After attending Rails Edge in Reston, Virginia I decided to move some common tasks from my ~/.irbrc file and put them into Rake. I thought I would share a task that reads and writes the ActiveRecord schema table. Sometimes in migrations this is either good to know or manually change. Simply copy this in a foo.task file in your project/lib/tasks directory and use rake -T to see the description and usage. I have placed these tasks in the db:version namespace.

I made a revised version of a rake task that I have used quite often, for unloading existing DB tables into fixture data and thought I would share. This rake task is the in correct name space and adds a "rake db:fixtures:unload" command to your rails project when you put this in "lib/tasks/foo.rake". It can take an optional TABLES variable or if none is present the whole array of DB tables are converted. I find this rake task helpful when dealing with LARGE databases.

Well this is far beyond cool but highly functional, a Quake like terminal implementation of Terminal.app that is a HotKey away from within any application. A friend turned me on to this after it showed up on the Monday morning Apple links post from arstechnica.com. Although I have never thought of this idea, it seems to have been a popular request for quite some time and after a public request, the author of QuickSilver stepped up to the challenge and coded this little goodie using the application enhancer method called SIMBL which was created by Mike Solomon, the creator of the PithHelmet plugin for Safari.

I will be the first to admit that I am really just learning how to tap into the power of my shell environment and to be honest, I've spent way to many hours reading man pages and figuring out how to do some really neat things that help my automate my workflow and system administration. Mostly these are just basic tasks like my Simple MySQL Backup and Deleting Invisible Resource Files scripts. But in all seriousness, when you get right down to using a UNIX-based operating system, you cannot escape using the shell environment. This is a good thing, its your friend, and getting your feet wet sooner than later is a good idea.

If you have ever accessed your website using a network protocol such as the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Samba (SMB), Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), or Network File System (NFS) using your Mac – I am sure you have run into this problem before – dreaded invisible resource fork files. These are the files that begin with a ._ and they are normally not seen from within the finder. My understanding is that these files are not even created on your local Mac hard drive since the HFS+ file system is smart enough to keep your data and resource forks together in one single file. But even if you are accessing your website from one Mac HFS+ volume to another Mac HFS+ volume, these files will still be created by programs like DreamWeaver and TextMate because the various protocols to access that remote share and/or the file systems themselves will need to split them to cope. So ultimately when ever you use these other types of file systems or network protocols, you will eventually be creating lost of invisible resource fork files.

After being exposed to using TextMate for all my normal text editing needs, I soon began to do more things than just simple GREP-based search and replace functions. I actually started to look at code more often. Within a few short months, I had gone away from my established norm of the happenstantial viewing of simple CSS, HTML and PlainText files to a ful-time lookey lou of languages such as Ruby, XML, PHP, SQL or any number of configuration files for Apache, PHP, Postfix, Bind, and so on. It's been an exciting time for me over the past 6 months and it feels like open hunting season on any hard to find UNIX application files that are deep in the brush of my Mac OS X. Belive me, treasure are rich once you start digging.

Lately, I've been loving all things that can be solved by using RsyncX. It's my de facto backup utility and I just keep finding more and more tasks for it as each day goes by. It has become the hammer for all my system's needs. So when it came time for me to implement a nice little backup routine for the MySQL databases hosted here at ActionMoniker.com, it was the first tool I considered. My requirements were simple, I needed a SQL script of selected databases in logically named folders for each DB with time-stamps in the file name. Then step and repeat on a regular basis.