ep's blog

O-ops 'display' in Ruby

ep — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:11:08 -0400

Today I have discovered a big oops I'd made when called column 'display' in our model. It turns out default ...

Passenger (mod_rails) for development. restart and debug

ep — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:04:42 -0400

rdebug with Phusion Passenger

self-inflicted DOS attack with javascript or why routing errors should be logged without stack trace

ep — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:39:39 -0400

Today we had an interesting experience. During the the deployment one of the server start showing a lot of errors ...

Tile Watermarking with RMagick

ep — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:34:37 -0400

Tile watermarking of an image with RMagick

Google Map API suprise

ep — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:41:23 -0400

Not well formed XML in Google MAP geocoding result

vCard, Vpim, Version 3.0 and =0D=OA=

ep — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:27:59 -0400

Vpim::InvalidEncodingError: ... =OD=0A= when parsing vcf files in ruby ...

Memory Leaks in Rails

ep — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:23:05 -0400

Well, it is not leaks, it's just the way how Ruby and Rails works. The problem in templates , Proc, GC and scope. Read more ...

Back from UTF8 for CSV in Ruby on Rails

ep — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:45:04 -0400

Rails taking care for your to handle UTF-8. How about when you need to generate a CSV file? It can't be UTF-8. It has to be one of the localized encodings. There is no javascript way to know what is a default locale on the windows client. You may assume it based on your major audience location, (still wrong assumption). ...

YAML bug with unpleasant side effect in ActiveRecord :serialize

ep — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:36:33 -0400

Just demo

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> YAML.load(YAML.dump("\n New Paragraph\nNew Line"))
ArgumentError: syntax error on line 3, ...

Impersonating scam from hijacked gmail account

ep — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:57:15 -0500

Gmail account of one of my friends got hijacked and pretty much the same minute all her contacts from contact ...

Another 'work/sales' representative scam

ep — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:10:24 -0500

Another 'work/sales' representative scam. Turkish company with email address on Spanish Yahoo. Apparently Finland, Cyprus and UK is not part ...

Russian "Nigerian Scam"

ep — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:47:38 -0500

I would never thought that russian OLIGARH'IE name will be used in the old-old scam

To: (Recipient List Suppressed)
Sender: ...

Re: New Scam: SINOSTEEL TRADING

ep — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:55:23 -0500

REF:KIR/02.
Dear Sir/Madam,

We avail ourselves of this opportunity to approach you for the
establishment of business relations with you. We are presently
searching for Representatives/Collection Agents who can help us
establish a medium of getting to our customers in the America,
precisely USA and Canada. If interested, Please contact us via email;
for more information. ...

ActiveMerchant, PayPal, SuccessWithWarning and alias_method_chain

ep — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:40:18 -0500

ActiveMerchant Paypal gateway doesn't like 'SuccessWithWarning' from Paypal. How to handle it and save your face (or your website face)

New Scam (and possible Identity theft) from pretend to be "Hartman International Co. Ltd"

ep — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:56:39 -0500

The scammers and identity thefts becoming more sophisticated. That email came through google spam check and spamassassin I run locally.

How to stop big file upload (Enemy at the gate) with Apache mod_rewrite

ep — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:02:22 -0500

Stop big file upload before it hits your application server

Apache 2
ModRewrite
Ruby on Rails

When you have a form to upload a file, you may want to limit the ...

Scam with elements of social engineering. Be aware

ep — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:12:04 -0500

Scam with elements of social engineering.
How scammers using craigslist to fool you, mislead and deceive you ...

Unobtrusive way to retry curl/curb based screen scraping function on Curl::Err::Error

ep — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:30:26 -0500

Curl retry easy with alias_method_chain ...

Ruby on rails debug shell script helper

ep — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:25:01 -0400

Some time you need a debugger with ability to step-by-step execution,
inspection and evaluation, not just watch. I use small shell script to achieve this

#!/bin/sh
mongrel-cluster stop
sleep 5
cd $ROR_HOME
/usr/bin/xterm -e "rdebug -n -- ./script/server -p 4001" &
/usr/bin/xterm -e "rdebug -n -- ./script/server -p 4002" &
/usr/bin/xterm -e "rdebug -n -- ./script/server -p 4003" &

The server will stop execution right at the line debugger if defined? Debugger

Safari "upload file" with 'unknown' content-type and Rails

ep — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:22:23 -0400

I don't know how Safari identifies a content-type for the file before it uploaded (extension or magic bit). But when it failed to identify it - nothing is passed to server Example upload CSV file from Safari on Windows ...

UTF-8, vCard and Ruby or how to alias class method

ep — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 22:27:24 -0400

I need to parse uploaded vCard (vcf) file for one of the project, I am
working on. There is not that many libraries for Ruby around there.
Well, actually there is only one - vpim

Everything was working just fine with test files I found on the Internet,
until I hit the wall with vcf from Apple Address book. Few surprises:
accent characters or non US ASCII in general plus EMAIL and TEL
without a value ...

Simple way to get around ticket 3096

ep — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:08:34 -0400

You need to render partial with a collection of hashes (or kind_of?). Probably you control the code, which generate the collection

...

Magic of alias_method_chain - Part 1

ep — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:30:01 -0400

Imagine, you have created a great module/class for rails interacting with 3rd party service provider over TCP/IP or you build a ruby extension to one of the libraries, where work with IO is done outside of the ruby itself. While you was building it you didn't pay a lot of attention to handling timeouts, network latency, IO blocks or you name it.

...

Eagle point

ep — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:58:40 -0400

I posted a new photo to GrandCanyon.

Hover dumb - view from helicopter

ep — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:52:24 -0400

I posted a new photo to GrandCanyon.

debug rails with rdebug

ep — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 17:05:05 -0400

When logs doesn't help to troubleshoot and you need to use an interactive debugger with rails and ruby (1.8.5)

install ...

auto_scope plugin for rails has_many with_scope

ep — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:07:30 -0400

auto_scope plugin for rails has_many with_scope

Ruby on Rails migration on empty DB with renaming/adding/removing columns in the middle

ep — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:32:18 -0400

if you do rename_column/add/remove in your migration, don't forget to call reset_column_information in the changed class. Otherwise you may have a problem with running migration on an empty DB if you pre-seed data in the migration after change ...

HTTP::Daemon::SSL and 2048 bytes size HTTP request body

ep — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:18:58 -0400

One of our custmers noticed that our server doesn't responsd sometimes if body of the request is 2048, or 4096 ...

OpenSRS RCL with perl 5.8

ep — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 01:31:36 -0400

OpenSRS RCL, perl 5.8, UTF-8 and Blowfish. How I can make it work?