http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog BLOGTASTIC! Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:07:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you have a string that looks like: \ and you want it to look like: \\ in ruby, you have to do the following: irb(main):070:0> str = "\\" => "\\" irb(main):071:0> puts str \ => nil irb(main):073:0> puts str.gsub("\\", "\\\\\\\\") \\ => nil In Ruby, you can use perl-style regular expression numbered group references in replacement strings (ie \\1 = the first ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/07/double-escaping-backslashes-in-ruby/ Consider the following irb session: irb(main):001:0> e = Exception.new("Jerk!") => # irb(main):002:0> e.message => "Jerk!" irb(main):003:0> require 'yaml' => true irb(main):004:0> YAML.load(e.to_yaml).message => "Exception" That sucks. Where did the "Jerk!" go? YAML ate it. If you include this code, you can keep your "Jerk!": cpm@juno:~/helpticket-dev/trunk$ cat lib/better_exception_yaml.rb require 'yaml' class Exception def Exception.yaml_new( klass, tag, val ) o ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/07/slightly-better-yamlization-of-ruby-exceptions/ I'm replacing some backgroundrb workers that do long, slow TCP connections with async eventmachine code in one of my Rails webapps. I ran into some problems installing eventmachine 0.7.2 on FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE with no root access, so I'm documenting how I got around these problems. I'm certain this isn't the ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/07/installing-eventmachine-on-older-freebsds/ Today I decided to finally start teaching myself Python. Out of curiosity, I tried the following: >>> class NoneType: ... def __str__(self): ... return "" ... >>> None >>> str(None) 'None' Is it sick that I find these results disappointing? Has Ruby corrupted my mind? A ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/04/my-mind-is-gone/ I just noticed that if you rename or remove a label, filters don't get updated appropriately. For example, let's say that I don't like having MySpace or FaceBook notifications in my inbox, so I create a MySpace label and and FaceBook label and set up filters that archives mail and ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/03/double-you-tee-eff-gmail/ A few weeks ago, I tried implementing ActiveRecord in PHP. What a fool I was. Consider the following: Sadly, User::findAll() returns "SELECT * FROM NOTABLE". I guess in order to implement ActiveRecord in PHP, you need to use some sort of combination of Singleton and Factory patterns? Gross. Add this ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/03/broken-static-methods-in-php-make-me-sad/ Like any good developer, I write code on a development server and then push the code to the production server. (Yay, SVN.) While testing out something, I noticed an odd inconsistency between the two. Consider the following: sock = TCPSocket.new( ip, port ) Fairly simple. When I run it on my test server, ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/02/6-48/ You ever have a programming "Doh!" moment? I had one the other day. You could say I fell face first into a leaky abstraction. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the phrase "leaky abstraction", Joel Spolsky coined it in his classic essay titled "The Law Of Leaky Abstractions". ... http://www.chazmeyers.com/blog/2007/02/leaky-abstractions/