Patrick Tulskie

Update: Aaron told me that he is going to be re-running the benchmarks this weekend so we’ll get a more complete set of data from the machine that originally ran the tests.

If you’re into parsing XML or HTML with ruby then chances are you’re familiar with the various gems out there for getting the job done.  Lately, there have been a lot of things flying around about which is the fastest and to settle it, Aaron Patterson (author of Nokogiri and Mechanize) wrote a test suite.

After it’s release, RubyInside posted about how the tests showed how fast Nokogiri was compared to Hpricot in this article here: Ruby XML Performance Shootout: Nokogiri vs LibXML vs Hpricot vs REXML.  Later in the day, I saw Why’s posting about the release of Hpricot here: hpricot 0.7 and decided to modify Aaron’s tests to use Hpricot.XML and here are the results:
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About 20 minutes ago I entered a situation where every time I ran a script on my machine, the only output would be “you need to write me”

Naturally I was a little freaked out.

After retracing my steps over the past hour I remembered I had updated my ruby gems with a good ol “sudo gem update.”  I do it all the time so I didn’t see the cause for concern.  I went and looked at the newly installed gems and saw that there was libxml-ruby-1.0.0.  I browsed inside the gem and saw that it had a bin directory that had a ruby executable in it.  Cute.  Whoever the person is who released that needs to pay super close attention to what they are doing in the future.

Anyhow, I uninstalled the gem and when it asked if I wanted to remove the ruby executable I said yes.  This of course trashed the ruby executable in my /usr/bin.  Luckily I was able to retrieve it from Jay Amster and all was well.  If I was to do things over I’d say not to trash the executable and just delete the gem and all of its files.

Having that broken ruby executable in my path devastated my system though.  Half of my Textmate scripts no longer worked, none of my rails apps would execute, etc.  It was awful.  Thankfully I was able to figure it out quickly and hopefully if you run a search for “you need to write me” then you’ll stumble upon this post and know what to do to fix your machine.

UPDATE:

It would appear as though this problem is now resolved.  Maybe I got a bad install of the gem?  Maybe it was just a fluke?  Who knows?  It appears safe to install the latest libxml-ruby now though.

This morning, Kevin Glowacz (@kevinglowacz) replied to me a few times on Twitter about Ruby String#Nameize class extension I had posted a while back.  I had done some work to it after posting it here.  Kevin also asked me a few questions about oddities that were in it that have since been resolved.  So thanks to his prodding, you get a slightly updated version…

The only real “feature” is that it will now handle full names just fine. Otherwise, the rest of the stuff was mostly performance related.  Here it is:

class String
  # Extension of the string class to properly handle camel names
  def nameize
    if self.match(/ /)
      # If the name has a space in it, we gotta run the parts through the nameizer.
      name = self.split(' ').each { |part| part.nameize! }.join(' ')
      return name
    elsif self.match(/^[A-Z]/)
      # If they took the time to capitalize their name then let's just jump out.
      return self
    else
      # If there are no spaces and there is no prior
      # capitalization then let's downcase the whole thing.
      name = self.downcase
    end
    # Let's now assume that they were lazy...
    return case
    when name.match(/^mac/)
      name.gsub(/^mac/, "").capitalize.insert(0, "Mac")
    when name.match(/^mc/)
      name.gsub(/^mc/, "").capitalize.insert(0, "Mc")
    when name.match(/^o\'/)
      name.split("'").each{ |piece| piece.capitalize! }.join("'")
    else
      name.capitalize # name is a first name or it's not Irish then capitalize it.
    end
  end

  def nameize!
    replace nameize # BANG!
  end

end

As always – question, comments, suggestions – shoot me an email, leave a comment, or hit me on Twitter (@PatrickTulskie).

Every Friday we have our code reviews at BeenVerified and it is definitely a non-trivial event.  Our development team looks through the code all together and offers suggestions and ways to improve what the creator deems near-complete code.  Code reviews have become my favorite part of team based development because they offer me such a badass opportunity to learn more.  Everyone looks a problem differently and so getting insight from other people is huge because you might not consider all of your options when you’re knee deep in 1000 lines of ruby, CSS, and js all at once.

Yeah it’s great, except this Friday it didn’t happen.  Thanksgiving weekend happened instead so we pushed it to Monday.  Being the silly goose I am, I decided to get a new Macbook on Black Friday.  I restored my stuff from Time Machine, installed my Ruby Gems, and thought all was well.  Monday morning, my turn to present code came up and there was a problem with screen sharing.  Crap.  All of my code is in a git branch that is not pushed to a server yet and the time it would have taken to get to a state where we could present it from another machine would have been too much so we postponed my review until my screen sharing would work.  This was most displeasing to me. Read More…

Those of you doing rails development work on Leopard with MySQL have probably seen this error message when starting your app:

WARNING: You’re using the Ruby-based MySQL library that ships with Rails. This library is not suited for production. Please install the C-based MySQL library instead (gem install mysql).

Normally I don’t care, but I figured since I was doing some cleanup today and getting things ready to move on to a longer term it might be good to have a properly working MySQL gem.  I like to run with a system that is close to what we run production.  The closer you get, the less surprises you have when you push it live.

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This morning we had an email from someone who wanted us to capitalize their name because they had not done it at signup.  That’s fine and all, but this is one of those things we’re going to see again.  Normally you’d just slap a .capitalize on the string and call it a day.  Unfortunately with Irish names, you run into a problem because capitalize doesn’t capitalize those types of names properly.  I wrote a quick function to extend the String class in Ruby that will help get around this problem.

class String
  # Extension of the string class to properly handle camel names
  # Should be used on pieces of names, not full names.
  def nameize
    # If they took the time to capitalize their name then let's just jump out
    if self.match(/\A[A-Z]/)
      return self
    else
      name = self.downcase
    end
    # Let's now assume that they were lazy...
    return case
    when name.match(/^mac/)
      name.capitalize.gsub(/Mac/, "").capitalize.insert(0, "Mac")
    when name.match(/^mc/)
      name.capitalize.gsub(/Mc/, "").capitalize.insert(0, "Mc")
    when name.match(/^o\'/)
      name.split("'").each{ |piece| piece.capitalize! }.join("'")
    else
      name.capitalize
    end
  end
end

I know it’s not perfect, but it should handle most oddly capitalized names.  Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter or whatever and definitely give me any changes you think should be in there.