Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Dave Thomas’ testing library (thrown in github)

Dave recently blogged a very cool little test framework he whipped up. Its under 100 lines of code and he says he definitely does not plan on supporting it publicly.
At the very least I intend on playing with it and incorporating some of the ideas, so I put it up on github. [...]

Staging Environments in Rails

(photo @ flickr)
Most Rails apps that grow beyond the “toy” or “small” stage benefit greatly from the addition of a staging environment. Staging is where you deploy to flush out integration issues, to demo new features to users and clients, and generally put the app through its paces in a “production-like” environment before [...]

Tarantula, Rails super-fuzzer, released

Stu has finally released Tarantula over on the main Relevance blog. Tarantula is probably the most exciting open source release Relevance has put out since I've joined the company about half a year ago. It basically will crawl your app intelligently, try putting garbage into forms and query params, and give you a [...]

Learn Git 10 Different Ways

No particular order - things near the top just happen to be what I've had time to look into so far.

Git-svn crash course
FLOSS Weekly #19 - Interview with Junio Hamano, maintainer of Git
Git tutorial
Learning git-svn in 5 minutes
Scott Chacon’s Git with Rails screencast
Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
Tech Talk: Randal Schwartz on Git
Using Git without [...]

Productivity Talk abstract and resources

Thanks to everyone who came out to Raleigh.rb last night for my talk. You can hear the talk (mp3 ~25 mb) thanks to Matthew Bass. The sound quality is decent considering it was just recording right into his macbook.
I've posted more details from the talk, the abstract, and references (books, tools, etc) at [...]

I Can Has Productivity?

I'll be speaking at Raleigh.rb tomorrow on Productivity, Ruby, and how to get more stuff done. Spend more time programming and less time reading about programming (or reading PerezHilton, if thats your poison).
If you are in the area you should come out and say hi. Productivity is serious business.

[ANN] brain_buster 0.8.0 released

I'm happy to release version 0.8.0 of BrainBuster.
This is a long overdue release. I've removed all deprecated code, updated for Rails 2.0, improved specs considerably, and cleaned up the api and views.
Because of the way the filter chain is handled in Rails 2.0, you will now have to handle a captcha failure [...]

Beware the default nginx config - old IE6 hates gzip

I had some issues with an application deployed to EngineYard recently, using their standard nginx config with a few mongrels behind it. The issue was only happening with IE6, and only happening intermittently. And of course, I could not reproduce it locally. After some fun-filled research and gotomeeting’s with folks who saw [...]

autotest without the unit_diff

Ever since getting ZenTest 3.9.1, it seems unit-diff is always turned on. That means your output in autotest is noiser, and I prefer the normal output from my spec or test framework. Anyways, I'm not sure what changed since earlier versions of autotest (maybe the rails command used to override the command string?), [...]

multi_rails 0.0.5 released

multi_rails version 0.0.5 has been released!

http://multi-rails.rubyforge.org/

MultiRails
MultiRails lets you test your Rails plugin or app against many versions of Rails in one sweep.
DESCRIPTION:
MultiRails allows easy testing against multiple versions of Rails for your Rails specific gem or plugin. It also has tentative support testing Rails applications against multiple versions of Rails.
Use MultiRails to hook in [...]