This week I am going to focus on resources that will help with learning Ruby.

Ben Orenstein’s Aloha Ruby Conf 2012 talk, Refactoring from Good to Great.

The Friday collection of useful stuff on the interwebs to expand your braaaaainz!

The Friday collection of useful stuff on the interwebs to expand your braaaaainz!

I’ve been slacking a bit with regular blog posts, so I thought I would catch up again with something simple yet useful.

This post will show you how to setup a simple private proxy server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and how to tunnel into it via SSH from your PC. Although your anonymity is probably not 100% guaranteed, you will be able to hide your identity from most sites and bypass most country restrictions.

Let’s start with AWS.

Constantly creating new Rails projects can become a very mundane task. Most of the time we will go through a series of copying and pasting to get a desired setup, but that is the opposite of agile.

AppDrone

Daniel Davey from Platform45 has created AppDrone.

AppDrone aims to take the bore out of setting up a Rails app just the way you
like it. It’s a code library that builds generator code that builds your Rails
app code - R A I L S C E P T I O N!

AppDrone comes with a slick and shiny Ember.js UI which makes creating an AppDrone template a breeze. Falling out of your bed is harder work.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to change the HTTP_USER_AGENT while testing a Rails app in RSpec.

All you need to do is stub the request object and set the new :user_agent.

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controller.request.stub!(:user_agent).and_return('Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1)')

The above snippet was tested in Rails 3.2.3, RSpec 2.9.0 and Ruby 1.9.3-p125

UPDATE: Asepsis’ functionality broke after the last update to Lion (10.7.4), but it has been fixed in Asepsis v1.3. You MUST uninstall the previous version of Asepsis before installing the latest version. Failing to do so could prevent your system from booting.

• Tested and working on OS X Lion (10.8.2) - 6th October 2012
• Tested and working on OS X Lion (10.7.4) - 30th June 2012
• Tested and working on OS X Lion (10.7.3) - 24th March 2012

There are two features of Ruby that seem to be almost universally frowned upon by professionals: the and and or keywords, and the unless ... else construct. I want to argue that both are OK and need not be banned from your codebase.