Contest Link

Link to the contest at MCP Actions.

Enjoy

Most of this is pretty much straight from the wiki pages on Devise, but it’s more fun with PowerPoint.

Enjoy.

Doing a little digging I found how nested_form handles various builders.

So getting to the how to:

In your Gemfile add:

gem 'twitter_bootstrap_form_for'
gem 'nested_form', :git => 'git://github.com/ryanb/nested_form.git'

After doing a bundle install to get the code. We are using the HEAD version of nested_form because support for other builders is not in the released version yet.

Now we need an initializer to add some methods.

require 'nested_form/builder_mixin'

module NestedForm
  begin
    require 'twitter_bootstrap_form_for'
    class TwitterBootstrapBuilder < ::TwitterBootstrapFormFor::FormBuilder
      include ::NestedForm::BuilderMixin
    end
  rescue LoadError
  end
  
  module ViewHelper
    if defined?(TwitterBootstrapBuilder)
      def bootstrap_nested_form_for(*args, &block)
        options = args.extract_options!.reverse_merge(:builder => NestedForm::TwitterBootstrapBuilder)
        form_for(*(args << options), &block) << after_nested_form_callbacks
      end
    end
  end
  
end

Now when you want to use nested_form and the twitter_bootstrap_form_for syntax you can by using
bootstrap_nested_form_for where you would normally use form_for.

See the documentation for nested_form and for twitter_bootstrap_form_for for details on how those libraries work.

Anyway after getting through a whole bunch of other performance issues, I turned my attention to setting up a Content Delivery Network(CDN). You see on Heroku hosting you only get as many front ends as you want to pay for. While you might think these work like passenger processes hosting up dynamic content, you would only be partly correct. The Heroku web dyno not only serves up Rails content, but also all the static content. This means if you page has a bunch of images, a css file and some javascript, you are loading up that dyno pretty heavily.

Enter the CDN. With a CDN you put all your content on a separate host. In this case I used Amazons CDN platform called CloudFront. Since we were already using S3 storage for attachments, something that is a must on Heroku anyway, setting up CloudFront was pretty easy. You go into the CloudFront configuration and setup a new distribution. In setting up the distribution the only thing you really need to set is the Origin. With Heroku and Rails 3.1, you want to set the origin to the URL of your website. CloudFront will pull files from there on demand as they are requested and cache them in it’s system.

Back to your Rails 3.1 distribution. All that is needed is the following line in your Rails 3.1 production.rb environment file:

config.action_controller.asset_host = "xxxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net"

Just put in your CloudFront distributioni URL and deploy. If you have already setup your Assets management, everything else just works.

Because Rails 3.1 generates unique filenames for each change in the files, you don’t have to worry about files going stale on the CDN, and with the Origin pointing back to your site, you don’t even have to upload the files there.

The performance improvement I saw was astounding. Besides needing less web dynos for performance, the amazon CDN is also better at scaling requests up. I saw numbers as high as 350 requests per second with concurrency of 100 with little delay at that level.

But tonights post is about my second attempt to give 3.2 a spin. I have a small play project that has a ways to go yet, but also has some decent functionality already in. I wanted to give the rails 3.2 a spin there thinking it was less complex than my earlier project.

Once I got past a bad download of gem files (thanks RVM for making it easy to cleanup these messes), I got the app to the point I thought it would run. BLAM doesn’t even get out of the gate. Got the error below:

/Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_pool.rb:374:in `retrieve_connection': ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished (ActiveRecord::ConnectionNotEstablished)
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:168:in `retrieve_connection'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/connection_specification.rb:142:in `connection'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/model_schema.rb:219:in `table_exists?'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/base.rb:413:in `inspect'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:190:in `inspect'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:190:in `start'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:352:in `block in compile'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:351:in `each'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:351:in `compile'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:381:in `__define_runner'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:426:in `block in __update_callbacks'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:423:in `each'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:423:in `__update_callbacks'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/callbacks.rb:492:in `set_callback'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activemodel-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_model/validations.rb:139:in `validate'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activemodel-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_model/validations/with.rb:95:in `block in validates_with'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activemodel-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_model/validations/with.rb:83:in `each'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activemodel-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_model/validations/with.rb:83:in `validates_with'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activerecord-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_record/validations/uniqueness.rb:176:in `validates_uniqueness_of'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/acts-as-taggable-on-2.2.1/lib/acts_as_taggable_on/tag.rb:17:in `<class:Tag>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/acts-as-taggable-on-2.2.1/lib/acts_as_taggable_on/tag.rb:2:in `<module:ActsAsTaggableOn>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/acts-as-taggable-on-2.2.1/lib/acts_as_taggable_on/tag.rb:1:in `<top (required)>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `block in require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:236:in `load_dependency'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/activesupport-3.2.0.rc1/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:251:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/acts-as-taggable-on-2.2.1/lib/acts-as-taggable-on.rb:19:in `<top (required)>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:68:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:68:in `block (2 levels) in require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:66:in `each'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:66:in `block in require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:55:in `each'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:55:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/bundler-1.0.21/lib/bundler.rb:122:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/work/FindItNearby/config/application.rb:9:in `<top (required)>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/railties-3.2.0.rc1/lib/rails/commands.rb:53:in `require'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/railties-3.2.0.rc1/lib/rails/commands.rb:53:in `block in <top (required)>'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/railties-3.2.0.rc1/lib/rails/commands.rb:50:in `tap'
  from /Users/bleeper/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/railties-3.2.0.rc1/lib/rails/commands.rb:50:in `<top (required)>'
  from script/rails:6:in `require'
  from script/rails:6:in `<main>'

Some careful googling led me to this ticket in acts_as_taggable_on. Now, the developer there seems to have his head in the sand a bit, waiting to address what seems to be a significant change needed in the gem until after GA of rails 3.2. This is rails after all, and I am not the only one looking ahead thinking that this release will be GA by the time I go live, so I should start getting used to it now. Alas I guess if I want to use the main gem and not a fork (already one out there that may work), I will just have to wait. Not really winning me over on the future of this gem.

Now I know this is open source and all and it is likely this guys side project, but if you are going to play in rails and this is a pretty popular gem, you have to stay on top of things.

In my case I am waiting out a big backlog, but have also switched my photo storage over to SmugMug for newer stuff anyway. I have not found any storage or throttling limits there “yet”, so I will hold on a review of their services for now until I have my entire photo collection backed up there. They do have storage options for non photo files which RAW files are considered at a cost per GB, but I have not researched that fully.

While the throttling is a pain, the price point is still very good compared to what you would pay for any other cloud storage of more than 200GB. It is just something that would be nice to know before signing up.

Personally, I have seen some ups and downs in my career to be sure. And unfortunately you do have to be willing to relocate sometimes. If you are in a non-technical area though there are many remote opportunities out there. The company I work for is small and is a prime example of some of the best opportunities out there. We are actually in need of almost 10 software engineers and are not sure how we are going to get them. That’s a pretty amazing statement to make when unemployment is almost 10% nationally, but it’s true. We put out job offerings and we get a trickle of resumes. We had some down time recently, but management was committed to the development team and didn’t let anyone from that team go. We now have a number of contracts lined up and will likely have solid work for years to come.

As for skills, I am currently using Ruby on Rails and seeing that language come into very high demand. It points to always looking ahead. Back when I was learning Rails my co-workers that were doing Java were afraid I think to tackle it. Not because it was difficult, but because they thought they would not be as marketable. Quite the opposite has happened. When I did test the waters recently I found that my experience in Rails was going to get me salaries I could not have imagined a few years ago for non-management positions. Additionally the atitudes of many in the community is one of collaboration and sharing, something that was not always present in the Java community. A real desire of your fellow programmers to see your projects succeed.

So if you are a software engineer and you have some good web based skills, sharpen them up on some Ruby on Rails open source projects. Get some commits accepted. That will go further than any work experience in today’s market. Look at the job boards. If you don’t want to or can’t relocate for whatever reason look at the job boards for those remote opportunities. Not the scammy ones, but there are some jobs out there like this on the major job boards. You may have to look at the startup job boards, they are more likely to have these remote opportunities.

On the side, Onyx Government Services the company I work for is expanding. We are looking to hire in the Washington DC area (very hot market by the way) and in the Colorado Springs area. I just relocated there for a variety of reasons, but one was to tap a market for developers that seemed to be less over extended than the DC market. If you are interested go to the website and send some feedback even if there isn’t a specific job posting.

Thanks

Poll

By major spending cuts I am talking not just domestic programs or cutting foreign aid, those alone really don’t amount to much and many of the domestic programs are very important functions to ensuring the safety and security of the American public.  Pay cuts for federal works can only go so far.  Despite popular opioinion the majority don’t make more than their private sector counterparts and every $30 / hour white collar job cut is a $90 / hour contractor that has to be hired to do the work instead.  Major cuts mean defense programs too.  Social security and Medicare spending are going to have to be addresses in some for too.

Tax increases will likely be across the board from a percentage perspective, but the wealthy of this country have never payed less in taxes since we started collecting taxes.  When Reagan proposed reducing the top end tax bracket they were at 90%.  Today they are around 35%.  Most middle class Americans are at 25% for their last dollar earned, but at 15% for the bulk of their taxable income.

Use the embedded poll to voice your opinion on which way we should go.

I have found that the internet capability varies wildly and not necessarily related to signal strength or number of bars. I originally thought that the issue was related to the device, however, after trading devices twice and using 3 different units it is definatly something with the network. I will update areas I have been and how good the reception was in that area below.

Summary

I have found the device to be frustrating at best, non functional at worst. I am not sure that there are really other options for what I am trying to do with this device. I am working mostly in outlying areas with sometimes fringe coverage. I will update things if I get into an area that has good 4G coverage.

• Salt Fork State Park near Cambridge OH. Coverage was 3 to 4 bars. Bandwidth was very spotty, would work for a few hours then be totally dead for 30 min to a few hours. Didn’t work very well in town either. Verizon store was actually one of the worst places.
• Columbus IN. about 10 miles south of town. Coverage was better than OH, but still a bit spotty at times.
• Eureka MO. about 15 miles southwest of Eureka. Coverage was good, still 3G outside of town, but Eureka itself was 4G as well as everything from there into St. Louis. Service was very good on 4G and pretty good on 3G. None of the intermittent issues from other areas

We are currently looking to hire another Rails programmer. We would love to get someone who has some experience with Rails, but will also consider candidates with strong programming backgrounds and a willingness to learn Rails.

For more information about the job and links to apply see: http://www.onyxgs.com