Ruby on Rails does a great job of parsing arrays in form data and populating a params hash, for quick and easy access in your controllers. For instance Gives you params[:item] # => ["item 1", "item 2"] Flask doesn't do this work f...

Stateless components are nice. They are simple to use and understand but can become tricky when you start thinking about data and how to manage state. In general, the consensus seems to be that if your UI is going to need state, then at least the componen...

Here is an extension you can use in your Swift (v4) projects that makes it easy to parse parameters from a url. Given a url like, "http://example.com/?x=1&y=2", you can extract the x and y parameters into a key, value data structure. Here is the s...

PHP has some default limits that do not work out of the box when you want to work with uploading very large files. So there are a few configuration changes you have to make to the defaults that come with PHP. These are defined in you php.ini file. The...

How to Chunk Large Files in Swift (4.1) It takes a bit of work but this is the solution I found that finally worked, thanks to this Stack Overflow thread https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46464177/split-data-in-chunks-and-upload-to-server The example ...

You can use CLGeocoder geocodeAddressString method. It will return an array of CLPlacemark objects that contain gps coords and city, location info. let address = "Burlington, Vermont" CLGeocoder().geocodeAddressString(address, completionHandler...

This code assumes you're using the UIImagePickerController. If not you will need to get an image url another way. But, If you are using UIImagePickerControllerDelegate then it will supply the asset's url in the `info` dictionary . From the asset's url...

You have to subclass NSObject class Car : NSObject { func drive(){ print("Driving..") } } let car : Car = Car() car.perform(NSSelectorFromString("drive"))

Is your app connected to the internet? You can use this standalone class to check! There are no dependencies so you can copy/paste it into your project without needing to install another framework. With this class it's as simple as running `Reachabili...

If you're working with an XCode application, either iOS or MacOS, and want to do a completely clean build and delete the cache, it's simple. Execute this command from the command line.. defaults delete your.apps.bundle.id Where "your.apps.bundl...

If you're working with SQLAlchemy, the best database driver for Python, and want to see only SQL syntax errors, you need to use the StatementError exception class. On it, is an attribute `orig`, that contains just the SQL syntax error... and not any data...

Here is an extension to base 64 encode and decode strings in Swift (3) extension String { func fromBase64() -> String? { guard let data = Data(base64Encoded: self) else { return nil } return String(data: data, encoding: ....

There are a lot of practical uses for automating user behavior in a browser. Everything from testing your web application to logging into Twitter and auto following people. But first you have to install the tools. Here is everything you need to run yo...

Heroku is awesome! Let's say we want to copy a production database to a staging database. We can use the `pg:backups:restore` command to accomplish this. Here is an example. For the source database we are using the `production-app-name` and for stagi...

Creating trigrams in Python is very simple trigrams = lambda a: zip(a, a[1:], a[2:]) trigrams(('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f')) # => [('a', 'b', 'c'), ('b', 'c', 'd'), ('c', 'd', 'e'), ('d', 'e', 'f')] You can generalize this a little bit more ...

The first thing you'll need to do is enable the extension create extension "uuid-ossp"; To test that it's working select uuid_generate_v1(); For more info on which version of the algorithm you should use refer to the documentation. ...

This query and pattern will return urls in text all within a single SQL query. select substring(column_name from '.*://([^/]*)') as domain_name from table_name; And here it is in a larger query, say for retrieving page view counts for referrers. ...

You can use string interpolation in combination with a dictionary for simple formatting. print "My name is %(name)s and I have $%(change)0.2f in change in my pocket!" % { 'name': 'Sean', 'change': 00.23 } # My name is Sean and I have $0.23 in chang...

Rails will infer the controller you want to test from the class name of the test case. For example... class PeopleControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase end will test the app/controllers/people_controller.rb. To change this is trivial. Us...

Foreman is a process management gem for ruby applications. It is used in combination with a Procfile for configuration instructions. A typical Procfile looks something like this [name] : [script to execute] Example Rack application Procfile ...

You need to find which configuration ini file has been loaded by PHP. The easiest way to do this is to run the phpinfo() function from the command line. php -r "phpinfo(); " | grep -i "loaded configuration file" You should see something like...

This regular expression matches non alphanumeric characters in a string. r = /[^a-z0-9]{1,}/i You can use it to create URL friendly slugs. slug = "hello world!".gsub(/[^a-z0-9]{1,}/i, '-').downcase # => hello-world In combination wit...

This snippet will make a request to this page and extract the title from the title tag. require 'open-uri' html = open('http://www.seanbehan.com/how-to-extract-the-title-from-an-html-page-with-ruby').read title = html.match(/(.*)/) { $1 } pu...

> This post is out of date - Heroku officially supports PHP now w/ buildpacks Heroku runs Apache version 2.2.22 PHP version 5.3.10 Deploying Wordpress to Heroku requires that you throw the Wordpress source into a Git repository. So download th...

I am not using the full Xcode package on my laptop. Instead I'm using the command line tools, offered by Apple as a separate and much smaller install. I haven't had too many issues, aside from not being able to use the FileMerge program that ships with ...

# Edit Rakefile in project root # # Add a new rake test task... E.g., rake test:lib, below everything else in that file... # Alternatively, add a task in lib/tasks/ directory and plop in the same code namespace :test do desc "Test lib source" ...

Here is a gist that demonstrates how easy it is to transform text using #gsub and a block with Ruby. "Scs Epc Score".gsub (/scs|epc/i) { |i| i.upcase } # => SCS EPC Score For more helpful string extensions in Ruby check out our Ruby Gem on GitHub...

If you're running Rails in production it will by default be configured to let apache or nginx send files for you. If you're handling file downloads yourself with send_file send_file("path/to/file.txt") you will notice that the downloaded files are empty...

At Railsconf last week I took Greg Pollack's online course Rails Best Practices. The interface is gorgeous and the instructions are excellent. One of the lessons involved taking a partial and moving it into a helper. I was reminded how difficult such a si...

Using the system clipboard with tmux on OS X is broken. I really like tmux but having copy and paste is kind of important for me. Here is my attempt to get it back with a simple bash script until I find something better. The approach is to take a named pi...

Short and sweet. Here all the commands I run in this order to set up a brand new box. It usually takes about 10 - 15 minutes on a 256 MB RAM instance. Compiling Ruby Enterprise Edition, which is super easy, will take the most amount of time. It will seem ...

If you use the link_to_function to replace content in a div with content from a partial, any javascript that you include in the partial will not be executed. It is instead included, but will do nothing. Obviously, this isn't the desired behavior. Why woul...

Here is a little code snippet that will fire off a request to update_client_path when you change the select field. This stands alone, rather than being apart of a larger form. The Client::CATEGORY argument is a hash, which I populated manually in my Clien...

After installing Ruby Enterprise Edition, REE, and Passenger on Ubuntu you may see this error message when you run script/console for the first time ./script/console production # => Loading production environment (Rails 2.3.5) Rails requires RubyGems >=...

What is RVM and why should you use it? RVM is a Ruby interpreter, version management tool. In short, it enables you to switch between different versions and releases of Ruby (for instance, version 1.8.6, 1.8.7, jruby 1.9.2, ruby enterprise edition) on the...

Given a collection of Active Record objects, you may use the collection_select helper method to produce a select form field. You need to pass in a number of arguments to the helper function. 1) object - your model object used in the collection 2) method ...

This post is inspired by http://pupeno.com/blog/really-resetting-the-database/#comment-1179. But as my blog mostly serves as a reference for my future self, I'd like to reprint this little snippet of code here as well. namespace :db do desc "Crush a...

In the Wordpress editor (html mode) you'll need to become friends with < and > if you plan on showing any code (php, html... xml, most languages actually) that readers will want to understand. I never thought about it, but assumed that the lt and...

There are many ways to tackle the Facebook style activity stream feature for your app. The simplest approach, which you can tack on at almost any moment, is what I'll describe here. You don't have to create a new model for news feed items or create any po...

While writing software it's common to leave comments for your future self. For instance, if you have written some code but realize that it should be refactored to be more efficient, you may place something along the lines of "TODO: change active record fi...

Remember to include the host declaration in the database.yml file when you deploy to Dreamhost. Dreamhost does not use "localhost" which is typically the default setting when using the mysql adapter and developing locally or even on a small site. At lea...

Arguably the most important function in the Moodle API, is the create_course function. One would think... after all Moodle is an LMS. Courses are the bread and butter for course management platforms, right? Taking a look at the function in the course/lib....

In the example below, I'm going to zip up a directory that includes images in both PNG and PSD file formats. However, I want to exclude the PSDs because they are huge! zip -r my-compressed-dir-without-psd.zip directory-to-zip -x '*.psd'

Uncompress a bz2 file using tar command tar --use-compress-program bzip2 -xvf your-file-to-uncompress.tar.bz2 @source http://www.kde.gr.jp/help/doc/kdebase/doc/khelpcenter/faq/HTML/bzip2.html...

I was hoping to find a function in the Wordpress API, that goes something like this... the_child_categories("Vermont"); // print Burlington, Brattleboro... etc if this post has any child categories of Vermont But I could not. The result that I did ...

Using CSS positioning it's possible to offset an element and collapse its width and height where it would normally appear. Wrapping the content in an absolute positioned element, the space that the element would normally take up is collapsed. <div st...

I could not find a listing of all thematic theme functions for Wordpress online. So the following is just a recursive grep of the thematic directory. grep -rh "function thematic_" * Each function needs to prepended with "thematic_" when adding as a actio...

This may not be the ideal solution. This just manages request.referers in a session variable, then looping over each unique path prints a link to the screen. It's more of a "history" than a hierarchy for resources in an application. It is however, pretty ...

If you follow the instructions on how to install the Rails Redmine PM Software (available here) and are using Apache with Passenger (REE), you need to delete the .htaccess file that is kept in RAILS_ROOT/public directory. Otherwise you'll see a 404 page n...

When you use validations in Rails, db column names are used as 'keys' for error messages. This is usually the preferred way to go about it because this maps nicely to the form fields. However, if you use a virtual attribute this may not be the case. For e...

The best place to keep application constants which are environment specific is in config/environments directory. For instance... # in RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/development.rb APP_DOMAIN = "localhost" # in RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/production.rb...

You can download it here http://github.com/suitmymind/acts-as-taggable-on-steroids as well as read usage info (which is for the most part reprinted here). ./script/plugin install http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids ....

Here is how to install a Rails application out of a subdirectory (rather than as a subdomain) with the Apache web server(Apache2). In this example I'm going to use my own blog which is a Wordpress installation and serve a Rails application from the subdir...

Pass a fourth parameter to the mail() function with the header information. <?php $to = "jane@example.com"; $subject = "Hello World!"; $body = "This will be sent from email-addr@example.com"; $headers = "From: email-addr@example.com\r\nX-Mailer: php";...

Quick and dirty way to grab the users status messages without having to go through the twitter api (not having to authenticate that is). You can grab the RSS feed and indicate the number of statuses returned with the count param. I wrote this function for...

My friend Andy made this 3D rendering of me using LIDAR (Laser Detection and Ranging). In the first image you can see me holding up my hand along with a number of file cabinets. The cube in the center is a table used to calibrate the device. In this sh...

I came across an awesome tool this morning. Priit Haamer has chunked Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and some of YUI documentation into native Mac OS X dictionary binaries. This lets you search those API docs from Spotlight, TextMate, any application that uses the...

Here is my first data visualization. I used the Processing programming language and an SVG map of the United States. ...

These aren't all of them, but I think they are some of the most useful. # making a directory in another directory that doesn't yet exist... FileUtils.mkdir_p '/path/to/your/directory/that/doesnt/exist/yet' # recursively remove a directory and the conten...

There must be a better way to do the following with PrototypeJS. I want to loop over nested links inside of table td cells and apply a class to the row that the link is in when the link is clicked. If a user clicks on another link the class will be remov...

I usually change some of the default settings when I use the Paperclip plugin. For most of my projects I don't like having separate directories for each image that is uploaded. I prefer, in this instance, to put avatars of different sizes together under o...

Link_to_function syntax for Haml template. Notice the "|" pipe which will allow for new lines in your code. = link_to_function( "Add Line Item") | {|page| page.insert_html :bottom, :invoice_line_items, | :partial => "line_item", :locals=>{:line_item=...

import zlib regular_string = 'this is my string' compressed_string = zlib.compress(regular_string) decompressed_string = zlib.decompress(compressed_string) print compressed_string print decompressed_string

I followed the instructions from here http://arvinderkang.com/2009/09/01/installing-scala-on-snow-leopard/ but I used version 2.7.6 (rather than .5) I installed scala under /usr/local/scala so I had to include it to my path. Type vim .bash_profile expor...

Ruby is beautiful @posts = if true Post.all else [] end Simply elegant!

Check it out http://sinatra.seanbehan.com/ This assumes Apache2 and the Phusion Passenger module have already been installed. If not you can get up to speed w/ this resource http://seanbehan.com/ruby-on-rails/new-ubuntu-slice-apache-mysql-php-ruby-on-rail...

I normally install postfix for my MTA. However, I've never really used sendmail so I'd decide to give it a whirl for a new application I'm working on. I don't use it for anything but handling the mail that the application needs to send out, like new user ...

Looks like there is a problem with using the attr_accessor method with datetime form fields http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/8983 In Rails 2.3.2, for me at least, the problem seems to be popping up again. While trying to process a date for credit card v...

You might use the attr_accessible method to create getters and setters for a class that has attributes which don't map directly to corresponding fields in a database. For example let's take the scenario where you are processing a credit card transaction. ...

If you want to get version information about a gem the easiest way to do it is with this command gem list For example gem list activemerchant will output the activemerchant versions I have installed. You can pass only part of the name like gem list ...

If you create a module in the lib/ directory of your Rails application you won't have access to those methods in your views. If you don't want to put those methods in a helper file, you need to add a method to your module that makes them available for you...

There is a helper method for handling the obfuscation of email addresses in Rails. mail_to "me@domain.com", "My email", :encode => "hex" # => My email If you want to then extract an email address(or all email addresses) from a block of text here is the...

If you run into problems using ActionMailer > 2.2, Postfix and OpenSSL while sending mail from your application, try changing the following: vim /etc/postfix/main.cf Change smtpd_use_tls=yes to smtpd_use_tls=no OpenSSL support with Postfix does ...

I've got some pages that are cached using their permalinks on the filesystem, such as http://example.com/about-us.html which will need to map to RAILS_ROOT/public/about-us.html ... The issue I have is that I use a namespace for the admin area and the cont...

In your environment.rb file turn off timestamped migrations like so: config.active_record.timestamped_migrations = false

Sample Ruby on Rails database config file for connecting to mysql. production: adapter: mysql encoding: utf8 reconnect: false database: db_production pool: 5 username: db_user password: db_password #socket: /tmp/mysql.sock #this may vary ...

TinyMCE is a nice little WYSIWYG for text processing online. It uses iFrames and Javascript callbacks to manipulate textarea form fields. Using it with Rails can be somewhat problematic if you want to set up an observer on a field that TinyMCE is managing...

How to validate uniqueness in a :has_many :through relationship with Ruby on Rails. You'll need three models in this example List, Subscriber and ListSubscriber. A list has many subscribers and a subscriber has many lists. Simple enough. Running the follo...

super easy gem install passenger passenger-install-apache2-module will walk you through the install and remember to copy paths to your apache config file. for passenger i kept it in mods-available/passenger.conf and then linked it to mods-enabled ln -s...