Coding font roundup

As a followup of the poll about “What coding font do you use?” on Rails Envy, here are the results and a PDF showing all the fonts for comparison:

1. Monaco (37%)
2. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (20%)
3. Consolas (14%)
4. Deja Vu (5%)
5. Inconsolata (4%)
6. Liberation Mono (2%)
7. Pro Font (2%)
8. Courier New (1.5%)
9. Lucida Console (1%)
10. Monospace (1%)

Some old favourites in there, but they seem to be going out of style in favor of the new ones. Consolas is one of the new fonts that ships with Windows Vista (or was it Office 2007?), Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the font Ryan Bates at Railscasts and (I think) Monaco is the default font in Textmate.

Check out the pdf here. I use Consolas ;)

Update: I’ve heard that some users can’t view all the fonts in the PDF, so here’s a PNG of all the pages put together.

First tutorial: Writing a blog in Rails 2.0.2

I’ve just finished my first tutorial, writing a blog in Rails 2.0.2. It’s of course inspired by the great 15 minute blog screencast by DHH, which convinced me to try Rails in the first place. This one is with some new Rails 2 conventions and explanations on why some things work.

Now, without further ado, go and read it:

How to write a blog in Rails 2.0.2 (not quite in 15 minutes)

Comments and criticisms are always welcome, it’s my first tutorial ;)

Conditional fragment caching

We were just wondering if it’s possible to provide a condition to fragment caching, in order to only cache certain fragments when no user is logged in to our site. This is to ensure anonymous users (the majority of visitors), who will see the same page anyway, will get it loaded from cache. People who log in will see their personalized site.

I was unable to find anything on Google about this, so I wrote my own helper. It looks so obvious that I’m probably not the first to write this, but I figured I’d share it anyway:

  def cache_if (condition, name = {}, &block)
    if condition
      cache(name, &block)
    else
      yield
    end
  end

Using this, you can write something like:

<% cache_if @current_user.blank?, 'navigation' do %>
  Navigation content here, including user specific navigation
<% end %>

Loading additional files when starting script/console

I use the Rails console quite a lot, and from a co-worker I had received a .irbrc file that contains a method called ‘log_to’ which enables on-screen query logging in the Rails console. It still required me to call this method every time I started the console though, because even though it’s defined in .irbrc, it cannot be executed from there since it uses Rails specific code (which is not loaded at the time that the .irbrc is loaded.

So, naturally I was wondering whether it is possible to auto-execute any commands while starting script/console. It turns out it isn’t (according to the friendly people on IRC). With the help of madnificent though, I can now do it. He made a small change to rails/railties/lib/commands/console.rb, which will change the behaviour of the console such that it will look in #{RAILS_ROOT}/console_scripts for any additional Ruby files to load.

Please note, for this to work you will need to either freeze rails in your vendor directory, or change your local rails source. As I’m very new to Rails I’m not sure why this kind of functionality is not already in (or perhaps it is but I just could not find it), but I’m hoping it will be picked up somehow ;)

I have also included the script I wanted to load in the first place, I find it quite handy to be able to see what kind of queries my commands are generating.

You can find the files on Pastie and on my webserver (console.rb and enable_sql_logging.rb).

Pretty test output with the Turn gem

Have you ever been annoyed that when you run tests, you only see periods, E’s and F’s; not being able to see what actually went wrong until all the tests were done?

I found this pretty gem last week, thanks to some nice people in #rubyonrails. It’s called Turn, and I am unable to find a repository for it anywhere. What it does, is update your test output as follows:

Without Turn:

Loaded suite
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
Started
........
Finished in 0.339899 seconds.
8 tests, 8 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

With Turn:

Loaded suite
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake/rake_test_loader
CourseInstanceTest

test_truth                                                            PASS
CourseTest

test_truth                                                            PASS
# some output removed here
==============================================================================
pass: 8,  fail: 0,  error: 0
total: 8 tests with 8 assertions in 0.373991 seconds
==============================================================================

This way, you will be notified which tests fail right after it fails, which can save considerable time; you will be able to start fixing it before your test suite is finished (which can take quite some time I’ve noticed). As an added bonus, if you have the ‘facets‘ gem installed, it will even colorize the output.

I’ve made a small modification to the gem which allows you to specify whether or not you want to hide passed tests, since this produces quite a lot more output than the default Test::Unit output. However, I don’t have access to this modification right now, I’ll add it later.

To install:

gem install turn

To enable:

Add this to your test/test_helper.rb:

begin
  require 'turn'
rescue LoadError
  puts 'Install the Turn gem for prettier test output.'
end

First post :)

This is the first post on my blog ;) I have been working with Ruby on Rails for a very short while now, and figured it would be nice to report on the issues I encounter, as well as nifty little gems/plugins I find.

Don’t expect very regular postings as I’m a chaotic person, but I’ll try to put something here every now and then.