Sébastien Grosjean's coding blog

Just a few references to help you boost your spec suites. Got 50% - 70% speed boost for BookingSync test suite.

• Inspect with perftools.rb
• Lower BCrypt Cost
• Deferer Garbage Collection

References:

http://blog.syncopelabs.co.uk/2012/12/speed-up-rspec-test.html
http://makandracards.com/makandra/950-speed-up-rspec-by-deferring-garbage-collection
http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/02/02/crank-your-specs/

Updated 2014-09-17: Recommend Tunnelss (extra 's') instead of Tunnels to provide valid certificate for .dev domains. (Use carefully, .dev is now a legitimate TLD)

I'm using Pow for running Ruby on Rails Apps in development. One thing not provided by Pow but important to me, is the ability to use SSL in development. For this, I use Tunnelss

Once setup, you'll need to make it run everytime you start your computer, and on OS X Mavericks using rbenv, this can be done by creating the following file:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.rubygems.tunnelss.plist

Make sure to adjust the tunnels path to your system

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.rubygems.tunnelss</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Users/seb/.rbenv/shims/tunnelss</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  <key>UserName</key>
  <string>root</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Let's stream in peace! Add this bookmarlet to your bookmark and use on streamzzz.com to watch without distraction.

Just got a movie in 3D Half/Full SBS MKV and trying to play it with VLC 2.0.5 just show up the 2 images side by side. One solution is to watch it as regular 2D movie by using the script below:

#!/bin/bash
#
# VLC 3D, version 0.2, 2013-04-03 by Sébastien Grosjean
#
# Allow to watch 3D Half/Full SBS MKV files in 2D with VLC 2.0.5
if [ -n "$1" ]
then
  /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --video-splitter=wall --wall-cols=2 --wall-rows=1 --wall-element-aspect=16:10 --wall-active=0,1 --monitor-par=1:2 "$1"
else
    echo "Usage: Pass the 3D SBS mkv file as an option."
  echo "For subtitles, use :"
  echo "- right align (VLC > Preferences > Subtitles & OSD > Show All > Input / Codecs > Subtitles codecs > Subtitles > Subtitle justification > Right)"
  echo "- and smaller font (VLC > Preferences > Subtitles & OSD > Display Settings > Font Size > Smaller)"
fi
exit

Notice the work around for subtitles, making them smaller and right aligned.

Rails 3.1+ and the Asset Pipeline is excellent to minify, merge, and deliver assets, however it's good to also leverage browser caching.

Using nginx, you can set a far future expiration header like this:

server {
  location ~ ^/(assets)/ {
    expires max;
  }
}

PNG Optimization

It's always good to save a few bits when you deliver images on the web, a lot of information can be stripped out of an image without quality loss. To do so on OS X, currently Mountain Lion, I like 2 options:

Batch Convertion

Using ImageOptim

Command line

Using pngcrush

Install

brew update
brew install pngcrush

Usage

pngcrush -rem allb -brute -reduce favicon-32x32.png favicon-32x32-crushed.png

PNG convertion to ICO

Install

brew update
brew install png2ico

Usage

png2ico --colors 16 favicon.ico favicon-32x32-crushed.png

Starting to play around with EmberJS I found myself looking for an easy way to create a toggle link.

Here's a simple view helper that handles just this.

When clicked, it will toggle the class name active and trigger the action set to activeBinding. Simple, yet really useful.

// ==========================================================================
// Project:   Ember Handlebar Views : ToogleLink
// Copyright: ©2012 Sébastien Grosjean.
// License:   Licensed under MIT license
// ==========================================================================
var set = Ember.set, get = Ember.get;
/**
  @class
  Creates an HTML link for handling toggle events.
  the view will render as a link element of the 'a' type and HTML
  related properties will be applied directly to the input.
      {{#view Ember.ToggleLink activeBinding="action"}}link{{/view}}
      <a href="#" id="ember1" class="ember-view ember-toggle-link">link</a>
  The `active` attribute of an Ember.ToggleLink object should always be set
  through the Ember object or by interacting with its rendered element representation
  via the mouse, keyboard, or touch.  Updating the value of the link via jQuery will
  result in the active value of the object and its element losing synchronization.
*/
Ember.ToggleLink = Ember.View.extend({
  tagName: 'a',
  href: '#',
  active: false,
  classNames: ['ember-toggle-link'],
  classNameBindings: ['active'],
  click: function() {
    var active = !get(this, 'active');
    set(this, 'active', active);
  }
});

Updated: February 28th 2012 to fix a typo in the translation file. Thanks erwin.

Starting to work with Twitters Bootstrap I have to make few adaptation to my simple_form setup to keep having clean forms and benefit from the slick interface provided by Twitter Bootstrap.

The tweaks required takes 2 parts:

1. The setup for input wrappers and form classes, ...
2. The buttons wrappers to be added easily

Setup for input wrappers and form classes, ...

Most of the work can be done by generating your simple_form config with as describe on simple_form documentation

rails generate simple_form:install --bootstrap

I had to make a few extra tweaks to use the horizontal mode, that I prefer:

config.label_class = 'control-label'
config.form_class = 'simple_form form-horizontal'

That's now good for all except the submit buttons, I'm still not happy to define the whole submit wrapper on each form, so let's make a button wrapper

Buttons wrappers

Adding the following to a new library, for example /lib/extras/simple_form_extensions.rb:

module WrappedButton
  def wrapped_button(*args, &block)
    template.content_tag :div, :class => "form-actions" do
      options = args.extract_options!
      loading = self.object.new_record? ? I18n.t('simple_form.creating') : I18n.t('simple_form.updating')
      options[:"data-loading-text"] = [loading, options[:"data-loading-text"]].compact
      options[:class] = ['btn-primary', options[:class]].compact
      args << options
      if cancel = options.delete(:cancel)
        submit(*args, &block) + ' ' + I18n.t('simple_form.buttons.or') + ' ' + template.link_to(I18n.t('simple_form.buttons.cancel'), cancel)
      else
        submit(*args, &block)
      end
    end
  end
end
SimpleForm::FormBuilder.send :include, WrappedButton

will allow you to use :

<%= f.button :wrapped, :cancel => posts_path %>

Don't forget to load your new library, I like to use the following way from config/application.rb :

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib/extras)

And require it from config/initializers/simple_form.rb

require 'simple_form_extensions'

Last thing, add the new translations within config/locales/simple_form.en.yml

en:
  simple_form:
    creating: "Creating..."
    updating: 'Updating...'
    buttons:
      or: 'or'
      cancel: 'cancel'

Restart your app server and here we go, we now keep the really clean way to manage forms of simple_form with the beautiful design of Twitter Bootstrap.

More like a quick memo, here's the steps I had to follow to install PEAR, PECL and pecl_http on OSX Lion.

Install PEAR and PECL

sudo php /usr/lib/php/install-pear-nozlib.phar
pear config-set php_ini /private/etc/php.ini
pecl config-set php_ini /private/etc/php.ini
sudo pear upgrade-all

Load the extensions

Then open `/etc/php.ini` and uncomment `extension=php_curl.dll` also add `extension=http.so` as you are at it.

Install pecl_http

sudo pecl install pecl_http

Just press "Enter" at the request questions to accept the default values.

Restart Apache

sudo apachectl restart

Register the TSV Mime Type

in `config/initializers/mime_types.rb` register the TSV mime type

Mime::Type.register "text/tab-separated-values", :tsv

Add to_csv and to_tsv to Arrays so as CSV and TSV renderers

In `lib/csv_and_tsv_renderers.rb`

# encoding: utf-8
#
require 'csv' # adds a .to_csv method to Array instances
class Array
  BOM = "\xEF\xBB\xBF" #Byte Order Mark UTF-8
  alias old_to_csv to_csv #keep reference to original to_csv method
  def to_csv(options = Hash.new)
    options = options.merge(:force_quotes => true)
    # override only if first element actually has as_csv method
    return old_to_csv(options) unless self.first.respond_to? :as_csv
    # use keys from first row as header columns
    out = first.as_csv.keys.collect{|k| k.to_s.titleize }.to_csv(options)
    # collect all entries as CSV, ensure that no line break is present within values
    self.each { |r| out << r.as_csv.values.to_csv(options).gsub(/\r?\n/, ' ').strip! + "\n" }
    # Force encoding to UTF-16LE and add Byte Order Mark for Excel compatibility
    (BOM + out).force_encoding("UTF-8")
  end
  def to_tsv(options = Hash.new)
    to_csv(options.merge(:col_sep => "\t"))
  end
end
ActionController::Renderers.add :csv do |csv, options|
  csv = csv.respond_to?(:to_csv) ? csv.to_csv() : csv
  self.content_type ||= Mime::CSV
  self.response_body = csv
end
ActionController::Renderers.add :tsv do |tsv, options|
  tsv = tsv.respond_to?(:to_tsv) ? tsv.to_tsv() : tsv
  self.content_type ||= Mime::TSV
  self.response_body = tsv
end

Load the lib

In `config/initializers/load_libs.rb`

require 'csv_and_tsv_renderers'

In your models

Cherry pick the attributes you like to be exported

def as_csv(options = {})
  csv = {
    attribute_1: attribute_1,
    ...
  }
end

In your controllers

respond_to do |format|
  ...
  format.csv  { send_data @objects.to_csv(), :filename => "nice_filename.csv" }
  format.tsv  { send_data @objects.to_tsv(), :filename => "nice_filename.tsv" }
end

References

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/

https://github.com/ilmotta/to-csv/issues/3

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/539294/how-do-i-determine-file-encoding-in-osx

Update 2012-01-28

Use UTF-8 everywhere instead of the initial UTF-8 BOM then forcing to UTF-16LE. Seems to work fine under Windows' Office 2010.

If you could confirm that it works properly under an other version, opens fine and shows diacritics characters, please leave a comment bellow.