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ActiveRecord magic for importing across different database types

I recently had to import some old tickets from Collaboa (postgres) into Trac (sqlite3). After trying some conventional data dumping methods and getting frustrated with dealing with all the formatting issues, I came up with a rather simple solution by using ActiveRecord to do the dirty work with two database connections:
require ‘rubygems‘
require ‘active_record‘
$config = YAML.load_file(“#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/database.yml“)

module [...]

It’s Icy Outside

Rails 2.0 dependency system problems

This is one of those “PC Load Letter!?!?!” bugs that had be me stumped for longer than it should have. I was using the restful_comments plugin and noticed after upgrading to Rails 2 that I could only post one comment, after which point the system would start dying with bizarre errors such as “User expected, [...]

Yahoo search broken for ‘planypus’

You’ve gotta love it when software assumes it’s smarter than the user. Google finds planypus just fine but search for planypus on Yahoo and all you get are links to platypus related items. Now there are tons of planypus links on the web - why is it that Yahoo decides to just completely throw [...]

validates_acceptance_of behavior in Rails 2.0

I noticed that when upgrading to Rails 2.0, my validates_acceptance_of started failing (or rather, it started telling me that my field was not accepted when the param being passed was ‘1′). Apparently I had to add the :accept => true to make it work. I discovered this by reading the Rails source, where it mentions [...]

Introducing Elastic Server On Demand

Ta Da! Ok…so now all people who keep asking “what have you been working on” are going to get your answer…
We at CohesiveFT, have finally opened Elastic Server On Demand Beta up to public registration! So what is this thing?
Elastic Servers are custom application stacks that you build from a set of components you can [...]

How to hire a visual/interaction designer

Design by committee is a bad idea.
Everyone knows this but few people practice it. There’s an inherent desire to get everyone’s input on the project, especially in a small team. What this leads to is a lot of argument and very little progress.

Especially bad is the idea that team members should give feedback directly to [...]

Bluehost database downtime continues for two months

I’ve filed 4 support tickets, called support, had them admit there was a problem, posted on Matt’s blog, and yet bluehost refuses to notify their customers that there are persistent database problems going on. So here it is - the public announcement - bluehost is having constant MySQL database downtime (over the last two months). [...]