For now, all development is being committed to Git, and then patched into the svn repository. So, if you’re using the svn repository don’t worry, it will remain current for a while.

I remember first hearing about Git during the Linux/Bitkeeper contoversy, and recall thinking Linus Torvalds was odd for not using CVS or Subversion over Bitkeeper, and then thinking he was certifiably insane for deciding to roll his own version tracking system once Bitkeeper didn’t work out.

Of course, Linus Torvalds is (a) a better programmer than me and (b) smarter than me, so there you go. Git has evolved into a very nice tracking system; for me everything that was slow and annoying in SVN (namely, comparing revisions and branching) is fast and easy using Git. If you haven’t yet taken a look at it, you should.

You can take a peek at the shiny new friendly_id repository here.

If you’d like to see a quick introduction to Git, take a peek at Sebastian Delmont’s presentation below.

GIT Talk (nyc.rb) from Sebastian Delmont on Vimeo.

The solution is to use Mocha to mock an instance of ActionController::Flash::FlashHash and capture the value being set. Here was my solution:

def test_create_with_empty_email_sets_error_in_flash
  hash = {}
  ActionController::Flash::FlashHash.any_instance.expects(:now).returns(
    hash
  )
  post :create
  assert_not_nil hash[:error]
end

Don’t you ever feel really dumb when you realize that what you’ve been trying to do for days is actually so easy? I haven’t worked as a sysadmin for 4 years now and find my skills have really atrophied… but anyway… thanks to the Google gods I have managed once more to get away with it.

Just because Rails is good is not an excuse to avoid using quality software written in another programming language. I know a lot of Rails developers dislike PHP but I’m happy to work with good software - especially free software - no matter what language it’s written our in. And this blog was never meant to be a “Rails blog,” we here at Randomba also work with C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Objective C, Cocoa and a lot of other languages/frameworks. Yes, we CAN all get along. We just happen to be doing a lot of Rails stuff lately.

Anyway… this means that I need to apologize to the thousands hundreds several people that left comments on the previous blog; it was a little complicated to port them over, and I got lazy and decided to leave them. This should be the last time it happens, I promise.

However the current release, Etch, comes with Ruby 1.8.5, which is a bit old and has some problems running Mongrel. It’s very easy to download and compile Ruby, installing it in /usr/local, but this bypasses Debian’s packaging system. But it’s easy to do better; using Ruby’s package manager to install Ruby and maintaining all the benefits of having your installed software under package management.

Note that you’ll need to be root to run these commands.

Make sure you haven’t installed ruby in your package manager yet.

Or, if you have, uninstall it before proceeding to avoid package conflicts. Read the comments on the post below for more details.

1) Update your /etc/apt/sources.list, to use Debian’s “unstable” source packages:

deb-src ftp://debian.mirrors.tds.net/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib

2) Update your list of available packages:

apt-get update

3) Install Ruby’s build dependencies:

apt-get build-dep ruby1.8

4) Install Debian’s package management development programs:

apt-get install dpkg-dev

5) Download the Ruby source package and build it:

apt-get source -b ruby1.8

This took about 5 minutes on my system with SATA disks and a 2 gig P4. It creates the following packages:

• irb1.81.8.6.111-4all.deb
• libdbm-ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libgdbm-ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libopenssl-ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libreadline-ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libruby1.8-dbg1.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• libtcltk-ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• rdoc1.81.8.6.111-4all.deb
• ri1.81.8.6.111-4all.deb
• ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• ruby1.8-dev1.8.6.111-4i386.deb
• ruby1.8-elisp1.8.6.111-4all.deb
• ruby1.8-examples1.8.6.111-4all.deb

6) Install the packages:

dpkg -i *.deb

You can also just install the ones you think you’ll need; at very least you’ll want ruby1.81.8.6.111-4i386.deb, and the ri, rdoc and irb packages.

7) Bask in the Ruby 1.8.6 goodness:

norman@randomba:$ ruby -v

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i486-linux]

This provides your application with better search engine optimization (SEO), better data security, and more human-friendly URL’s.It can optionally keep track of modified ids, so that you can do 301 redirects the current URL’s of updated resources.

Read more in the RDoc, or download it directly from its subversion repository.

EDIT: now available in two flavors: svn and git.

You can get it using svn or git.