Rails debugging has gotten really good lately; a new Rails project automatically includes the ruby debug gem, and it is enabled by default in development. The Rails instructions for it work great if you start your server with rails server and want to use the command line debugging interface. However, I prefer to run all my apps with puma-dev to give myself a nice local test domain name, and I prefer to use vscode for debugging.
With the release of iOS 17.2 and macOS 14.2, there is now the ability to see a count of the number of chat messages stored in iCloud. A bunch of people were comparing counts and what not both on social media and in work chats, so I decided to take a look at my count too. I noticed that for some reason my number was an order of magnitude higher than everyone else’s. While many people had hundreds of thousands of messages, I had 2.9 Million. I am not a popular individual, so I knew something had to be wrong. I decided to investigate by hacking the messages database.
More …Recently it occurred to my colleagues and me that an IRC bot could benefit our chat room discussions. I looked around a bit and I couldn't find any simple ruby IRC bots to use. However, in my searching, I did find shout-bot. Shout-bot is a simple IRC "shouter" in that it connects, reports a message, and then disconnects. Using this as a starting point, I was able to create a simple bot that stays connected to a room and responds to messages.
More …Edit: Erik Hinterbichler has written a much better native plugin called White Out. I highly recommend using that one instead of this one.
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