When I worked on Best Tech Videos with Alexey Kovyrin, we faced a problem of filtering videos by category with selecting posts categories in the same query. It was easy to solve the problem, but there is one query optimization trick exists.

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It’s happened! We all waited for Sphinx update and finally Andrew Aksyonoff has released version 0.9.7 of his wonderful search engine (who does not know about it, look my previous posts here and here).

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Свершилось! Мы все ждали обновления Sphinx, и вот наконец Andrew Aksyonoff выпустил версию 0.9.7 своего замечательного поискового движка (для тех, кто не понимает, о чем я говорю: посмотрите мои предыдущие заметки здесь и здесь).

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Very often I have to implement console scripts (because of my laziness, for boring processes optimization). Many of them write some information to the output, show process status or display results of work. Anyway, it’s very wearisome action to read script output, and I want to highlight most important things: errors in red, successfully finished steps in green color, etc. And it is a case when ANSI escape sequences could help. They are supported by the most terminals, including VT100 (btw, Windows NT family console does not support it, but I will back to this issue later).

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RSpec provides a framework for writing what can be called executable specifications of program behavior. In this short post I want to explain why I use this framework in place of classic TestUnit library.

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Every time I’m creating fixtures for Rails application I’m being angry because any more or less considerable project needs tons of them. Most complicated thing is to track all relationships, validations, and to keep fixtures up to date. A few days ago Yurii Rashkovskii has released small utility — Fixturease. What if I would tell you that now you can create your fixtures using your models?

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