knowing

• A pitcher of beer is a jug of beer
• ketchup is sauce
• standard hotel checkout is 10:00am
• the people are nice, no worries!

The travel guides we used

• Frommer’s Australia 2008 (Frommer’s Complete)
• Australia (EYEWITNESS TRAVEL GUIDE)

more posts

• Medina Grand Harbourside Sydney Australia
• Hotel George Williams YMCA, Brisbane Australia
• Coral Tree Inn Cairns Australia
• Archipelago Studio Apartments Port Douglas Australia

Seriously we had a great time - Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns and Port Douglas

At work we have a QA Inbox where tons of emails generated by our application are sent, of course nobody ever takes the time to clear it out and even after numerous requests to the IT department to automatically purge anything older then a few weeks it always seems to be really full when I get around to testing some email functionality

This post is just a rant about one thing in particular I really do not like about Exchange and Outlook - why is it so hard to delete email? if exchange would just do this on the server it would save me a lot of time

so here we go - delete all of the ‘Older’ mail - and there is a lot

oh look not enough memory to delete all that mail? why don’t you just do the delete on the server, I don’t want to bring local copies of each of them and then delete them?

ok so we select a few thousand at a time, about 1 minute to delete say 2,500 emails - just guessing but there are probably like 10,000 COM+ calls being executed from my workstation across the network to the exchange server for this operation?yeah, so now select another couple of thousand emails - what ‘operation failed’ - doh! re-open that inbox and try again
so then here we are 36,000 emails deleted later - now we need to purge the Deleted Items



and look at that - only 40 seconds to purge 36,000 emails from the Deleted Items - I guess this part is ‘optimized’?



</rant>
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just getting into rspec, after reading The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez, a very nice testing framework.

after installing the gems and plugins I ran into this error when trying to run my tests “Your RSpec on Rails plugin is incompatible with your installed RSpec”

a simple workaround, run spec from your local script directory

this one raises the error, because it is running from the ruby gems?
spec spec/models

this one does not raise the error because it is running the locally installed version
from your rails application root
script/spec spec/models
or make the output pretty
script/spec spec/models -fs

the install was as follows
gem install rspec (sudo gem install rspec, on some OS)
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/trunk/rspec
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/trunk/rspec_on_rails

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This is just for reference RunnerScript

One option for running scheduled processes for a rails application.

see also HowToRunBackgroundJobsInRails

FreeRice.com

Just came across this site - a good idea and a great cause


From their website - http://www.freerice.com/about.html

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

One of the guys at work hooked me up with this code - quite useful if you want to do a bunch of data inserts but don’t want to worry about the order you apply the inserts because of foreign key constraints

Before performing data actions:

-- generate these and run
SELECT
'ALTER TABLE ' + so.NAME + ' NOCHECK CONSTRAINT ALL'
FROM sysobjects so
WHERE xtype = 'u'

After performing data actions:

-- generate these and run
SELECT
'ALTER TABLE ' + so.NAME + ' CHECK CONSTRAINT ALL'
FROM sysobjects so
WHERE xtype = 'u'

Thanks to ET for this code bit!

I have used SnagIt off and on over the past few years, usually with the trial version for a month here and there, finally broke down and got a license.
It runs $39.95 for single user - so I did a quick google search to see if any promotional codes were available and came across one - the promotional code SNUG will get you $10.00 off the standard price. The posting I found for this discount was from 2007 and it is now May 2008 so who knows how long it will be around?

SnagIt is a great tool - if you have never used it I recommend downloading the trial, best screen capture tool ever!

UPDATE 2009-01-07: the promo code SNUG expired on 2008-12-31, bummer; it was great while it lasted!

Just came across this on a rails forum (post by Freezzo), rails production.log files can grow very large - but no chron job required - this is very handy.

config.logger = Logger.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']}.log", 'daily')

where ‘daily’ can be ‘daily’ to ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘5mb’, etc…

Recently I did a google search for a Python MVC web framework. I have never done any coding in Python but it seems to be one of the primary languages used at Google and currently the only language supported on the Google App Engine so it seemed worth getting familiar with.

Django seems to be one of the most robust python mvc frameworks around at this time and I was going to dive in and create a small toy application with it, but then I stumbled across a comment on some blog that talked about the web2py MVC framework, still in it’s infancy, development is very active on the project. It seems very easy to get up to speed with the framework and even someone who does not know Python can get a simple site up and running.

I love this graphic from one of the pdfs on the site

The feature list taken directly from the site
Web2py is worth checking out!

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Komodo Edit is my new text editor of choice for ruby and rails stuff. I use windows OS and have tried alot of different editors and IDEs; most of the IDE are too slow for my tastes and I have been using an alpha version of InType or NotePad++ for any Rails development.

This product is free and available from ActiveState. Note that there is also Komodo IDE which is a full blown IDE and is not free. I have not tested out that product but may in the future.

Go to http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml click the ‘Get Komodo Edit’ button, ignore the contact details form, it is optional and kind of annoying? Click Continue to download, there are versions for Mac, Linux and Windows.

After installing the MSI package I only needed to make a few minor tweaks to my preferences
First things first, create a new ‘Project’ (File -> New -> New Project), just point to one of my existing rails applications and save the kpf file in the root. Then I actually want to see the files so View -> Tabs -> Projects


And a few tweaks; get rid of that right hand edge line, not a big fan. Edit -> Preferences -> Smart Editing -> uncheck ‘Show edge line / Hightlight characters beyond…’ ok - i have been converted to the dark side so, Edit - Preferences -> Fonts and Colors -> select Dark from the Scheme, bump the font size to 12 and go bold - you will be prompted to give this new scheme a name


bada bing bada boom - we are good to go