If you’ve developed in Rails for a decent amount of time then you’ve most likely needed to use the interactive console: ruby script/console. This has saved me within our production application on many occasions. As you probably know, when using the console in production mode, logging is disabled. Sometimes it’s useful to see the queries generated by ActiveRecord, which brings me to my scenario from yesterday. I badly needed to see what query was being gererated by one of my model methods and stumbled across this snippet of code:

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)

Be sure to restart your console before running this command and when you execute a statement like User.find(1) you’ll be presented with some handy debug info.

Just a quick post to announce the launch of the JoeyTracker at Tufts University. We worked a couple of Tufts students to help them bring the project to life and allow them to track their campus bus (aka “The Joey”) online. Read this article posted by the Tufts Daily if you’re interested in more details.

If you’re really bored and decide you want to lobby for a GPS bus tracker on your campus then be sure to check out the video below. I recently posted this article about a Tufts GPS bus tracking project with Ublip. At Ublip, we’re working hard to connect people with remote assets and this project is a great demonstration of our technology foundation.