Laurel Fan

There are charts of what Rails migration types (:string, :integer, :boolean, ...) map to mysql types (varchar(255), int(11), tinyint(1)...), but sometimes you want something not on the chart. For example, for string types, you only get varchar and text, but sometimes you want a char. In mysql, accessing tables with fixed length rows is faster than tables with variable length rows (of course the tradeoff is that if your string is actually variable length you can waste space.

It’s surprisingly simple. If Rails doesn’t understand the column type, it’ll pass it straight through to the database. So if you want a char instead of varchar, just replace:

With:

(Of course, this may or may not make your migrations non-portable to another database).

Yes, Rails has a query cache (in addition to the one your database probably has).

I discovered this when trying to debug a problem with a query that should have been giving me random rows from the database. The unit test worked fine, so I didn’t bother testing for randomness in the controller test, since it’s annoying to test for randomness. But of course it didn’t work in real life. It’s kind of ironic to have a bug that the results are not unexpected enough.

Hey, let’s look at the logs:

  Goal Load (0.000656)    SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE g.* FROM goals g ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100 
  CACHE (0.000000)     SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE g.* FROM goals g ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100
  CACHE (0.000000)     SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE g.* FROM goals g ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100

Hmm. So it turns out that Rails/ActiveRecord has its own query cache. It invisibly does what you want, unless you are doing a query that returns random results more than once in a request. The documentation is a bit thin, but it’s easy enough to disable temporarily:

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 def self.random_goals(limit = 100)
      uncached do # disable rails query cache
          Goal.find_by_sql [RANDOM_GOALS_SQL, limit]
      end
  end

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>> 1.year.to_i / 1.day.to_i
=> 365
>> 1.year.to_f / 1.day.to_f
=> 365.25

Which makes quick and dirty calculations like age = (Time.now - birthdate) / 1.year slightly more accurate than one might expect.

I’m in the habit of using little -r for rm and grep. Most examples I see use this, not sure if it’s because it’s one less key to press or if historically -R didn’t work. But this means I’m also in the habit of using -r for chmod, which will print an error message and also make my directory unlistable. So I should probably get in the habit of using -R…

(I tried this on OSX, FreeBSD, and Linux)

How not to spam everyone when testing email sending (assuming I don’t want to just turn off email sending).

mysql> update users set email = concat(email, '.xx') where email not like 'laurel%';

Before:

After:

The web checkin form for Hawaiian Airlines asked me how many surfboards I will be bringing:

Unfortunately I had to click 0.

Too bad this only works in unit tests:

I’ve always liked playing with graphs and representing data, so when we we decided to implement a version of Buster’s Morale-O-Meter for the new 43 Things profile page

I started with gruff, but I wanted something a little more stylized and less techy looking, so I took out all of the axes and hacked it to use numbers as the points. I kind of like how it turned out:

(This isn’t the final version, and the feature isn’t live on 43 Things yet, but it will be “soon”...)

Our apps have a lot of custom sql. A lot of the time it’s easier just to write exactly the sql we want instead of messing around with ActiveRecord. But any time two programming languages run in to each other things can get out of hand, so there are lots of opportunities for refactoring.

Before:

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    NUM_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE = <<-SQL.prettify_sql
        SELECT count(*) FROM listed_items 
        WHERE active = 1 
        AND person_id = ?
        AND ( (completed_on IS NULL 
        AND complete = 0 
        AND give_up = 0 
        AND posted_date > ? 
        AND posted_date < ?)
        OR (completed_on > FROM_UNIXTIME(?) 
        AND completed_on < FROM_UNIXTIME(?) ) )
    SQL

    STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE = <<-SQL.prettify_sql
         SELECT * FROM listed_items
         WHERE active = 1
         AND person_id = ?
         AND ( (completed_on IS NULL
         AND complete = 0
         AND give_up = 0 
         AND posted_date > ?
         AND posted_date < ?)
         OR (completed_on > FROM_UNIXTIME(?)
         AND completed_on < FROM_UNIXTIME(?) ) )
         ORDER BY updated_date DESC
         LIMIT 0, 100
    SQL

    def num_completed_or_started_items_during_range(start_date, stop_date)
        ListedItem.count_by_sql [NUM_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE, self.id, start_date, stop_date, start_date, stop_date]
    end

    def completed_or_started_items_during_range(start_date, stop_date, offset=0, limit=20)
        items = ListedItem.find_by_sql [STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE, self.id, start_date, stop_date, start_date, stop_date]    
        item_to_sort = Hash.new
        items.each do |item| 
            item_to_sort[item.id] = item.completed_on ? Time.at(item.completed_on).to_i : item.posted_date
        end
        items.sort{|a,b| item_to_sort[a.id] <=> item_to_sort[b.id]}.reverse[offset .. (offset + limit - 1)]
    end

What’s wrong with this?

First of all, there are no tests. So first step is to write some. If I were just refactoring, I’d write tests that pass, but the reason I’m in this code is that there’s a bug (long story short, the bug is caused by the fact that a listed_item can have a non-null completed_on but have completed = 0). So I write a failing one that catches the bug too.

The STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE and NUM_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE string constants are almost identical. So when I start changing the strings I realize that I’m going to mess things up if I leave them duplicated like that (even if I do the right thing, change both strings, it’ll be wrong for the moment where I’m moving the cursor 10 lines down), so I stop and factor out the where clause.

The next thing is that I don’t like the way the parameters for the SQL string work. Parameters are repeated: if you look at completed_or_started_items_during_range, the start_date and stop_date parameters are both in there twice. Also, it’s annoying and error prone to keep paging between the string and the methods (I pasted the excerpt together, so it doesn’t look like it here, but this file is arranged so all of the constants are together at the top of the class definition, so there are several pages separating these constants and methods) to remember what the parameters mean. Rails lets me use named bind variables so I can give them names like a real programming language.

Ok, now that I have > :start and < :end instead of > ? and < ?, I’m more comfortable changing that to use the SQL between operator, and it looks a lot nicer (and one line shorter). I realize that between doesn’t quite have the semantics of < and >, but that’s fine with me in this case.

It’s a good thing it’s shorter because I’m going to take a break from refactoring and fix the bug, which involves adding a line. Ok, finally the tests pass.

We’re doing sorting and limiting with ruby. Sometimes it’s faster to do the sorting in ruby because the database is doing something dumb, so I’ll have to keep track of the timings. And sometimes it looks nicer in Ruby if it’s complicated code. But in this case the Ruby code is 5 lines of really dense code (use of the ternary operator and the compact {} form of blocks makes it look like you’re trying to hide something). After staring at it for a while, it’s just doing a coalesce and a normal limit with offset, so doing it in SQL looks nicer to me.

After:

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    WHERE_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE = <<-SQL
        WHERE active = 1 
        AND person_id = :person_id
        AND ( (completed_on IS NULL 
               AND complete = 0 
               AND give_up = 0 
               AND posted_date BETWEEN :start AND :end)
           OR (completed_on BETWEEN FROM_UNIXTIME(:start) AND FROM_UNIXTIME(:end)
               AND complete = 1 ) )
    SQL

    NUM_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE = <<-SQL.prettify_sql
        SELECT count(*) FROM listed_items
        #{WHERE_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE}
    SQL

    STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE = <<-SQL.prettify_sql
        SELECT * FROM listed_items
        #{WHERE_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE}
        ORDER BY COALESCE(completed_on, FROM_UNIXTIME(posted_date)) DESC
        LIMIT :offset, :limit
    SQL

    def num_completed_or_started_items_during_range(start_date, stop_date)
        ListedItem.count_by_sql [NUM_STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE,
                                 {:person_id => self.id,
                                     :start => start_date,
                                     :end => stop_date}]
    end

    def completed_or_started_items_during_range(start_date, stop_date, offset=0, limit=20)
        ListedItem.find_by_sql [STARTED_OR_COMPLETED_ITEMS_DURING_RANGE,
                                {:person_id => self.id,
                                    :start => start_date,
                                    :end => stop_date,
                                    :offset => offset,
                                    :limit => limit}]
    end

Pop quiz: how do you get the month (as a name, not a number) of a Time in Ruby (without looking at the Time#strftime documentation)?

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irb(main):001:0> Time.now.strftime("%a")
=> "Tue"

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irb(main):002:0> Time.now.strftime("%b")
=> "Feb"

That doesn’t look very ruby-like. Aren’t % format strings for C programmers (whoever wrote the code I’m currently refactoring is probably a recovering C programmer. They even use sprintf…)?

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 irb(main):003:0> Time.now.short_month_name
=> "Feb"

I’m sure others have done this already, but I couldn’t find it so I made my own Rails plugin, and stuck it here: http://svn.laurelfan.com/decorated_time/, mostly to see if I could set up an svn repository on dreamhost. The stuff that actually does the work is a total of about 4 lines of code since Ruby nicely lets me reopen the Time class at will.

(speaking of the day of week, I noticed that 1.9 added monday?, tuesday?, etc methods)

One good part of doing a big refactoring is that I get to have fun with emacs.

I found a great step by step tutorial with all the details. But basically, first you get in to dired (directory editing), then mark the files you want to search through, and then do dired-do-query-replace-regexp.

So for example, to replace @params with params in all controllers:

• M-x find-dired
  • Run find in directory: app/controllers
  • Run find (with args): -name '*.rb'
• %m
  • Mark files (regexp): .
• M-x dired-do-query-replace-regexp
  • Query replace in marked files (regexp): @params
  • Query replace @params by: params

Dired is fun stuff like emacs’s other “everything is a buffer!!” things (just like unix’s “everything is a file!!”). I’m not quite emacs-hacker enough to use it as a shell for extended periods of time though.

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    rescue Exception => e
      # other stuff
      raise "#{e.class}: #{e.message}"

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    rescue Exception => e
      # other stuff
      raise

raise without any arguments will reraise the current exception, complete with class, message, and stack trace.

See also Programming Ruby on exceptions.

We found a site that looked like it was stealing our content. Then we go there, and it’s exactly the same site! What are they doing? Are they crawling the site and sucking up all of our pages? Proxying us?

 > dig d****list.com
d****list.com.          1736    IN      A       209.61.175.237

 > dig 43things.com  
43things.com.           86400   IN      A       209.61.175.237

Why would someone do that? Is it some SEO trick to steal our google rank for their domain?

Josh noticed that the domain was registered to someone in China (we don’t think this is a good person trying to get us around the Great Firewall—a test tool we tried showed that 43things.com isn’t blocked). So we decided to cause them some trouble:

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .*d****list.com$
    RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 [R]

Tracking down a memory leak? Here’s a way to find the memory usage of the current process on Ruby:

memory_usage = `ps -o rss= -p #{Process.pid}`.to_i # in kilobytes 

-o rss= asks ps to print only the RSS (Resident Set Size, or physical memory used). You could also use vsz/vsize (virtual memory). The hanging = sign sets the header text to a blank string so you don’t have to filter out the header line.

-p #{Process.pid} limits the ps to only show the current process.

The backticks are kind of hacky, but this cuts down on the piping and grepping. It works on all of the unixes I’ve tried (Linux, FreeBSD, OSX), but of course ps is notoriously nonstandardized.