AutoTags, an open source project, is a plugin for RubyOnRails applications to automatically generate the relevant tags for the provided content. Its quite simple to use and provide easy integration with ActiveRecord. The plugin is very useful for social applications, community websites and all those networking applications where there is a scope of user generate content to be tagged. No more heck for the admin to sit and add the tags to the content or waiting for the users to add the tags to their content.

For installation and usage read here.

If you liked the plugin then please recommend me on workingwithrails.

Currently for my rails applications I am running Ruby1.8… and exploring 1.9 to get ready as we are heading with nice speed in the rails developments. Modrails has already started making waves all around.
Soon I would be publishing a couple of posts on threads, processes and sockets in ruby… here is a bit on how they are going to be different in Ruby1.9.

In Ruby1.9 the threads implementation is going to be really different than what we all know/do in Ruby1.8. The Ruby1.8 uses a single native thread and runs all Ruby threads within that… which certainly protects the Ruby threads to take on much responsibilities and to completely leverage the hardware with multiple processors.

Now, the good news, the Ruby1.9 allocates a separate native thread for every Ruby thread. But at this very moment it is not fully functional… as because of some C libraries, used here, are not thread-safe that it will not allow Ruby1.9 to take control on multiple native threads. Still, great signs of improvements in these directions… It has been mentioned that this restriction will be removed in the upcoming versions of Ruby1.9 and there will be full fledged implementation of multithreading in Ruby with multiple native threads, and the charm of parallel execution… means a lot more scope of improvements for all related libraries, frameworks built on the top of Ruby.

Yes, we accept that there are some pain points, like hosting Rails applications at shared hosts. No we don’t need those in production, but don’t you wish it was easier to deploy a rails app for a quick review with a client (a client who can’t run it on his own machine). Yes php scores there, just throw the code on the server and you are done. Why do I still run this blog on wordpress and not typo or mephisto? The big reason is that it’s easy to let just apache handle everything.

But things might change soon with the launch of passenger aka modrails.

And the other classic allegation against Rails has been performance. Remember the discussion between JDD and DHH about CPU cycles vs. developer cycles. We are definitely headed in the direction of lesser CPU cycles for our Rails app. Rails2 made some advances towards that and with Ruby1.9 and YARV and Rubinium, we have high expectations. Also you have heard about Ruby Enterprise Edition , haven’t you?

So things might change, when people try to figure out the fastest web language or framwework , the next time around.

I and those around me here, are generally biased towards rails. Ruby makes us happy. For us the pleasure points in Rails were always far more than the pain points. The basic Rails principles of DRY and Convention Over Configuration clicked with us. Ruby’s and Rail’s simplicity and beauty clicked with us. We did not need hosting on shared hosts. We could work with Rails caching to improve performance. No wonder we were one of the early adopters of Rails in India. But today, I would like to thank the critics whose untiring rants have moved Rails in the direction of being much more than what is was a couple of years ago.

Some of those changes have been in rails, but more have been around it. If you would have noticed, most of these development are not in rails as such, but in the ruby ecosystem.

Rails provides developer productivity and joy; ease of deployment; and ever-improving performance. And no, now you don’t need to go back to Java. We knew it, I am just repeating it for you.

Extrapolate this one year old graph for yourself.

So what is your reason for not having rail-ed yet?

Update: Charles Nutter has a post on upcoming Ruby implementations here

1) Trailing whitespace
2) Indent SP followed by a TAB
3) Unresolved merge conflict

The first error “Trailing whitespace” is because of carriage-return/line-feed(windows style line feed/end). To resolve this problem comment following lines(58-60) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

The second one “Indent SP followed by a TAB” is because of leading spaces/tabs. To resolve this problem comment following lines(61-63) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

The third one “Unresolved merge conflict” is because of seven or more successive occurrence of = or < or > characters. Major chances of having seven = character in README or doc files. To resolve this problem replace following line(64) in .git/hooks/pre-commit file:

by

These tricks worked for me, I hope it could help you.

svn patch to add schema info to spec file and spec fixture file
git patch to add schema info to spec file and spec fixture file

Here in this post I admit that gaming, especially playing ‘Tekken3′ is one of the biggest distraction for me. As whenever I spend continuous hours on work, I get the time out and start playing ‘Tekken3′ which surely very much joyful. But, actually I know I make reason to myself to play that game and not actually to take some time off to have rest. Playing game certainly gives some enjoyment but not exactly the rest, I still be in the same position on my desk, sitting on my chair, and playing the game instead of doing the work… so its almost that I am doing work and not giving rest to my body. So, basically I was not willing enough to say that the game is a distraction for me… instead I kept on saying that I am playing it to take a time out of the work, But its for sure a wastage of time. And now I am sure enough to say its purely a wastage of time as I have made a resolution to say NO TO GAMES. I am in my 20s and need to conquer many of my dreams and need to work really hard to do so… which will certainly require killing of all these distractions in my life. And I’ve started very well by signing off from games… Though its true that I have a dream to run a Gaming company… and if I would be able to do so… the Gaming will also be my work

So, to take time out from my work I would rather now read my newspaper and I can now allocate the time I used to spend in reading newspaper back to work. Reading newspaper is a required task to be accomplished and would not be a reason to take a forced time out from the work… moreover I can relax while reading newspaper that I couldn’t do while gaming. I must say I have dumped a biggest distraction of mine.

Find all blogs with category ruby or rails

another way

Find all blogs with categories ruby and rails

another way

Grouping for more precision

NOTE: mind the grouping using parenthesis, you might get unexpected results without proper grouping.

Find all blogs with categories ruby or rails with author Sur

Find all blogs with categories ruby AND rails with author Sur

Find all blogs with categories ruby or rails with author Sur or David

Find all blogs with categories ruby and rails with author Sur or David

Install THIN by issuing

THIN accepts more or less similar switches as that of mongrel. You start THIN by issuing

-p — port, defaults to 3000
-e — environment, defaults to development
-d — daemonize mode

THIN provides an in built support for clustering and running multiple servers for the same applications. You can start say 3 servers for the single application by providing the -s switch as…

And similar to mongrel it will start three servers on the ports 9090, 9091 and 9092.

Great words from great design enginners…

With the market being ultra-competitive and high on style, it is not enough to just have a good product — it has to score good on looks too.

Design gives the consumer an experience and not just a product, which, in turn, leads to a loyal customer base. This is one area where investments are small when compared to the benefits a company can get out of it.

It takes time fort a startup to realize the worth of design. A startup is also, more often than not, cash strapped and thus does not have funds to invest in designing, which is an area that requires huge investments.

Say your app example.com is residing in /var/www/apps/example

Nginx configurations

say your existing configuration looks like…

add the error page configurations

Create the required html error page at /var/www/maintenance/example/500.html.
Now, restart the nginx to reload the configurations by issuing /etc/init.d/nginx restart.
And you are done!