I’ve just posted a technical overview of how Kakama functions. You can view it at Kakama.org

I’ve been working with Rails and Ruby since 2006 and I’m surprised I hadn’t put this together for myself:

$ cd test # from your rails app root
$ ruby unit/a_model_test.rb

As compared to:

$ ruby -I"lib:test" "/usr/local/Cellar/ruby-enterprise-edition/1.8.7-20090928/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.7/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb" "test/unit/a_model_test.rb"

Definitely a hand to forehead moment when I read that! Found it in a comment here:

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/16213/tickets/8

*Assumes your ruby command is set up correctly in your shell’s environment, of course.

When you’re starting off, it’s fairly easy to commit to the master branch. But once your application is released, you probably want to keep things stable on the master branch. So use feature branches.

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I’ve moved from MacPorts to Homebrew which includes a recipe for installing MongoDB. After installing Homebrew, just run this as your normal user:

If you prefer to store your MongoDB data all under your home directory, you might find Mislav’s gist suits your needs instead:

http://gist.github.com/265272

If you prefer installing from source, check out this post:

http://shiftcommathree.com/articles/how-to-install-mongodb-on-os-x

Enjoy.

Here at Katipo, we’re using New Relic RPM to monitor our deployed Kete applications, to help make things as fast as possible. In order to make New Relic as useful as possible, I’ve been trying out three New Relic RPM features, some available in only the latest versions of RPM, on one of those sites. These recent and little-known features aren’t enabled by default, so I’m going to run you through them and how to set them up in this post.

If you don’t yet use New Relic RPM, you can get a Lite account for free by going to newrelic.com, where you can also test drive New Relic RPM on a real application. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who follow this sort of thing, Github shut down their gem building. Thankfully, a newer and easier gem hoster, Gemcutter, appeared on the scene not long before that happened. The idea behind it, for those who haven’t heard of it, is that you manage your own gem building. Gemcutter doesn’t wait for your Gem spec to change before it makes a new gem. You simply build it locally, and push it to Gemcutter, using a handy gem they provide that extends Rubygems ‘gem’ console command.

But Github was building gems for some time, and due to it’s continuing popularity, many well known Ruby on Rails developers and companies switched permanently to Github for their gem building/hosting at the time, so it’s likely that quite a few gems you’ve got installed are from Github.

To help transition over from Github to Gemcutter, Maxim Chernyak wrote a great utility called off_github, which looks at your list of gems, and tells you which ones you’re installed from Github, and whether they can be reinstalled from Gemcutter. It saves a lot of time and effort  than having to do it manually. So here’s how to get started….

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Stumbled upon this. If you’re going to make a URI (domain or sub domain) with an underscore, think twice. IE7 and IE8 do not support these URI’s when dealing with cookies.

For more details, see this blog post, detailing the symptoms.

http://blog.patrick-morgan.net/2008/09/problems-with-ie7-sessions-not-saved-in.html

A few sites that we have been working on wanted an extra step with the signup process on their website that requires an additional level of vetting by the site administrator when a new user submits the online form. To achieve this we made some minor changes to the core code.

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Developing in Joomla sometimes throws up minor issues with solutions so simple that you wonder why they’re not in the core code.  While putting together the Rangitikei District Council’s website we discovered that there’s no easy way to set up Navigation Access Keys in Joomla 1.5, as per the New Zealand Government Web Standards (http://webstandards.govt.nz/8-4-navigation-access-keys/).  The keys are a great navigation aid to non-mouse users and are recommended by w3c (http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/#keyboard-operation).
To add Access Keys to a Joomla site you need to hack at the core code of your Joomla install.  There are some basic instructions on the Joomla documentation site at http://docs.joomla.org/Adding_Access_Keys.  This sets up a new “Accessibility Access Key” field in the System Parameters dropdown that’s available when you edit an menu item, allowing you to simply enter the keystroke you want to associate with that menu link on your site.

The hack makes it easy to add as many access keys as you need, and you can offer more than just the basic keystroke options set on most government websites.

When I started on a new Ruby on Rails project at Katipo Communications, I evaluated a range of testing libraries, and decided on Cucumber. It’s simple and has a flexible style of feature testing. For more info about it, see the Cucumber Wiki Documentation. In this post, I’ll detail some of my experiences with it for other developers who are considering using it.

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