ep's blog

"YYYY-MM-DD 24:00:00".to_time ouch

ep — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:22:56 -0400

Be aware of the bug in Rails ActiveSupport String.to_time method

(rdb:1) "2009-09-10 24:00:00".to_time - "2009-09-10 00:00:00".to_time
TypeError Exception: expected numeric or date
(rdb:1) "2009-09-10 24:00:00".to_time.to_time - "2009-09-10 00:00:00".to_time
86400.0
(rdb:1) p "2009-09-10 24:00:00".to_time.class
DateTime
(rdb:1) p "2009-09-10 00:00:00".to_time.class
Time
(rdb:1)

FasterCSV and development mode in Rails 2.3, Rack and Passenger

ep — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:15:34 -0400

Using Proc as a response you pass from the controller sometimes causes 500 error. It happens to be the nature of the Rack/Rails life cycle. Before response was sent/called before Dependencies cleanup in Rails, because it was part of the flow on request-response processing. Now with Rack in front of Rails, the Proc is not called in the request-response flow of the Rails, but in the Rack after Rails finished and if you happens to use Model classes inside the Proc, then you may get empty or partial response and some errors in Apache error logs

Rails 2.3, Rack and FasterCSV

ep — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:20:46 -0400

With recent update to Rails 2.3 we found that we cant' strem CSV with FasterCSV anymore

Re: process hangs - (Errno::ESPIPE) "Illegal seek" rails + passenger

ep — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:59:48 -0400

With a recent upgrade to passenger to 2.0.6 ESPIPE come back again. Another patch ...

Rails Edge in 'batches' bug http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/d13623ca46c82120c398f4634e206422fc3ad7ea

ep — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:15:51 -0500

it has a bug or feature in it. yeilding inside with_scope will put scope on the same class

migration

class ...

MONKEYS FOR SALE

ep — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:10:55 -0500

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. ...

ROR: Migrations, fixtures, test, mysql and Mysql::Error Duplicate entry

ep — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:52:37 -0500

Few days ago we upgraded our test server with mysql 5.1.30 (before we had 5.0.27) and tests started to fail. ...

process hangs - (Errno::ESPIPE) "Illegal seek" rails + passenger

ep — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:20:23 -0400

In our application we have the problem with high CPU load and hang process when upload of the file failed ...

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

...