BrunoMiranda.com

The much improved interface, search RSS feeds, Top Chefs, Top Recipes, a redesigned planner and a new shopping list.

You have to see it to believe it.

http://www.tastyplanner.com

PS. much more to come within the next days.

“A wiki is a type of computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites, and are increasingly being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets or for use in Knowledge Management.” Wikipedia.org

As an alternative to backpackit, you can roll your own wiki if you already own a domain and hosting. Josh Owens developed an open source simple wiki called Sigal Wiki that is dead simple to setup. Dependencies include json, ruby-openid and redcloth gems.

It supports, openid, askismet spam filtering and private pages. I have deployed his wiki under my domain, check it out!

-Bruno

GMAIL to the rescue

If you need to send mail from within your rails app using gmail’s smtp relay server you will need to do some extra hacking.

require 'smtp_tls'

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port    => 587,
  :domain  => "domain.com",
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name => "name@domain.com",
  :password => "password"
}

Smtp_tls includes the necessary code to establish communication through SSL so that your message can be successfully relayed.

Place smtp_tls.rb in /lib

require "openssl"
require "net/smtp"

Net::SMTP.class_eval do
  private
  def do_start(helodomain, user, secret, authtype)
    raise IOError, 'SMTP session already started' if @started
    check_auth_args user, secret, authtype if user or secret

    sock = timeout(@open_timeout) { TCPSocket.open(@address, @port) }
    @socket = Net::InternetMessageIO.new(sock)
    @socket.read_timeout = 60 #@read_timeout
    @socket.debug_output = STDERR #@debug_output

    check_response(critical { recv_response() })
    do_helo(helodomain)

    raise 'openssl library not installed' unless defined?(OpenSSL)
    starttls
    ssl = OpenSSL::SSL::SSLSocket.new(sock)
    ssl.sync_close = true
    ssl.connect
    @socket = Net::InternetMessageIO.new(ssl)
    @socket.read_timeout = 60 #@read_timeout
    @socket.debug_output = STDERR #@debug_output
    do_helo(helodomain)

    authenticate user, secret, authtype if user
    @started = true
  ensure
    unless @started
      # authentication failed, cancel connection.
        @socket.close if not @started and @socket and not @socket.closed?
      @socket = nil
    end
  end

  def do_helo(helodomain)
     begin
      if @esmtp
        ehlo helodomain
      else
        helo helodomain
      end
    rescue Net::ProtocolError
      if @esmtp
        @esmtp = false
        @error_occured = false
        retry
      end
      raise
    end
  end

  def starttls
    getok('STARTTLS')
  end

  def quit
    begin
      getok('QUIT')
    rescue EOFError
    end
  end
end

I am not exactly sure who wrote the library above. A little bit of cargo culting never killed anyone.

DISCLOSURE: I do not condone cargo culting :-}

If you are running ferret as a Drb server you may encounter problems while trying to run your test or specs. This issue happens because when you start the ferret server with ruby script/ferret_start it faults to production environment.

You you should not have this problem if the production and test environments are set to the same port numbers in config/ferret_server.yml

If you prefer to have different port numbers (which is what I advise), make sure you start the ferret server for the test environment as well.

RAILS_ENV=test script/ferret_start

Hope that helps.

How often do you hear the statement below?

“We can’t write tests, we just don’t have time for that type of luxury.”

Well, I hope you have time and money to do it twice.