We should all strive to handle all possible errors in our programs and display nice error messages to the users, but one can hardly be sure that nothing will ever go wrong. That’s why I believe we should try to embed a debug mode that users can take advantage of when submitting the issue or solving the problem. Luckily this is very simple thing to do.
Implementing a basic debug mode for your Ruby CLI
Conditional unique indexes in Rails and PostgreSQL
This is a simple example of adding a conditional and partial unique index to Rails applications backed by PostgreSQL.
InvoicePrinter 1.1 “Cape Town” released
Tomorrow starts the famous African Ruby conference Rubyfuza in Cape Town and since I am attending I decided I will do a final 1.1 release of InvoicePrinter from South Africa just before everything begins. So here we are, this is a 1.1 “Cape Town” release.
Do not run Rails with pending migrations
Database migrations are the tricky part of any deployment. They make zero-time deploys problematic. They requires special attention since they can break stuff. Some might choose to run migrations automatically, some of us run them manually. But one thing is almost always true; the production code without migrations should not ever run. So how not to run your code without doing migrations first?
Editing XFA PDF forms on Linux/Fedora
PDF should be this nice universal format that many government institution now work with. But what if they require you to fill in XFA forms inside their template PDFs? The ones I need to fill for my insurance company are certainly not supported in the standard Document Viewer shipped with Fedora. This weekend I tried installing Master PDF Editor and guess what? It works like a charm for me. They even offer various RPM builds for CentOS 6/7. And they work on my Fedora out of the box. Lucky me. Thanks a lot for this!