Tips 'n Tricks

Rails tip - run FCGI if you can't do Mongrel

Submitted by on

A small tip, but one I just encountered. If your web hosting provider can't allow you to set up a nice proxied Mongrel cluster, your best bet is to use the FastCGI (aka "FCGI") interface to Apache as the plain-Jane CGI interface is just slow as a dog. I ran into this little issue when using RedMine for my project management, and let me tell you it was slow. Well, it finally dawned on me to take a look see if it was using CGI or FCGI - low and behold by default it is set to use CGi, no wonder it was so slow!

Tags: 

Rails on OSX tip: MySQL access

Submitted by on

After wasting lots of time trying to get a database connecting to Rails on my MacPro at work I finally found the magic combination for MySQL.

  • Install MySQL.
  • Install the MySQL GUI Tools set.
  • Using the MySQL Administrator from the GUI Tools add a new user.
  • When adding permissions for the use set the hostname to be "(computername).local", e.g. "mymac.local".

It is that last part that had me pulling my hair out - using just "%" didn't work for me, it had to be "(computername).local". Silly thing.

Tags: 

MySQL + Rails on Cygwin tip

Submitted by on

Here's a really quick tip for anyone using Rails on Cygwin. If you want to connect to a MySQL database the understood practice is to compile MySQL and go through the hassle of getting it all working within Cygwin itself. After what I've gone through with it all, the best way of getting this combination to work is to:

Tags: 

IE bug - background images, floating blocks

Submitted by on

There's a bug in all versions of Internet Explorer, including the latest IE7, whereby if you have a floating block in a block inside another block which has a background image (possibly also background colors), text will disappear. I was hitting this at work where we had two columns created using floating blocks, inside two separate blocks that each had a background image, and just above the columns was a heading - the text within the columns showed up but the heading always disappeared after the images finished loading.

Tags: 

Most important thing for ColdFusion development

Submitted by on

After working with Adobe's ColdFusion for several years I've come to the conclusion that the single most important thing that a developer can do is use the CFQUERYPARAM tag. This single tag can help prevent many security problems as it will automatically work out how to pass the variable into the database based on the type of data you say it is, e.g. strings will get the proper quotation marks around it, dates will have pound signs added if needed, etc, etc.

Tags: 

Pages

Subscribe to Tips 'n Tricks