I recently switch from a mod_proxy / thin setup to Phusion Passenger and my application started to do the funniest things and the production.log was full with errors related to memcached.
It seems, that passengers spawn method “smart” isn’t compatible with memcached. Within seconds on a lightly loaded server the cache gets corrupted big time.
I got better results with a newer memcache client (the ruby gem actually), but for that i need to remove the client from the rails vendor lib. Furthermore, under higher load there still where errors.
Only solution is to set the spawn method to conservative like so
RailsSpawnMethod conservative
Problem seems to be known in the Phusion and Rails teams.
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Ruby on Rails I18n infrastructure did a great job to internationalization in Rails applications. Most things work right out of the box.
Daily Fratze is fully internationalized and i wanted to use ordinal day numbers in the English version. Pity, there is no template for strftime that works that way.
As i already hat monkey patched a “t” method to all date and time related classes, i came up with the following solution:
Parallel to “en.yml” i now have “en.rb” in my locales folder which gets loaded in environment.rb via
config.i18n.load_path += Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'locales', '*.{yml,rb}')]The en.rb files defines some procs as translation values like so:
{
:'en' => {
:date => {
:formats => {
:dmy_with_long_month => lambda { |date| "%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y" },
}
},
:time => {
:formats => {
:dmy_with_long_month => lambda { |date| "%B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y" },
:dmy_with_full_day_and_long_month_and_time => lambda { |date| "%A, %B #{date.day.ordinalize}, %Y at %H:%M" }
}
}
}
}Used with the standard I18n tools you’ll end up with the string representation of the proc object. Useless 
So time for monkeypatching like so:
module DateTimeSupport
def t(format = nil)
type = self.respond_to?(:sec) ? 'time' : 'date'
formats = I18n.translate(:"#{type}.formats")
format = formats[format.to_sym] if formats && formats[format.to_sym]
I18n.localize(self, :format => format.respond_to?(:call) ? format.call(self) : format)
end
end
class Time
include DateTimeSupport
end
class Date
include DateTimeSupport
end
class DateTime
include DateTimeSupport
end
class ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
include DateTimeSupport
endCode resides in a file in config/initializers and gets loaded automatically. It adds a t method to all date and time related classes. The method tries to look up the translation of format just like I18n/Simple does.
If it is proc, it gets called and then passed to I18n, otherwise it the original parameter is used.
That way the t method can use “dmy_with_long_month”, :dmy_with_long_month and any other arbitrary format like “%B %Y” that is not defined in any language file.
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Again, the MySQL ruby gem totally annyoed me trying to install it on a fresh Mac OS X 10.5.5 install and MySQL 5.0.67.
This time the following command brought it to life:
sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- \
--with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib \
--with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include
Thanks to a bitter software engineer.
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If you followed the instructions here and used the method named PDF::Writer (Austin Ziegler), you we’re out of luck when Rails 2.1 appeared.
With Rails 2.2.2 once again the rendering mechanism seems to have changed big time and my previous post on how to make the pdf/writer gem work with a custom template handler doesn’t work anymore.
With the help of Josh Peek i was able to fix this. He gave me the following code to enable a rpdf template handler with pdf-writer:
module ActionView # :nodoc:
require 'pdf/writer'
class PDFRender < ActionView::TemplateHandler
PAPER = 'A4'
include ApplicationHelper
include ActionView::Helpers::TranslationHelper
include ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper
include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
include ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper
def self.call(template)
"ActionView::PDFRender.new(self).render(template, local_assigns)"
end
def initialize(action_view)
@action_view = action_view
end
# Render the PDF
def render(template, local_assigns = {})
@action_view.controller.headers["Content-Type"] ||= 'application/pdf'
# Retrieve controller variables
@action_view.controller.instance_variables.each do |v|
instance_variable_set(v,
@action_view.controller.instance_variable_get(v))
end
pdf = ::PDF::Writer.new( :paper => PAPER )
pdf.compressed = true if RAILS_ENV != 'development'
eval template.source, nil, ''
pdf.render
end
end
end
ActionView::Template.register_template_handler 'rpdf', ActionView::PDFRenderJust drop this under config/initializers and you’re fine.
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I couldn’t find this in the documents, but Geoff Buesing showed me the hooks to turn off Ruby On Rails’ automatic timezone conversions for some columns of a model or a complete model:
# Turn it off for just some columns
class Picture < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.skip_time_zone_conversion_for_attributes
[:created_at, :published_at]
end
end
# Turin it off for the whole model
class Picture < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.time_zone_aware_attributes
false
end
end
Thanks a lot!
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