Restarting Rails with ‘Address Already in Use’

iTerm crashed on my this morning taking down my development Rails process. Now, I’m busy tailing cullect.com‘s production.log and listening to some podcasts so I didn’t want to restart1 A little Googling found John Nunemaker’s year-old, “Oops I did it again” post. His tips worked. An I’m rewriting the following for Future Reference2: $ ps …

Rails Cheap, MySQL Expensive

This is an update to earlier post on Performance and MySQL Indexes. While 10-12 seconds per feed is an improvement, it’s completely unacceptable when we’re talking 2,000+ feeds (full parse would take 5.5 hours) and slow down the system to unusable. In an attempt to find the bottlenecks, I loaded up the query_analyzer plugin on …

The Performance Power of MySQL Index

I’m at the point in the development cycle where performance is the worth working on, for two reasons; everything else that’s going in is in, it’s too slow. After one too many out-of-memory errors and far too many times wondering if I should have purchased a larger server to begin with, I sent an SOS …

REST-less with link_to

This week, I file my first major complaint with Rails. I was innocently running tests and tweakings some views – when I discovered function that should work longer did. A little background, my app is filled with routes the make the URLs more contextually appropriate and memorable than the standard REST URL construction. If you …

Passing Sessions and Referers in Rails Functional Tests

So, you’ve set up your Rails app to present different views to authenticated people verses non. Now, how do you test functionality for the authenticated people? Seems silly to have your tests sign in before checking whatever it is you want them to check. Well, pass the session data in the test as a hash. …

MySQL on OS X Reinstall Reminders

First off, if you can avoid reinstalling MySQL on OS X – by all means do. Whatever the reason is that you want to do a reinstall, it’s not a good one1. Just buck up and work around whatever issue you have. It’s not as bad as what follows. Let’s say you decide to reinstall …

The Power of Vendor/Gems

Right now, I’m heavily reliant on an unsupported (if not completely abandoned) ruby gem library. Historically, I’ve just gem install bizarro-gem and moved on. A couple of issues have changed my perspective: My host, textdrive, doesn’t allow installing bizarro gems on their shared servers and I’ve had difficulty freezing them, so I worked around the …