Month: December 2009

Autumn beauty at Hanging Rock

In November, I was blessed with the opportunity to visit Hanging Rock State Park with some friends from church. Though the fall colors were past peak, it was still an enjoyable and invigorating hike. I took this video clip from the top of Hanging Rock with my iPod Nano. It was a very windy day. The view off the southern side was clear enough that I could see Winston-Salem. What a beautiful experience!

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” Psalm 19:1-2

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Romans 1:19-20

December 3, 2009
test_spec_on_rails now runs on Rails 2.3
If anyone still happens to be using test_spec, you’ll be thrilled to know that the test_spec_on_rails plugin is now compatible with Rails 2.3. It has also been converted to a gem. Install with:
```
sudo gem install test_spec_on_rails
```
Add to your Rails app’s test.rb like so:
```
config.gem 'test_spec_on_rails'
```
Enjoy the goodness of test-spec helpers from inside your Rails tests. Fork and submit patches via the GitHub project. Tell your friends. Donate money. Vote for Pedro.
December 3, 2009
Processing malformed files with FasterCSV
On a recent project, I had to implement a CSV parser that would gracefully handle malformed files. I’m talking about files with unescaped quotes, wacky UTF-8 chars, and various other abominations of nature.

I originally assumed FasterCSV would handle this automagically, but it turns out that the library’s most commonly used methods are pretty strict when it comes to handling CSV files.

For example, parsing a malformed file one line at a time will result in an exception being thrown, even before any rows are yielded to the block:
```
FasterCSV.foreach("malformed.csv") do |row|
  # use row here...
end
```
Not cool! I managed to get around this by manually looping over each row and rescuing a malformed CSV exception if one gets thrown:
```
FasterCSV.open("malformed.csv", "rb") do |output|
  loop do
    begin
      break unless row = output.shift
      # use row here...
    rescue FasterCSV::MalformedCSVError => e
      # handle malformed row here...
    end
  end
end
```
Anyone have a better way to do this?
December 3, 2009
Time warping gem goodness
The time zone warp code I posted about last week is now a gem:
```
sudo gem install time-zone-warp
```
To configure in your Rails app, add this line to the bottom of test.rb:
```
config.gem 'time-zone-warp', :lib => 'time_zone_warp'
```
You can also fork the code from the project on GitHub.
December 3, 2009