Ruby on Rails

Adam — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:04:32 +0000

We at Deft Flux have been using Ruby on Rails for a new web site. We are developing a web site that will help inspectors of homes and businesses do their jobs better and easier. The site will automate the communications between the inspection requesters, the inspection managers, and the inspectors and make information transfer reliable. But back to Ruby on Rails. After using the Ruby language and the Rails framework for a couple of months now, we are in love. The Ruby language is terse; it is powerful. What else could you ask for? The Rails framework makes it easy tie your object oriented application into your relational database of choice. Moreover, Rails automates your database migrations when you upgrade your application so that you don’t accidentally bollix things.

We understand that some commercial languages (e.g. .NET and ColdFusion) and PHP are implementing frameworks like Rails. We are stoked that Ruby on Rails is amongst the pioneers and that the power of the language makes it a pleasure to use.

Gnu For Windows

Adam — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:26:39 +0000

We here at Deft Flux have always preferred Unix style operating systems and commands to Microsoft. The problem was that our clients always use Microsoft operating systems and until recently, it was always too much of a hassle to get gnu utilities up and running on a Microsoft workstation, especially when you’re moving to a new one every few months. Well, since the good folks at gnu started compiling programs for windows and providing installation programs (to cover dependancies), we decided every workstation needs gnu utilities. First, we install gvim because it is the best text editor ever written. Then we install grep, core utilities, and finally sed. Thus we have assembled, on a Microsoft workstation, a group of what are arguably the most useful programs ever written, pound for pound.

Now when you are using gvim, you are editing files faster than ever. But when you are using grep and sed and so on, you get a request to remove commas from the names of 20,000 files and you say “with pleasure.”dir /b | grep , | \ sed -e "s/^.*/\d034&\d034 /;h" -e "s/,/_/;x" \ -e "s/^.*/mv &/;G" -e "s/\n//"

We used dir at the beginning because it runs faster than ls in a Windows directory with 20,000 files. One could just as easily use ls.
Even though we could have done the same thing with sed, we used grep just to take away one sed command.
We broke the sed commands into pieces because we were having problems with how Windows was passing arguments to sed. This also makes the line [slightly] more readable.
The sed edits operate on this wise:
- Add quotation marks to the beginning and the end of the file name.
- Save the resulting string in a buffer (clipboard).
- Replace commas in the file name with underscores.
- Exchange the fixed file name with the buffer. Now we’re working with the original file name.
- Add the mv command before the original file name.
- Paste the fixed filename after the mv and original file name.

Redirect this output to a file and you have a script to remove all of those pesky commas. Sweet? We think so.

Deft Flux » Open Source

Ruby on Rails

Gnu For Windows