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Making the Rails acts_as_tsearch plugin work with fixtures

acts-as-tsearch is pretty cool, except for the fact that it uses Ruby (app layer) instead of PL/pgSQL (DB layer) to update the tsvectors that are indexed for full text search. That means that fixture data gets inserted without being full text indexed. D’oh!
Here’s some code that changes that.

Bad, Bad Code

I’ve written before about tips for offshoring. One specific thing I said to watch for is the bait-and-switch of talent: during the sales process you’re shown rockstars, but the real code you get is written by clueless newbies. When you set up a project such that you’ve minimized the cost per hour of development, but […]

Rails, Fixtures, the Test DB, and Test::Unit

From what I’ve seen, Rails’ weakest features lie in the way it prepares the test database and test data, and Ruby’s Test::Unit isn’t much better than the awful but ubuiquitous JUnit that Java developers are accustomed to. I set out this week to impose my preferences on Rails in this area, and that took some […]

Rails and the notion of Stupid Databases Being a Good Idea

For the last few days I’ve been struggling to bend Rails to my will regarding the proper way to assure data consistency. Today I made some progress. This builds upon some research I did a few months ago, and hopefully this is a more or less complete solution to the problem of making Rails work […]

Full Text Search refuses to be a black box

Once upon a time, before Google pwn3d internet search, there were several competing definitions for full text search. Altavista more or less gave you results matching the exact strings you gave it, but in a crazy order that made it painful to use. Excite (my favorite back then) used a dictionary to achieve stemming and […]