Upgrading Gutsy to Hardy

My slicehost slice was running Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10), but when I switched my projects from my personal svn server to github, gutsy only had an early version of git that doesn't support submodule ... the only way to upgrade git was to upgrade my ubuntu.

After a quick mysql backup, these are the instructions that worked:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
# [ replace each "gutsy" with "hardy" ]
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I found this solution on ubuntugeek.com. It worked first time, like a charm. Congratulations ubuntu team ... linux has come a long, long way

Back up your mysql database with mysqldump

I don't use this often so I end up googling it every time I need it.

mysqldump -u root -p database_name > sql_dump_file

Now I know exactly where to find it and I don't have to scan a whole article just to get the syntax.

Change "root" to the user you normally use; you an also specify -ppassword (no space between -p and the password) so you don't have to enter the password interactively ... security issues etc but if you're running this from a script I'm not sure what the alternative is.

What kind of World do You want to inhabit?

Whatever you think of Stallman, go have a look at this quick dystopia, and imagine what kind of world you would like to live in. Then head over to boingboing and learn about ACTA. I preferred the days when Russia and China were the bad guys, and they were far away.

It should have no missing translations!

I'm a big fan of rspec and of rails' I18n, and I don't like having to study yml translation files over and over to make sure every key has a translation in every language; so I wrote it_should_have_no_missing_translations to test my templates for missing translations.

Previously, I needed this for every template:

  it "should have no missing translations in fr" do
    I18n.locale = "fr"
    do_render
    response.should_not have_tag("span.translation_missing")
  end

  it "should have no missing translations in en" do
    I18n.locale = "en"
    do_render
    response.should_not have_tag("span.translation_missing")
  end

Where do_render knows how to render the template I'm testing. If you're like me, and I presume you are, you're thinking the duplication up there is a bit annoying and someone should do something about it. Well, here you go:

  it_should_have_no_missing_translations

You like? Obviously, it_should_have_no_missing_translations needs a bit of context, like an implementation of do_render, and any other setup you need. Here's the implementation, under the WTFPL. Copy it into your specs or make a helper out of it that you include in your spec, or publish it in a gem and become famous.

  def it_should_have_no_missing_translations
    INSTALLED_LANGUAGES.each do |lang|
      it "should not have translations missing in #{lang}" do
        I18n.locale = lang
        do_render
        response.should_not have_missing_translations
      end
    end
  end

have_missing_translations is defined thus:

  INSTALLED_LANGUAGES = [:en, :fr] unless defined?(INSTALLED_LANGUAGES)

  class TranslationsMissing
    def initialize(scope)
      @scope = scope
    end

    def matches? response
      if response.is_a? String
        root_node = HTML::Document.new(response, false, false).root
      else
        root_node = HTML::Document.new(response.body, false, false).root
      end
      m = @scope.css_select root_node, ".translation_missing"
      @missing_translations = []
      m.each do |mt|
        @missing_translations << mt.children.first
      end
      m.size > 0
    end

    def failure_message
      "expected that response would contain a translation_missing element, but it didn't"
    end

    def negative_failure_message
      "expected that response would contain no missing translations, but it contained these \n#{@missing_translations.join("\n")}"
    end
  end

  def have_missing_translations
    TranslationsMissing.new self
  end