It goes PING!
If you're like me, you have a bunch of trusty (and rusty) shell scripts that you reach for when doing things like testing a new load balancer.
Enough of that! igp (It goes PING!) is a simple command line utility for testing services with a range of common protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, HTTP/S, LDAP/S and so on.
This is nothing earth shattering I know, but it's nice to have simple cross-platform (since it's ruby) tool that does all the common protocols in one. Thankfully, most of the work has already been done by the net-ping library - igp really just provides a sleek command-line wrapper.
The only dependency is ruby+rubygems. Just:
gem install igpAnd then you are ready to capture traces, for example:
igp my.server.com
# ^ ICMP assumed by default. This is the same as:
igp icmp://my.server.com
igp http://my.insecure.server.com
igp http://my.insecure.server-hiding-on-a-funny-port.com:8080/javascripts/all.js
igp https://my.secure.server.com
igp https://my.secure.server-hiding-on-a-funny-port.com:4443
igp tcp://my.tcp-service.com:9091
igp udp://my.udp-service.com:123
igp ldap://my.insecure.ldap.server.com
igp ldaps://my.secure.ldap.server.com
Blogarhythm: Keep it Up - Snap!
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Multi-tenancy with Rails
RedDotRubyConf 2011 in Singapore is over. It was an amazing event (ryan takes notes so we don't have to - day#1 day#2)
Somehow I managed to cheat my way into a line-up of legendary speakers that included Matz himself. Here are the slides..
I spoke about multi-tenancy - what it is and why it's increasingly relevant for Rails development. It dives a little into four of the many approaches and ends with the challenge: Isn't it about time there was a 'Rails Way'?
Blogarhythm: So Many Ways POP DISASTER
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jQuery UI AddToCalendar update
Thanks to nfarina for a patch to improve compatibility with older IE versions.. jQuery UI AddToCal widget is stepped to 0.1.1 and now listed in the jQuery plugin store.
To recap .. use AddToCal if you want to offer your website visitors the ability to add any events you list or present on your site to their own calendar. It supports Google Calendar, Microsoft Live Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, 30boxes, any iCal or vCalendar compatible desktop application (and you can extend it to support any special calendar software you might be dealing with).
See my previous post that describes how to use it in a bit more detail..
Blogarhythm: Birthday
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Paranoid Yak Shaving
So a few weeks ago I found myself wanting "soft-delete" in a Rails app. Ruby Toolbox is a little long in the tooth on the subject, but after a little more research I discovered xpond's paranoid project that was just what I wanted:
- packaged as a gem, not a plugin
- built for Rails 3 (arel-aware in particular)
- can be selectively applied to your models
All was cool, except at about the same time we updated to Rails 3.0.3 and it broke (as it turned out, due to changes in AREL 2.0.6 internals).
One of the beautiful things about github and the way it's been adopted by the ruby/rails community in particular is that it makes it so damn easy to just dive in and help update code originally contributed by other people. So paranoid needs updating for Rails 3.0.3? No problem - fork it, diagnose the issue and push your fixes back up to github.
But that's also a great recipe for yak shaving ;-)
The fixes are yet to make it into the released gem, but if you desparately need 3.0.3 support you can install from my repo. i.e. in your Gemfile:
gem 'paranoid', '~> 0.0.10', :require => 'paranoid', :git => 'git://github.com/tardate/paranoid'
Blogarhythm: Paranoid (of course - but this is the bluegrass version!)
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