I developed MySecrets to manages my personal secrets/passwords. I had a lot of fun doing BDD with cucumber. Pickle works very nicely with Machinist to reduce step definition code. I used authlogic for authentication and formtastic to reduce the boiler plate code in my views.

I had some trouble integrating cucumber, pickle, machinist, and authlogic. A user has 0 to many secrets and secrets are protected by authlogic. So cucumber features that needed to add secrets and validate them were a little tricky.

This scenario creates a user, login in, creates a secret, shows the secret, and finally validates the secret.


The show pages are handled with a polymorphic_path.


The actual user creation and login steps are handled here.


The secret is validated with:


All of the coded can be found at http://github.com/perry3819/mysecrets

Labels: BDD, Rails, Ruby

pwfoo is a gemcutter.org hosted gem that I developed to generate random passwords, score the strength of passwords, and generate random seeds.

Generate password


Determine password strength


The SrandSeedGenerator is interesting because it uses the current time and currently running processes to generate random seeds.


pwfoo can be installed from gemcutter.org.

Labels: Gem, Ruby

Feedpoint (source) is a blog aggregator written with Ruby on Rails deployed on a linux server. It retrieves RSS content from blogs and displays them sorted by date at http://feedpoint.hertler.org. Retrieving the RSS content is an expensive step and caching is needed to speed up HTTP requests. Google searching for a way to expire page caching on a timed interval did not yield promising results so I developed a very easy custom strategy through the use of Linux cron jobs.

The Rails code for the page caching is in home_controller.rb.



caches_page and expire_page  are ActionController methods. caches_page caches the the :index and :planet_redpoint actions and expire_page expires them.

With this setup, http://feedpoint.hertler.org/home/ will load the :index into page cache and http://feedpoint.hertler.org/home/expire_cache will expire the cache. At this point, monkeys could be trained to navigate to the expire_cache URL every ten minutes or a cron job could be set up. This post will focus on setting up the cron job.

The cron job was configured by entering crontab -e from a terminal and then adding the following line:


This job uses cURL to call the expire_page action every ten minutes. Good cron tutorials are all over the web and beyond the scope of this post.

One added benefit of this approach is that if a blogger is anxious for a recently posted blog to show up on the world famous http://feedpoint.hertler.org site, it can manually be refreshed right away!

Labels: Rails, Ruby

I had a little trouble installing the mysql gem on OS X 10.5 this morning so I thought I would post the solution.

1) Download the mysql binaries from apple http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25017?viewlocale=en_US
2) Unpack the binaries.
3) sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config (be sure to give an absolute path to the config file)
4) done

Labels: mysql, Rails, Ruby

I thought I would share my AES encryption wrapper for Ruby. The attached code utilizes openssl.

require 'openssl'

module AESCrypt
  DEFAULT_CIPHER_TYPE = 'aes-256-cbc'
  CRYPT_STRUCT = Struct.new(:encrypted_data, :key, :iv)

  def AESCrypt.encrypt(plain_text, opts={})
    cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new(DEFAULT_CIPHER_TYPE)
    cipher.encrypt
    opts.reverse_merge! :key => cipher.random_key, :iv => cipher.random_iv
    cipher.key = random_key = opts[:key]
    cipher.iv = random_iv = opts[:iv]
    encrypted_data = cipher.update(plain_text)
    encrypted_data << cipher.final
    CRYPT_STRUCT.new(encrypted_data, random_key, random_iv)
  end

  def AESCrypt.decrypt(crypt_struct)
    cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new(DEFAULT_CIPHER_TYPE)
    cipher.decrypt
    cipher.key = crypt_struct.key
    cipher.iv = crypt_struct.iv
    cipher.update(crypt_struct.encrypted_data) + cipher.final
  end
  
end

Labels: openssl, Ruby

I have recently spent some time learning Ruby and Rails. When I learn a new language I typically write an easy application so that the focus is not on solving a particularly difficult problem, but on learning the new technology. To learn Ruby on Rails, I wrote http://firstmem.hertler.org. The code is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/firstmem/

Labels: Rails, Ruby