On And Off The Rails

So been using Sphinx with the UltraSphinx plugin and I came across the requirement to use filters to reject records. Unfortunately in the plugin the filters are hardwired to submit the ‘exclude’ parameter as ‘false’ i.e include. Time for a quick hack I think…….

Very easy to fix, just open up the ‘internals.rb’ file in the UltraSphinx plugin or include the gem using ‘rake gems:unpack GEM=ultrasphinx’ (need to have config.gem “ultrasphinx” set in envrinoment.rb) and then find that file.

Ok, so found the file? On line 97 is this loop:

Array(opts['filters']).each do |field, value|
  ....
 begin
     case value
     when Integer, Float, BigDecimal, NilClass, Array
       # XXX Hack to force floats to be floats
       value = value.to_f if type == 'float'
       # Just bomb the filter in there
       request.filters << Riddle::Client::Filter.new(field, Array(value), false)
     when Range
     ....
end

The ‘Riddle::Client::Filter.new(field, Array(value), false)’ call is the one we need to change (the ‘false’ is the exclude param).

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So I needed to parse the log files for SlimTimer this weekend to correct a data loss issue due to a small issue with implementing https for subscribers. The issue required looking for requests that had returned something other than “200 OK” collecting the parameters and entering any data that had got lost. After a bit of messing around it occured to me the the format of the parameters string in the Rail’s logs was not a million miles from the JSON format, so I came up with this to turn the string into a useable hash:

params =~ /.*: Parameters: (\{.*\})$/
str_hash = JSON.parse(params.gsub('=>',':'))

This provides a hash of the parameters used in the request. Of course the keys here are strings so to convert to symbols we can then use:

def create_symbol_hash(input)
  ret = input
  if input.is_a? Hash
    ret = {}
    input.each do |k, v|
      ret[k.to_sym] = create_symbol_hash(v)
    end
    ret
  else
    ret
  end
end

and simply pass in the output from the JSON library. Seemed quite neat to me anyway.

I released TweetLists last night, well actually this morning (about 3am), the idea being to try and capture a little of the zeitgeist on Twitter by aggregating the links people are talking about. At the moment there are 3 lists, the live feed, a popular feed (the links ordered by the number of times they appeared) and one I have chosen to call Twitterati (quite proud of that!) which is the links ordered by the number of followers people have.

At the moment there is no time aspect to the Twitterati or Popular lists (not relevant on the live one) but I guess I will make them for the last 7 days?

Lesson one form this has been: don’t try and be clever with your scheduling — cron just works. I tried to use the Rufus Scheduler and it had stopped running by the time I got up again this morning.

Anyhoo, I’ve found it to be fun and interesting so far, any ideas for other lists?