Tag Archives: Ruby
Extracting Subject Alternative Name from Microsoft authentication client certificates
Among the client certificates present in an HSPD-12 smart card, you may find a Windows Smart Card Login certificate used for authentication, which has several particularities, one of them being storing the Subject Alternative Name (this is, the Windows logon and domain of the card’s owner) in an ASN1-encoded UTF8 string in a Microsoft extension (OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.311.20.2.3). What does this … more
Careful when truncating strings
One of our Rails applications has to consume an RSS. Nothing fancy here, we simply wanted to extract some fields from each item and store them in the PostgreSQL DB (app was hosted on heroku). Simply slicing the string seemed to work at first: summary = entry.summary[0...255] But soon we started obtaining PGError (incomplete multibyte … more
Upgrading to Rails 3: @routes is nil
I’m currently in the process of upgrading an application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Fortunately, it’s not the first time someone does so, and there’s plenty of resources throughout the web that will help you to work it out. In particular, I chose to follow the steps demonstrated by Ryan Bates in an outstanding … more
New office, ruby cake
Two weeks ago, Friday, was the last day in our old office. The mood was pretty nice since the new office has direct sun light and is much more comfortable, and also because every Friday, in a round-robin fashion, each one of us brings some delicious for dessert. It was my turn. I’m not much … more
rgviz-rails updated to Rails 3
I just updated the rgviz-rails gem to work with Rails 3. It was pretty easy, following the instructions of this site. I also moved the code from Google Code to github, so i can have all my projects under a single tree, and to start using git more frequently. Here are the new URLs: http://github.com/asterite/rgviz … more
Introducing cukecooker: writing cucumber scenarios with aid
In our development team we want our testers to start writing cucumber features. I know, BDD, the features should be written before the code, but a tester could later add scenarios which we haven’t previously thought or regression features for bugs. For writing the scenarios she could learn the steps from other features or just … more
Rails Rumble is over: welcome GithubDamper!
This past weekend, together with Emmanuel Oga, we’ve been coding a Ruby on Rails application for this year’s Rails Rumble. The idea: in github you can watch some repositories, but later you can’t make a search over those watches. The only search github provides is one over all repositories. When your watches reaches a big … more
Even more powerful Goolge Visualizations for Ruby on Rails
Ok, now you can easily implement a Google Visualization API data source on rails. But… are you still using javascript to render them? Well, you don’t need to do that anymore. Now rgviz-rails supports a pretty simple and powerful way to do it. In your views templates you now have an rgviz function. You use … more
Powerful Google Visualizations for Ruby on Rails
So we have this project in Ruby on Rails where we keep track of several reports. Now we need to do some visualizations with all those reports. We analyzed several solutions. One was using Google Fusion Tables but we soon realized it was not an easy task: we need to keep our records synchronized with … more
Building an application to track expenses in one hour using GeoChat
Whenever one of our team member travels to another country we tell her to track expenses like food, transportation and accomodation so that later that money can be refunded. Each of us does it in a different way: we write it in a notes application in a cellphone, or in a text file in our … more