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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Today I found that Sphinx search engine has been updated. Major new features include:

• extended query mode with boolean, field limits, phrases, and proximity support (eg.: @title "hello world"~10 | @body example program);
• extended sorting mode (eg.: @weight DESC @id ASC);
• combined phrase+statistical ranking which takes words frequencies into account (currently in extended mode only);
• official Python API;
• contributed Perl and Ruby APIs.

I have updated Sphinx Client Library along with Sphinx 0.9.7-RC2 Windows build.

Almost all Web-applications needs data search logic and really often this logic should have full-text search capabilities. If you are using MySQL database, you can use its FULLTEXT search, but it’s not efficient when you have a large amout of data. In this case third party search engines used, and one of them (and I think, the most efficient) is Sphinx. In this article I’ll present my port of Sphinx client library for Ruby and show how to use it.

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There are couple of cheat sheets about Ruby on Rails and related technologies can be found in the web. I decided to collect all of them (almost all) in one post just to keep them in mind. All of them are in full color PDFs or PNGs.

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In my current project I need to encode media files from any format to several predefined. Furthermore I need to track progress and show it for the customer. I don’t want to describe wich media formats I need and what troubles with converting (maybe it will be my future posts, if anybody interested), instead I will describe common idea how to implement encoder scripts and how to track progress.

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