Bibliographic Wilderness

Bibliographic Wilderness
	Are you talking to Heroku redis in cleartext or SSL?
In “typical” Redis installation, you might be talking to redis on localhost or on a private network, and clients typically talk to redis in cleartext. Redis doesn’t even natively support communications over SSL. (Or maybe it does now with redis6?) However, the Heroku redis add-on (the one from Heroku itself) supports SSL connections via “Stunnel”, … Continue reading Are you talking to Heroku redis in cleartext or SSL? →
	Comparing performance of a Rails app on different Heroku formations
I develop a “digital collections” or “asset management” app, which manages and makes digitized historical objects and their descriptions available to the public, from the collections here at the Science History Institute. The app receives relatively low level of traffic (according to Google Analytics, around 25K pageviews a month), although we want it to be … Continue reading Comparing performance of a Rails app on different Heroku formations →
	Deep Dive: Moving ruby projects from Travis to Github Actions for CI
So this is one of my super wordy posts, if that’s not your thing abort now, but some people like them. We’ll start with a bit of context, then get to some detailed looks at Github Actions features I used to replace my travis builds, with example config files and examination of options available. For … Continue reading Deep Dive: Moving ruby projects from Travis to Github Actions for CI →
	Unexpected performance characteristics when exploring migrating a Rails app to Heroku
I work at a small non-profit research institute. I work on a Rails app that is a “digital collections” or “digital asset management” app. Basically it manages and provides access (public as well as internal) to lots of files and description about those files, mostly images. It’s currently deployed on some self-managed Amazon EC2 instances … Continue reading Unexpected performance characteristics when exploring migrating a Rails app to Heroku →
	faster_s3_url: Optimized S3 url generation in ruby
Subsequent to my previous investigation about S3 URL generation performance, I ended up writing a gem with optimized implementations of S3 URL generation. github: faster_s3_url It has no dependencies (not even aws-sdk). It can speed up both public and presigned URL generation by around an order of magnitude. In benchmarks on my 2015 MacBook compared … Continue reading faster_s3_url: Optimized S3 url generation in ruby →
	Delete all S3 key versions with ruby AWS SDK v3
If your S3 bucket is versioned, then deleting an object from s3 will leave a previous version there, as a sort of undo history. You may have a “noncurrent expiration lifecycle policy” set which will delete the old versions after so many days, but within that window, they are there. What if you were deleting … Continue reading Delete all S3 key versions with ruby AWS SDK v3 →
	Github Actions tutorial for ruby CI on Drifting Ruby
I’ve been using travis for free automated testing (“continuous integration”, CI) on my open source projects for a long time. It works pretty well. But it’s got some little annoyances here and there, including with github integration, that I don’t really expect to get fixed after its acquisition by private equity. They also seem to … Continue reading Github Actions tutorial for ruby CI on Drifting Ruby →
	More benchmarking optimized S3 presigned_url generation
In a recent post, I explored profiling and optimizing S3 presigned_url generation in ruby to be much faster. In that post, I got down to using a Aws::Sigv4::Signer instance from the AWS SDK, but wondered if there was a bunch more optimization to be done within that black box. Julik posted a comment on that … Continue reading More benchmarking optimized S3 presigned_url generation →
	Delivery patterns for non-public resources hosted on S3
I work at the Science History Institute on our Digital Collections app (written in Rails), which is kind of a “digital asset management” app combined with a public catalog of our collection. We store many high-resolution TIFF images that can be 100MB+ each, as well as, currently, a handful of PDFs and audio files. We … Continue reading Delivery patterns for non-public resources hosted on S3 →
	Speeding up S3 URL generation in ruby
It looks like the AWS SDK is very slow at generating S3 URLs, both public and presigned, and that you can generate around an order of magnitude faster in both cases. This can matter if you are generating hundreds of S3 URLs at once. My app The app I work is a “digital collections” or … Continue reading Speeding up S3 URL generation in ruby →
	A custom local OHMS front-end
Here at the Science History Institute, we’ve written a custom OHMS viewer front-end, to integrate seamlessly with our local custom “content management system” (a Rails-based digital repository app with source available), and provide some local functionality like the ability to download certain artifacts related to the oral history. We spent quite a bit of energy … Continue reading A custom local OHMS front-end →
	Encrypting patron data (in Rails): why and how
Special guest post by Eddie Rubeiz I’m Eddie Rubeiz. Along with the owner of this blog, Jonathan Rochkind, and our system administrator, Dan, I work on the Science History Institute’s digital collections website, where you will find, among other marvels, this picture of the inventor of Styrofoam posing with a Santa “sculpture”, which predates the … Continue reading Encrypting patron data (in Rails): why and how →
	Intentionally considering fixity checking
In our digital collections app rewrite at Science History Institute, we took a moment to step back and  be intentional about how we approach “fixity checking” features and UI, to make sure it’s well-supporting the needs it’s meant to.  I think we do a good job of providing UI to let repository managers and technical … Continue reading Intentionally considering fixity checking →
	Sprockets 4 and your Rails app
Sprockets 4.0 was released on October 8th 2019, after several years of beta, congratulations and hooray. There are a couple confusing things that may give you trouble trying to upgrade to sprockets 4 that aren’t covered very well in the CHANGELOG or upgrade notes, although now that I’ve taken some time to understand it, I … Continue reading Sprockets 4 and your Rails app →
	open source, engineering professional ethics, complicity, and chef
So an open topic of controversy in open source philosophy/ideology/practice (/theology), among those involved in controversing on such things, has been “field of endeavor” restrictions. If I release software I own the copyright to as (quasi-)open source, but I try to say that legally you can’t use it for certain things, or the license suggests … Continue reading open source, engineering professional ethics, complicity, and chef →
	Card Catalogs: “Paper Machines”
A book I just became aware of that I am very excited about (thanks to Jessamyn West for posting a screenshot of her ‘summer reading’ on facebook, bringing it to my attention!) Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Krajewski PhD, Markus (Author), Peter Krapp (Translator) Why the card catalog―a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements―can be regarded as … Continue reading Card Catalogs: “Paper Machines” →
	Dealing with legacy and externally loaded code in webpack(er)
I’ve been mostly a ruby and Rails dev for a while now, and I’ve been a ‘full-stack web dev’ since that was the only kind of web dev. I’ve always been just comfortable enough in Javascript to get by — well, until recently. The, I don’t know what you call it, “modern JS” (?) advances … Continue reading Dealing with legacy and externally loaded code in webpack(er) →
	Bootstrap 3 to 4: Changes in how font size, line-height, and spacing is done. Or “what happened to $line-height-computed.”
Bootstrap 4 (I am writing this in the age of 4.3.0) changes some significant things about how it handles font-size, line-height, and spacer variables in SASS. In particular, changing font-size calculations from px units to rem units; with some implications for line-heights as handled in bootstrap; and changes to how whitespace is calculated to be … Continue reading Bootstrap 3 to 4: Changes in how font size, line-height, and spacing is done. Or “what happened to $line-height-computed.” →
	What happened to $grid-float-breakpoint in Bootstrap 4. And screen size breakpoint shift from 3 -> 4.
I have an app that customizes Bootstrap 3 stylesheets, by re-using Bootstrap variables and mixins. My app used the Bootstrap 3 $grid-float-breakpoint and $grid-float-breakpoint-max variables in @media queries, to have ‘complex’ layout ‘collapse’ to something compact and small on a small screen. This variable isn’t available in bootstrap 4 anymore.  This post is about Bootstrap 4.3.0, and … Continue reading What happened to $grid-float-breakpoint in Bootstrap 4. And screen size breakpoint shift from 3 -> 4. →
	Blacklight 7: current_user or other request context in SearchBuilder solr query builder
In Blacklight, the “SearchBuilder” is an object responsible for creating a Solr query. A template is generated into your app for customization, and you can write a kind of “plugin” to customize how the query is generated. You might need some “request context” to do this. One common example is the current_user, for various kinds … Continue reading Blacklight 7: current_user or other request context in SearchBuilder solr query builder →