I generally build my systems with chef-solo cookbooks. I do not want to maintain a central server for recipes. However, I’m getting to the point where I’d like to share my cookbooks from one solo project to another. Anyways, I
wanted to run an individual recipe of a given cookbook. The following gist allows for this. Although, it may not be necessary, since cookbooks are generally idempotent. Seemed like a good idea earlier in the evening, meh.

http://gist.github.com/242526

I wanted my users’ cron to run under zsh, so it picks up the .zshenv — which contains additional environment variables, my rake task required.

Can add the following to schedule.rb. This will work with any ENVIRONMENT=variable.

### schedule.rb
env ‘SHELL’, ‘/usr/bin/zsh’

I have found myself needing to know the operating system platform. Rather than explicitly checking for /etc/lsb-base or /etc/issue to determine if it’s Ubuntu or Debian respectively. Let Ohai do the work for you.

This small gist prints the platform. You can access just about anything you want to know about your system via this method.

I couldn’t find information on changing the default “Captcha response is incorrect, please try again.” text returned by the reCAPTCHA Rails plugin.

This gist uses Rails 2.2’s internationalization (I18n) to change the message.

I wanted to learn Sinatra, so I started converting my personal Rails site over to Sinatra. I scrape my Twitterholic rating, and redisplay it on my site. I need the css and html to have a Content-Type of utf-8.

I came up with the following before filter. There is probably a better way to do this, I just wanted my controllers to be less “wet”.

I also use the following to render all css.

Here is a config.ru for use with Sinatra. It also includes a logging section for your app. This configuration works on Sinatra (0.9.1.1). Quite a few of the examples out there use the deprecated Sinatra::Application.default_options vs set.

:update:

Updated config.ru with Blake’s suggestions.

Geminstallthat is a pretty groovy name, which reidmix came up with. What would be really geeky is a gem named ‘that‘, which allows you to read my blog. I didn’t feel like dealing with rubyforge (to get the non-githuby gem name) , so here is a sneak peek at that.

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ sudo sudo gem install retr0h-that
Successfully installed retr0h-that-0.0.0
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for retr0h-that-0.0.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for retr0h-that-0.0.0...
$ that

It will display all posts from the time the gem was built to Time.now.

I wanted to automatically upload my bundle_fu assets to Amazon’s s3, and use their Cloudfront CDN for SnGs. I came up with the following rake task, which can be hooked into Vlad.

It’s as simple as adding the following to production.rb, and running the rake task ‘cloud:upload’.

ActionController::Base.asset_host = "cloudfront_url"

I created a quick little rake task which finds missing RSpec view tests. It assumes the extension is .haml, however, this can be overridden with the EXTENSION environment variable.

rake spec:missing_view_templates
or
EXTENSION=erb rake spec:missing_view_templates