How to generate a Rails-compatible query string

From Rails 3.0.9, there is a method Hash#to_query that will turn a Hash into a query string:

>> {:a => "a", :b => ["c", "d", "e"]}.to_query
=> "a=a&b%5B%5D=c&b%5B%5D=d&b%5B%5D=e"
>> CGI.unescape _
=> "a=a&b[]=c&b[]=d&b[]=e"

If you're on the browser side, you can serialize nestd objects to query strings using jQuery's $.param.

Geordi 1.3 released

Changes:

  • Geordi is now (partially) tested with Cucumber. Yay!
  • geordi cucumber supports a new @solo tag. Scenarios tagged with @solo will be excluded from parallel runs, and run sequentially in a second run
  • Support for Capistrano 2 AND 3 (will deploy without :migrations on Capistrano 3)
  • Now requires a .firefox-version file to set up a test firefox. By default now uses the system Firefox/a test Chrome/whatever and doesn't print warnings any more.
  • geordi deploy --no-migrations (aliased -M): Deploy with `cap ...

ActiveRecord meets database views with scenic

Using Scenic, you can bring the power of SQL views to your Rails application without having to switch your schema format to SQL. Scenic provides a convention for versioning views that keeps your migration history consistent and reversible and avoids having to duplicate SQL strings across migrations. As an added bonus, you define the structure of your view in a SQL file, meaning you get full SQL syntax highlighting in the editor of your choice and can easily test your SQL in the database console during development.

[https://robots.thoughtb...

Marvel | Elastic

Dashboard (Marvel Kibana) and query tool (Marvel Sense) for Elasticsearch.

Once installed you can access Kibana and Sense at these local URLs:

bash: print columns / a table

Ever wondered how you can create a simple table output in bash? You can use the tool column for creating a simple table output.

Column gives you the possibility to indent text accurate to the same level. Pipe output to column -t (maybe configure the delimeter with -s) and see the magic happening.

detailed example

I needed to separate a list of databases and their corresponding size with a pipe symbol: |
Here is a example list.txt:

DB	Size_in_MB
foobar	11011.2
barfoo	4582.9
donkey	4220.8
shoryuken	555.9
hadouken	220.0
k...

Linux Performance Analysis in 60,000 Milliseconds

You login to a Linux server with a performance issue: what do you check in the first minute?

uptime
dmesg | tail
vmstat 1
mpstat -P ALL 1
pidstat 1
iostat -xz 1
free -m
sar -n DEV 1
sar -n TCP,ETCP 1
top

Also see:

PostgreSQL: Show size of all databases

Use this:

SELECT pg_database.datname as "database_name", pg_database_size(pg_database.datname)/1024/1024 AS size_in_mb FROM pg_database ORDER by size_in_mb DESC;

Want to see database sizes in MySQL ?

How to query PostgreSQL's json fields from Rails

PostgreSQL offers a really handy field type: json. You can store any JSON there, in any structure.

While its flexibility is great, there is no syntactic sugar in Rails yet. Thus, you need to manually query the database.

Demo

# Given a Task model with 'details' json column
Task.where("details->>'key' = ?", "value") # matches where 'details' contains "key":"value"
Task.where("details->>'{a,b}' = ?", "value") # matches where 'details' contains "a":{"b":"value"}
Task.where("details->'a'->>'b' = ?", "value") # same as above, but vi...

rack-mini-profiler - the Secret Weapon of Ruby and Rails Speed

rack-mini-profiler is a powerful Swiss army knife for Rack app performance. Measure SQL queries, memory allocation and CPU time.

This should probably not be loaded in production (the article recommends otherwise), but this looks like a useful tool.

Use jQuery's selector engine on vanilla DOM nodes

There are cases when you need to select DOM elements without jQuery, such as:

  • when jQuery is not available
  • when your code is is extremely performance-sensitive
  • when you want to operate on an entire HTML document (which is hard to represent as a jQuery collection).

To select descendants of a vanilla DOM element (i.e. not a jQuery collection), one option is to use your browser's native querySelector and [querySelectorAll](https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/We...

MySQL/MariaDB: Hide all sleeping processes in processlist

If you have many connections to your MySQL or MariaDB (as we have) you might want to filter the list you see when running a SHOW PROCESSLIST. To hide all sleeping processes, you can simply use grep as your pager:

\P grep -v "| Sleep"

There is an more advanced way by querying the information_schema database: Show MySQL process list without sleeping connections

CSS: Select elements that contain another selector

CSS4 comes with :has. E.g. h1:has(b) would select all <h1> tags that contain a <b> tag.

This is implemented in no browser but the jQuery query engine already supports it as a custom extension.

Preconnect, Prefetch, Prerender ...

A very informative and interesting presentation about browsing performance, looking at efforts Google Chrome takes to increase it.

From those slides

There is a bunch of interesting pages in Chrome:

  • chrome://dns - List of prefetched DNS
  • chrome://predictors/ - Chrome knows where you'll go

Preconnect

With <link rel="preconnect" href="https://the-domain.com"> in an HTML head, you give the browser an early hint that it will need to access the mentioned domain. By setting up the connection in advance, page load performance gets im...

Case Study: Analyzing Web Font Performance

Table of contents of the linked article:

What are Web Fonts?

  • Advantages of Web Fonts
  • Disadvantages of Web Fonts
    • Fallback Fonts
    • CSS3 @font Declaration Example
    • Fallback Font Example
    • Render Blocking and Critical Rendering Path
    • FOIT

Optimizing Web Font Delivery Further

  • Prioritize Based On Browser Support
  • Choose Only Styles You Need
  • Character Sets
  • Host Fonts Locally or Prefetch
  • Store in LocalStorage with Base64 Encoding
  • Another Method

Web Font Pe...

Test your application's e-mail spam scoring with mail-tester.com

You can use mail-tester.com to check your application's e-mails for issues that might cause e-mails to be classified as spam.

They provide a one-time e-mail addresses that you can use to sign up etc. You can then check for scoring results of SpamAssassin and other potential issues.
You don't need to hit 10/10. Something around 9/10 is perfectly fine.

Note:

  • For password-protected staging sites you will get an error for links that can not be resolved. This is fine, simply check production once available.
  • ...

get haproxy stats/informations via socat

You can configure a stat socket for haproxy in the global section of the configuration file:

global
  daemon
  maxconn 999
  user foobar
  stats socket /var/run/haproxy.stat  # this is the line you want to configure

You need socat to query data from this socket.

After installing socat and reconfiguring haproxy you can use this socket to query data from it:

  • show informations like haproxy version, PID, current connections, session rates, tasks, etc..

    echo "show info" | socat unix-connect:/var/run/haproxy.stat stdio
    

...

jQuery: How to attach an event handler only once

With "attaching an event handler once" you possibly mean one of these two things:

Register a function for an event, and discard it once that event has happened

Use one instead of on.

$(element).one('eventName', function() { ... });

It has the same API has on.

When code is run multiple times that registers a function for an event, do that only once

With jQuery, you can de-register callbacks. You can use that to achieve registering a function only once.

function myAction() { ... }; // defined somewhere globally o...

Lazy-loading images

Note

This card does not reflect the current state of lazy loading technologies. The native lazy attribute could be used, which is supported by all major browsers since 2022.

Since images are magnitudes larger in file size than text (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is, loading the images of a large web page takes a significant amount of the total load time. When your internet connection is good, this is usually not an issue. However, users with limited bandwidth (i.e. on mobile) need to mine their data budget...

Ruby: How to update all values of a Hash

There are many solutions, but a very concise one is this:

hash.merge!(hash) do |key, old_value, new_value|
  # Return something
end

The block of merge! will be called whenever a key in the argument hash already exists in the base hash. Since hash is updated with itself, each key will conflict and thus allow you to modify the value of each key to whatever you like (by returning old_value you'd get the behavior of Rails' reverse_merge!, by re...

How to split up a git commit

Quick steps

  1. git rebase -i -> mark your commit with edit
  2. git reset HEAD~ (remove the marked commit, but keep its changes)
  3. Make several commits (optionally setting the previous author manually)
  4. git rebase --continue

Detailed instructions

Basically, you will review the last n commits and stop at the splittable commit. Then you'll undo that commit and put its changes into new commits at your liking.

  1. Review commits (rebase)

    git rebase -i HEAD~3
    # or
    git rebase -i origin/master
    

    ...

PostgreSQL: Expanded display and other command line features

One useful postgres command I stumbled upon recently was \x. It gives you an expanded display which allows you to actually read the results of your select * from queries. The link below describes a few more useful techniques and commands.

Test downstream bandwidth of Internet connection

You want to test your 1GE or 10GE internet uplink? We needed to ensure we have full 10GE to the backbone for a customer project.

Using netcat

To test whether we can achieve the bandwidth internally, you can use netcat and dd like this:

On your first server: nc -v -l 55333 > /dev/null
On your second server: dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024K count=5000 | nc -v $remote_ip 55333

You should see some output like this:

user@xxx:~ % dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024K count=5000 | nc -v removed 55333
Connection to 91.250.95.249 55333 port [...

How to remove properties of ActiveRecord scopes

When dealing with AR scopes, you can remove conditions, order, etc by using the unscope method.

It is available on Rails 4+.


Examples

Consider an exemplary User class as follows. For the examples below, we will use a scope that applies all its constraints.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :active, -> { where(locked: false) }
  scope :admins, -> { where(role: 'admin') }
  scope :ordered, -> { order(:name) }
end

users = User.active.admins.ordered

^
SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "use...

A case for Redactor

Redactor is yet another WYSIWYG editor. It definitely has its weak points, but I want to point out that it has clear strengths, too.

Pro

  • Simple and beautiful interface.
  • Outstandingly organized source code. Have never seen a JS library that was this structured.
  • Clear, comprehensive and searchable API documentation. Filled with code examples.
  • Easily customizable: specify toolbar buttons, pass various callbacks, etc.
  • Features a collection of great [plugins](ht...