JGUIMONT>COM

You can now use the BrowserStack local tunnel from the command line. Just download the jar file from here.

Once done, copy it in your home folder and add this to your .profile :

function tunnel(){ java -jar ~/.browserstack/BrowserStackTunnel.jar <KEY> localhost,$1,0; }

You can now use the tunnel like so fromt he command line:

If you remember my post about the performance degradation of using external javascripts like Google Analytics, UserVoice or Intercom (All Those Services).

It seems I was not crazy after all because I found out CloudFlare and their optimizer service. In relation with their CDN and proxying, it allows to optimize your external resources without changing your app, code or provider.

You have a cool startup idea. You want to enhance other people's web application or web site with metrics gathering, analytics, realtime data, two ways communication, chat, blinking or mustaches on cats. Who knows.

You build your startup and application. You do what everyone else is doing since (I believe) Google Analytics: they configure your application and get a code snippet. They install this snippet on their homepage, web app, whatever. Life is good. 

Problem is that you are not alone doing this. At Porkepic we happen to love using KISSmetrics, Google Analytics, Intercom and UserVoice. Four services that we use daily. Four services that each load a script. Four services with each a different loading mechanism: from the simple javascript include to the deferred loading multiline script. Two of those services generate DOM elements and load images, CSS.

We load tons of crap with those snippets. Javascripts, DOM, images, CSS. Some even include a complete jQuery version (!). Your browser have to load, parse, execute all of those files on each page load. (Some does a good job, but most do not even minimize their files.)

Not mentioning you have to maintain those scripts and includes within your code base.

This is a pain.

I am imagining a central service that would let you standardize these services behavior for your web app. You log into the service. You configure the different files you want to load, you configure if you are already using jQuery or JSON or anything like this on your web app already and you configure the loading mechanism you want to have.  Once that is done, the service goes and fetch all scripts, sanitize them (checks for duplicate scripts like jQuery), minimifies them and send them to a CDN to be served up to your app when needed. 

All the config happens in the service. After the initial setup on your application, there would be nothing else to do. 

What would be even more useful is that all those vendors standardize their practice to use such service and provide piece by piece code loading. So if you want to load the code to have a helpdesk widget to let your customer enter support message but do not want to load the code for the chat widget you could. 

Here is one simple code snippet in Coffeescript to revert easily from the last saved version in Backbone.js models:

I stumbled upon this problem this week. There are many blog posts on how to do this in Rails 2, but not many for Rails 3 and most are broken in some ways. So I dug a little and found a nice solution.

First of all, Rails 3 is broken down into distinct modules that enables developer to pick and chose features and assemble them into something new. This is mostly what is happening with the new mailers. They include the features from a normal ActionController but in a different context. When you read the code of the mailers you will see that it includes a bunch of AbstractController modules. The same modules are also found in ActionController::Base. These are the basic building blocks to render templates in rails. 

So this is how I created this OfflineTemplate class that allows you to render anything offline, in a rake task or in a cron job. You can render a partial, a string, XML, json or a page including its layout. 

Zombie callbacks on inputs

I run into this problem with PDFKit middleware where the PDF generation seems to hang indefinitely for no apparent reason on Heroku as well as locally when using Thin.

Wkhtmltopdf will load the HTML and then try to load all assets from it (js, css, images, etc.) On Heroku the asset is first served up by the rails server and when you have a single Dyno it will create a deadlock in the handling of the HTTP request. The user trying to access the pdf document will consume the Dynos and the PDF generator will wait for it. Deadlock.

Two ways around that:

Access the static files directly from the web server and not Rails

Access the static files locally

The first option requires some setup (cloudfront and such) and some actions at deployment. Overall this requires to much work.

The second option is the one I preferred. I used Rails asset_host to have all assets for a PDF generation fetch locally (file://). Here is the gist of it:

Works as intended! Hope this will save some people the time I spent on this.

It is More than complicated to find a descriptive, powerful and nice name for a product/company. Even harder that when you cannot name something, it is like it doesn't exist yet.