A Blog about Skateboarding, Technology, and Entrepreneurship

Merging a Single Subversion Commit from Trunk to Branch

dennis — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:23:56 +0000

I’m posting way too much about SVN these days, but these are mainly for my personal recollection. Hopefully you’ll find them useful too. Here’s the scenario: you’re working on a branch and you want to merge a single commit from trunk into the branch. The first thing you need to do is find the revision number that you want to merge. Let’s say it’s 11259. Your SVN merge command will look like this:

svn merge -r 11258:11259 –dry-run https://myrepo.com/trunk

Notice the “–dry-run” parameter. This will display a list of files impacted, but won’t actually make the change. When you’re ready for primetime just remove the –dry-run param:

svn merge -r 11258:11259 https://myrepo.com/trunk

Running a Single Test File in Rails

dennis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:13:27 +0000

There are cases where you don’t want to run your entire Rails test suite. From your Rails application directory run the following command:

ruby -I lib:test test/integration/dealer_admin_test.rb

A small but useful tidbit.

Problems with MySQL Gem and Rake on Snow Leopard

dennis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:15:19 +0000

I recently got a new MacBook Pro and had problems creating a new database for my Rails app on Snow Leopard. Running rake db:create left me with the following useless error:

Couldn’t create database for {”username”=>”root”, “adapter”=>”mysql”, “database”=>”delete_me”, “password”=>nil, “socket”=>”/tmp/mysql.sock”}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching collation)

Although I could manually access MySQL via command line and create the necessary databases, rake continually failed. It turns out that the MySQL gem needed to be compiled for a 64-bit OS as mentioned in this post:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard

The key command to run is:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Then you should be able to run your rake tasks and ultimately get Rails talking to your MySQL database.

Magento Unexpectedly Prompts to Download index.php

dennis — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:15:00 +0000

This was a new one for me. I was installing Magento today on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.3 LTS to be exact) and ran into a problem where accessing the base Magento install URL would prompt to download the index.php file. The odd thing was that I could access the index.php directly and it would work just fine. This was running under Apache 2.2. It turns out that Apache needed my DirectoryIndex to be specified, which is strange because this hasn’t been a problem with other installations. At any rate, I updated my default config file located in /etc/apache2/sites-available with the following lines just before the closing VirtualHost tag:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

I then restarted apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart) and was good to go.

SVN List Comment and Files Changed for a Certain Revision

dennis — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:25:39 +0000

I’m spending a lot of time with the SVN command line right now because we’re trying to get a product release out the door. One thing that I’ve found handy is the ability to get the comments and list of files changed for a certain revision number. This is fairly commonplace for SVN GUI tools, but it took me a bit to find out how to do this via command line. Here’s how you do it:

svn log -v -r 7447 https://yoursvnurl.com

You can remove the URL if you’re running this command from your local copy.

SVN Current Revision Number and Commit Log Between Two Revisions

dennis — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:19:56 +0000

Just a quick post if you’d like to get a history of SVN commits between an older revision and your current working copy. Get the current revision number from your local copy:

svnversion .

Then get a commit history between and older version and your current version:

svn log -r 6885:8485

Where the number before the colon is your old version and the one after is your current.

Installing Ubuntu Gutsy Packages via apt-get When EOL’ed

dennis — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:32:38 +0000

If you’re running an older version of Ubuntu that has been EOL’ed (End of Lifed) then you’ll at some point need to install a new package using apt-get. When trying to do this you’ll likely get a 404 erros saying the package isn’t found. Your choice is to either upgrade Ubuntu to a new version or modify /etc/apt/sources.list to point to an older release archive. In my case I took the path of release resistance and modified /etc/apt/sources.list. The original version had these lines:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

And I simply modified them to look like:

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

After saving your sources.list file you should be able to do a sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get install [your-package-name] to install whatever package you need. Thanks to @austinmills for helping me with this.

Twitter Whores

dennis — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:42:46 +0000

I’m getting more and more follows from “Twitter Whores”. Generally I can tell they’re spam follows before I even click on the link because they’re username will be something like Username1975. Anyway, this is a completely useless post, but on the up-side it’s good to know that Twitter is taking action and suspending their accounts.

Rails 2.3.2 ActionMailer Views and Multiple Body Instance Variables

dennis — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:27:16 +0000

While upgrading our Rails app to version 2.3.2 I ran into a painful bug when running our unit tests. Previously, we defined ActionMailer instance variables to be used in our views like this:

@body["name"] = user.name
@body["feedback"] = feedback
@body["when"] = Time.now

I had to refactor this to use a hash as the ActionMailer documentation suggests:

body {:name => user.name, :feedback => feedback, :when => Time.now}

It turns out this doesn’t work and generates an error. So I removed the hash and did the following:

body :name => user.name, :feedback => feedback, :when => Time.now

Now all is well. It cost me an hour of my day and hopefully it will cost you much less now that you’re informed. If you can share any information why the hash doesn’t work then please feel free to share. Thanks!

Consolidating My Blogs to Reside @ techskater.com

dennis — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:36:51 +0000

I’ve decided to consolidate my different blogs about technology and skateboarding into techskater.com. I’ve migrated a majority of my content to this blog, but need to update all my pages in Google (> 300) to redirect to techskater. You’ll notice that this link about GoDaddy on Rails @ db75.com (my old blog) will redirect you to the appropriate article on techskater. Only 299 more pages to go

This will be an ongoing process so I decided not to wait until the full transition is done. My plans are to post about the entire process as I think there are some useful tips I can share for those moving their blogs to a new server/url. In the meantime, if you’re interested in Ruby on Rails, skateboarding, entrepreneurship, or just want to keep up with me then please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed or check back every now and then. Thanks.