http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog Jamie Flournoy's Software Development Blog Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:36:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Argh! I spent about 5 hours yesterday troubleshooting a failed Ubuntu Jaunty -> Karmic (9.04->9.10) upgrade. It worked fine until I rebooted and then failed to boot. Here's how I fixed it. It failed to boot, saying this: One or more mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted / : waiting for ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2010/02/07/karmic-on-xen-with-bad-etcfstab-pain/ Once again Ubuntu Linux proves itself to be easy to upgrade. Going from 9.04 to 9.10 (one release newer, since their numbering is bsaed on dates) was easy, but included the standard sprinkling of manual re-customization that I've come to expect from Debian based systems. I did the Network Upgrade for ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2010/02/06/ubuntu-910-jaunty-jackalope-upgrade-notes/ Rails provides some flexible and fairly short controller methods for responding with an HTTP error code. Given that controllers are complicated enough by nature, I'm always looking for ways to DRY them up and make the code easy to understand. So here are some controller methods that make it really ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/07/27/tidier-http-error-responses-in-rails-controllers/ Rails controllers can get out of hand if you're not very careful. Skinny Controller Fat Model is a great start. But what about handling errors? Isn't it enough to just let Rails catch your exception and show a 500 Server Error page? No, it's not. Falling back on 500 Server Error ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/07/27/proper-error-handling-in-rails-controllers/ I had some problems with a view in a Rails app that was conditionally hiding a Google Map that was generated using the YM4R plugin. I don't usually test views in unit tests, and this logic depended on a particular situation with the data behind the view, so I decided ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/07/27/a-cucumber-step-to-test-for-a-ym4r-google-map/ I'm working on a Rails app that uses the ym4r_gm plugin, getting Google to do the geocoding for Thentic. I liked the idea of stubbing the web service call, because all those calls to an external service add up to over 20 seconds of test suite run time(!). That's almost ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/07/23/fancier-stubbing-of-geokit-for-rails-unit-tests/ I'm at WordCamp San Francisco today and decided that running a year old version of WordPress (on a year old version of Ubuntu Linux) was undesirable. So, with the confidence that comes from many relatively easy Ubuntu OS upgrades, I charged ahead. For (I think) the second time ever, things ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/05/30/ubuntu-jaunty-jackalope-upgrade-notes/ I just did this yesterday; you can pretty much just follow my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide. The differences are: When you get to the "More Minimizing" section, yum -C grouplist will show a package called "Yum Utilities" which you probably want to leave installed. The Deployment_Guide-en-US file is not there so ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/05/30/centos-53-minimal-vps-install-guide/ Now that I've worked in a team that really was doing XP (except for our Lack Of Onsite Customer shortcoming) I can say that it works pretty well, but only to the extent that you do all of the practices together. Of course, that's what the XP folks said from ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/05/30/xp-experiences-conclusion/ Pair Programming is for 100% of production code, not 100% of your workday Pair Programming is intense, mentally and physically. You need to take breaks, stretch, walk around, and hopefully go outside for sunshine and fresh air. Even so, 8 hours of solid pair programming is a very tiring day. That ... http://www.pervasivecode.com/blog/2009/05/30/xp-experiences-part-5-of-5/