Auto updating sphinx delta on child record updates

Thinking Sphinx is quickly becoming the de-facto rails search plugin. In the past there have been a few other plugins that gained popularity and lost it almost as quickly by either being orphaned, outdated, etc. Thinking Sphinx has a clear path and a very involved/attentive maintainer.

Listen up, Señor T is talking to you. If you have ever tried to spend 8 hours working from a coffee shop, then I don't have to tell you that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. Yes, its a fun dynamic working environment, where people will make you coffee and tasty snacks. However, spotty internet connections, loud music, chatty patrons and lack of power outlets get old quick. But for a cybernomad like me, plopping down a monitor on a desk just isn't an option.

The current version of swftools in macports is 0.8.1 and for many cases it's not good enough. In particular, for pdf2swf to generate swf files that are recognized as ASVM3 (i.e. Flash version 7+ I think, but do correct me if I'm wrong) you need swftools 0.9.0 or greater. Loading an external swf movie from within another is considerably more cumbersome if the virtual machine used in the two files versions differ.

You know you ran into the above VM mismatch error if your Flash logs are telling you something like this:

  TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert flash.display::AVM1Movie@1e3d9e01 to flash.display.MovieClip. 
    at com.elctech::PdfViewer/doneLoading()

The above error will show only if -- only if -- you have a debugger enabled flashplayer and logging enabled.

But as we said, the current macports version isn't recent enough, so what to do? One option is to install everything from source, which for a package such as swftools entails a lot of dependencies. Another option is to install the current macports version anyway to get all the dependencies installed and then compile just the swftools package from source (http://www.swftools.org/download.html). Not ideal perhaps, but IMHO better.

With the 3.0 update coming out for the iPhone, people have been talking about one of the new features called tethering. Tethering is the process of using your mobile device's internet connection on your computer. This allows you to have internet on your computer anywhere there is cell service.

While phones like the Blackberry and Palm have had tethering for a few years, Apple has finally updated the new iPhone to include this feature. The problem is the US carrier for the iPhone (AT&T) will not support tethering for quite some time. And when they do decide to support it, they will charge an additional monthly fee.

While installing Sphinx for a largish application, I wasn't able to find many documented examples that touched on distributed deployments. The examples I did find were either a bit complicated when it comes to setup and execution, or, they didn't necessarily meet my needs. I "think" my needs are pretty simple:

I need indexing to be fast, searching to be fast, result sets to be up-to-date, and, this painlessly deployed across a large and dynamic array of machines.

If you ever need to stub out a method for all tests in your test suite, for example a before filter in ApplicationController that goes takes a while to run, here's a neat trick.

Stick the following in your spec_helper:

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each, :type => :controller) do 
    controller.stub!(:blog_feed).and_return([])
  end 
end

If you need to override the above for some specs, just put a similar block on top of the spec file. (Question: how can I remove the stub completely for just a few tests?)

It might not be the most elegant solution known to man, and it sure isn't very clean and could come back and bite you one day, but if you know what you're doing... ;)

Update: Something like this might work for your unstubbing needs, but if the above is an ugly hack, this is a really ugly hack and YMMV:

class Object
  def unstub!(method_name, *args, &blk)
    self.send("proxied_by_rspec__#{method_name}", *args, &blk) if self.respond_to?("proxied_by_rspec__#{method_name}")
  end
end

If you need to poke even deeper (and you really shouldn't), this might be useful to you:

rspec_guts = my_instance_of_something.send(:__mock_proxy) # rspec works its magic on this object, which is a Spec::Mocks::Proxy
puts rspec_guts.instance_variable_get("@proxied_methods").inspect

Until web coders and designers become one and the same, how does one deal with designing a website that is user interface heavy? Does it mean that all designers should learn to code? Or should all coders learn how to design?

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