geeksomnia

Nice title, right? Original. And hilarious.

So Rails is officially on GitHub. This is great if you’re a contributor: No more tracking unofficial repositiories (or maintaining your own), keeping backlogs of patches, or any of the million other frustrations that come along with not having the keys to the kingdom. Get over there, fork Rails, and integrate your awesome feature hotness!

Here’s how I’m tracking the Rails repository:

First, I forked rails/rails on GitHub. No GitHub account? They’re out of beta, you know.

git clone git@github.com:yournick/rails.git

git remote add upstream git://github.com/rails/rails.git

git fetch upstream

git checkout -b upstream upstream/master

Now I have my own forked master, from which I can branch features as I work on ‘em, plus I have an upstream branch, which tracks the Almighty Official Rails Tree. I can pull on the upstream branch and easily merge it into my forked master.

One quick note: I have branch.autosetupmerge set in my global configuration, which means that my upstream branch will automatically track changes. A little Google work should tell you whether you need to add --track to your incantations.

Have a different method for tracking? Think this is dumb? Hit the comments. I’ll update this article if a generally acclaimed Better Way emerges.

Love defaults write? Check it out.

Thanks to Diego Algorta Casamayou, the foxy fixtures plugin for 1.2.x now supports PostgreSQL.

I’m trying out a few kinda hairy directory reorganizations in the Rails source tree, and it’s madness trying to track them with patches. Until I set up a reasonable git server, I’ve half-assed a public repository here:

http://git.geeksomnia.com/rails

Check out the activerecord/test subdirectory in the ar-test-cleanup branch if you’re interested in seeing what I’m trying out.

GChart wraps Google’s Chart API with a friendly Ruby interface. This release doesn’t add any significant features (though :label is now :legend in all option sets), but it refactors the internals quite a bit. Enjoy.

Looks like I’m not the only one that’s tired of munging ENV when I pass parameters to rake tasks. Along with a handful of other fixes, Rake 0.8.0 added the ability to pass parameters to your tasks without mucking with environment variables.

What used to be:

# rake invoke COMMAND=foo
task :invoke do
  puts "Invoking #{ENV['COMMAND']}
end

Can become:

# rake invoke[foo]
task :invoke, :command do |task, args|
  puts "Invoking #{args[:command]}"
end

If your task has prerequisites, they come after the parameter names in the declaration:

task :invoke, :command => :prerequisite do |task, args|
  # ...
end

Looks like the args are comma-separated and purely positional, no named or default arguments. It’s possible that there’s a better way to access argument values than this, too: I haven’t run across any documentation yet.

I’ve posted a tiny update to Greedy, a little utility that makes it easy to subscribe to feeds with Google Reader via Safari’s “RSS” button. Recent Google Reader changes switched some URL’s around, which broke the world.

Download the new release. Installation is a drag-and-drop to your Applications folder. If you haven’t used Greedy before, just set it as your “Default RSS Reader” in Safari’s preferences.

The Foxy Fixtures plugin for 1.2.x has been updated to match the final features from Rails 2.0. If you can get your fixtures to work with the plugin, they should be just ducky when you upgrade. Enjoy!

GChart wraps Google’s Chart API with a friendly Ruby interface. This initial release is pretty bare, but it works! I hope to support the rest of the API’s features soon, but patches (and bugs, and feature requests) are always welcome. Enjoy.