Avin's Blog

Adventures in programming and data.

  • Adding CSRF token to jQuery AJAX requests

    When using a jQuery-supported framework such as Backbone, underlying jQuery AJAX requests are typically abstracted at the model layer. To insert Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) tokens or other session data into the request, one method is to proxy a method in the call stack and add the token via an option (example). This does have…

  • GUS Gives

    I was approached two years ago by a colleague from the Queensland Department of Education and Training (DET) to help set up a web application for GUS Gives – a charity portal that collects payments from members and provides detailed analytics for charity organisations. My role was to provide data management support and the first…

  • Parallel Bible

    My 85 year old grandma has been getting into reading various bible translations from her iPad. In order to improve her Hindi reading skills, she was looking for a side-by-side translation of a Malayalam bible and Hindi bible. While we could find Malayalam-English and Hindi-English versions, we couldn’t find a Malayalam-Hindi one that she could…

  • Reducing Rails asset precompile times on JRuby

    Rails asset precompile times on JRuby are considerably slower compared to MRI. I came across this post which provided suggestions on speeding up the asset precompile task. Using the following options – using Node.js instead of therubyrhino for JS compilation, forcing the JVM to 32 bit (although this can be omitted on a 32 bit…

  • Silencing noise in the Rails development log

    The standard Rails development log contains a lot of noise that is rarely meaningful for debugging. The Quiet Assets gem is a mandatory part of my Rails development process as it removes the logging noise of the asset pipeline. Also, if WEBrick is used as a development server, the following entry is logged for each…

  • Mixing DatabaseCleaner transaction and truncation strategies

    RSpec by default issues a database transactional rollback that is executed after the completion of a block. When using Capybara with the :js option (to enable testing with Selenium or Webkit), the transactional rollback offered by RSpec is unusable as the browser is loaded via a separate thread and has a separate database connection. Thus…

  • Mocking instances created via ActiveRecord’s find

    Most Ruby mocking frameworks have the ability to mock a new object created via a constructor. However, when an object is created via ActiveRecord’s find or find_by_* methods, the .new method isn’t invoked. Instead, the .instantiate method is called. For example, to specify :instantiate as the object creation method using FlexMock:

  • Persisting IRB & Rails Console History

    Continuing the theme on customising IRB and Rails Console, add these lines to ~/.irbrc to persist the command history across console sessions:

  • Awesome Print your IRB & Rails Console

    Awesome Print is a Ruby gem that prints prettified objects to the console. To avoid having to prepend ap to all your console commands, set it as the default formatter in IRB and Rails by adding the following to your ~/.irbrc: Obviously, Awesome Print first needs to be installed: gem install awesome_print UPDATE: Awesome Print…

  • Hello world!

    So I’ve been toying around with the idea of starting a blog and after prodding from my brother and probably more so, finally plonking down some cash for a domain, that was all the encouragement I needed.