I was trying to make a glossary of words grouped by their first letter, but I wanted words starting with the letter é grouped with words starting with the letter e. No small feat you might imagine. Wrong.

dict = words.inject({}) do |dict, word|
  letter = word.chars.decompose[0..0].downcase.to_s
  dict[letter] ||= []
  dict[letter] << word; dict
end

The reason this works is that letters like é have a decomposed form in Unicode, this form consists of a latin letter and a accent modifier. I’m not sure what happens if you run Arabic through this code, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

If you’ve installed the Rubyforge gem, which is a dependency of just about every gem in the wild through Hoe, then you might have see the OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError when trying to connect to a server over SSL. This is caused by http_access2 because it refuses to connect with SSL without verifying the certificates.

The problem is a little bit tricky because SOAP4r abstracts you away from http_access2 and that makes it hard to set the proper configuration on the HTTP client. Fortunately SOAP4r has a way to configure it’s subsystem.

Let’s assume that you’ve defined a SOAP::RPC::Driver somewhere.

class WebrApi < ::SOAP::RPC::Driver
  DefaultEndpointUrl = "https://webr.com/api"
  [snip]
end

There are two ways of making the error go away, the first is to tell http_access2 to stop verifying certificates and just get on with the connection.

proxy = WebrApi.new
proxy.options['protocol.http.ssl_config.verify_mode'] = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE

This is not recommended because one of the ideas behind SSL is that you can always verify that you’re talking to the correct server. If you want to keep this feature you will have to tell http_access2 which certificates to use.

proxy = WebrApi.new
client.options['protocol.http.ssl_config.verify_mode'] = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER
client.options['protocol.http.ssl_config.ca_file'] = '/etc/ssl/certs/certification_authority.crt'
client.options['protocol.http.ssl_config.client_cert'] = '/etc/ssl/certs/client.cert'
client.options['protocol.http.ssl_config.client_key'] = '/etc/ssl/certs/client.key'

You can find more advanced configuration examples in the SOAP4r source in sample/soap/ssl.

Changeset 6185, or so we assume, broke our fix for Basic Authentication in Safari when using RESTful Rails routes.

Luckily it wasn’t too hard to fix the fix and we’ve decided to make a plugin out of it so we can easily keep the fix in sync with Rails for all our projects. You can find safari_basic_auth_fix in our Subversion repository. The current fix makes sure that semicolons are encoded for every outgoing URL and it decodes the semicolons for all the incoming URLs.

Update: Changeset 6485 removed semicolons as a action separator, so this shouldn’t be a problem anymore once you upgrade to Rails trunk.

As you may have noticed OpenStruct#id always returns the object id of the OpenStruct instance, even when you set id.

>> o = OpenStruct.new :id => 2
=> #<OpenStruct id=2>
>> o.id
(irb):4: warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id
=> 9850940

Fortunately there is a simple way around this.

OpenStruct.__send__(:define_method, :id) { @table[:id] }

Now OpenStruct behaves like we want.

>> o.id
=> 2

Note that hash and object_id still work fine. You probably want to keep in mind that we’ve redefined the default OpenStruct behaviour and it might cause problems elsewhere.