A few finer points to note:

• “verify_mode: OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE” makes your life easier in development mode – not to mention some FTPS sites won’t even have one
• Most servers don’t like active mode, so explicitly use passive mode. Your connection ends up hanging without it.

So usage is:

DoubleBagFTPS.open(host, user, password, nil, DoubleBagFTPS::EXPLICIT, verify_mode: OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE) do |ftps|
 ftps.passive = true
 ftps.put("myfile.txt", filename)
 end

http://www.mommashouldataughtyou.com/

Anyway, I made some syrups because I remembered helping my Mom making pancake syrup when I was a kid, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I wasn’t doing that. Sure, it’s not “real” maple syrup, but hey, it’s better than most of the stuff in the store, and a load cheaper. It doesn’t have any corn syrup, and the debate on that issue notwithstanding, at least if my friend who’s allergic to corn and corn products comes over, she can have some pancakes and syrup.

Storage:

• save glass jars from other products (salsa, spaghetti sauce, etc.) and reuse them**
• use clean wine bottles and some pourers with hinged lids or syrup pumps
• oil bottles with pourer
• plastic condiment bottles (the squeeze kind you might put ketchup in, I’ve found these at dollar stores, big box stores or restaurant supply stores)
• Syrup dispensers with handles

I generally prefer something you can close or cap, since you’ll be storing these in the fridge and they can pick up smells from other foods.
**To clean and get the smell out of glass jars, follow these instructions.

Maple syrup:

1 c water
1 c white granulated sugar
1 c brown sugar
1 tsp maple extract
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
1/2 tsp butter extract (optional)

In a saucepan, boil the water, then add the sugars and stir until dissolved. Remove from heat and stir in the flavoring(s). Let cool and store in refrigerator.

Homemade simple syrup:

(for flavored coffees, hot chocolates, etc.)
1 c water
2 c white granulated sugar
1 tsp flavored extract (peppermint, vanilla, almond, hazelnut, etc.)

In a saucepan, boil the water, then add the sugar and stir until dissolved. Remove from heat and stir in the flavoring. Let cool and store in refrigerator.

Homemade chocolate syrup:

(straight up stolen from Pennies on a Platter)

1 cup water
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
Pinch of salt
¼ teaspoon vanilla

Combine the water and cocoa powder in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium while stirring to dissolve the cocoa. Stir in the sugar until dissolved. Bring to a boil and heat for 3 minutes, watching carefully to avoid boiling over. (Turn down the heat, if necessary.) Remove from the heat and mix in the salt and vanilla. Let set to cool. Use a funnel to pour into a clean glass jar with a tight fitting lid. Store in the refrigerator for up to two months.

Sara’s notes: 

• Give this your full attention. It only takes 10 minutes, so no walking away, lest you potentially have a burned, boiled-over chocolate disaster.
• Use a whisk and keep whisking throughout or you’ll get scorched chocolate.
• Be very careful with doing this on an electric stove. I have gas but I imagine you wouldn’t want to do more than med to med-high heat, since it doesn’t respond as fast and when it starts boiling it GOES.

Standings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women’s_foil

Until we got to the part where we were opening a remote URL, reading its contents (an MP3), and trying to save it to a file on S3. (Before you get all riled up about piracy, it’s a voice generator service that we pay for.) So after switching gems, all we got when trying to grab the remote file was:

  No such file or directory - http://www.blahblahblah...

At first I thought it might be the service, but plugging in any other url didn’t work either. Arrgh! The code didn’t change in that respect! WTH?

Yeah well, apparently something did with the gem, because putting:

  require 'open-uri'

at the top of the controller fixed it all up.

Hope this saves you some time/hair pulling/frustration.

And now you want to use Thinking Sphinx, which is awesome for searching. So you think, hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could do a search for all users in a group’s subtree? Except that Thinking Sphinx cares not for your puny ancestry methods, and :subtree_ids doesn’t work in an index.

Fear not! I’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

in user.rb:
define_index do
  indexes last_name
  has groups(:id), :as => :direct_group_ids
  has "CONCAT_WS('/',groups.id,groups.ancestry)", :as => :group_ids, :type => :multi
end

The first attribute is so that the join is made from users to groups. The second actually creates the multi-value attribute that you can search on. So from there you can do:

User.search(:with_all => {:group_ids => [1]})

That will give you all the users that belong to the subtree, including the root group (in this case, the group with the id of “1″).

That being said, if you only want the users from sub-groups of the group you’re searching on (i.e. you never want users that are directly attached to the group you’re searching on), you can instead do this:

in user.rb:
define_index do
  indexes last_name
  has groups(:ancestry), :as => :group_ids, :type => :multi
end

So if you have group 1 which has group 2 and group 3 as children, the first example will give you all the users attached to all 3 groups; the second example will only give you the users attached to groups 2 and 3.

One last gotcha: if you’re running the search in console, remember to add “:per_page => 100″ or however many entries you want back, or else by default you only get 20. Don’t want you to headdesk when you can’t figure out why it’s returning 20 users when it’s supposed to be returning 75.

Happy indexing!

if params[:teacher] && params[:teacher][:id] ...

so instead, do this:

if params[:teacher].try(:[], :id)

or do it a lot more:

name = params[:company][:owner][:name] if params[:company] and params[:company][:owner] and params[:company][:owner][:name]

turns into:

name = params.try(:[], :company).try(:[], :owner).try(:[], :name)

Yay for Stack Overflow!

UPDATE 4/10/2013: Updating these instructions to use bundle exec, per chintan/Nic Pillinger

If you want your crontab updated by whenever on deploy, make a file named deploy/before_restart.rb and stick this in it (make sure you replace ‘yourAppNameHere’, derp):

@rails_env = node[:environment][:framework_env]
run "cd #{release_path}; bundle exec whenever --set environment=#{@rails_env}; bundle exec whenever --update-crontab 'yourAppNameHere'"

This is called a ‘deploy hook’ and here’s more info.

via Deploy Hook using Binstubs

Since Engine Yard automatically installs your binstubs, you could also replace “bundle exec whenever” with “ey_bundler_binstubs/whenever”. If you want to be able to run “bin/whenever” you’ll have to symlink to ey_bundler_binstubs – but remember it’s in the current deploy directory, so you’ll have to do this per-deploy – which means you could stick this in the same before_restart.rb file (obviously it would need to be above the whenever line):

run "ln -nfs #{release_path}/ey_bundler_binstubs #{release_path}/bin"
@rails_env = node[:environment][:framework_env]
run "cd #{release_path}; bin/whenever --set environment=#{@rails_env}; bin/whenever --update-crontab 'yourAppNameHere'"

Note for Utility Instances

Desi McAdam was kind enough to note: “Secondary note for your readers just in case they need a reminder. If you only want this to run on a util server be sure to wrap the above deploy hook stuff with current_role == ‘util’.”

via Custom Chef Recipes

UPDATE 4.17.2012: If you’re on EY and not using custom chef recipes, you should start. A whenever recipe has been written and is detailed here. Info on how to start using custom chef recipes is here. It’s not so bad, really. One gotcha: your “appname” in the recipe is not your rails application name, but your EY application name – these can be different things!

Article from the News-Gazette
Article from the IL Stewardship Alliance
Senate bill 840

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