Kablingy

Recently I was in the market for a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. I wanted something to track leads, contact dates, and I wanted to store a plethora of custom information with each new lead/customer.

I tried out some open source tools, but they were too complicated for the job. Highrise didn't have what I wanted for this particular purpose. So I tried one out one of the CRM/SaaS market leaders. Let's leave them nameless for the post.

Within 30 minutes of signing up online to try it out, the sales staff phoned me. Holy moly, what quick customer service! Peter, the chap on the other end was delightful. He asked me all about my CRM needs, my business, and touted the benefits of his CRM online service. He was a genuinely pleasant fellow. I raved about the customer service after the call. Unfortunately, Peter set me up for a follow up call with... an account manager.

Enter the forceful salesman.

Bill the account manager emailed me 10 nanoseconds later eagerly looking to arrange a call with me. A day passed before I emailed Bill back. I had solved my CRM needs in the meantime with something much cheaper that his solution, and so I emailed him back to politely decline his offer.

This didn't suit Bill.

Bill ignored my email and phoned me back the very next day, clearly juiced up on one too many orange mocha frappachinos. He was aggressive, dismissive, and never gave up on the sale. He was everything what you would expect from a forceful salesman. I told him annual payments were so 2007, but he parried with quarterly payments.  I told him I disliked lock-in contracts and favoured 37 Signals style, 'cancel anytime' policies. He informed me that they'd be out of business in 8 months.  I told him his user interface was too complicated for me, he countered with the offer of an in-house demonstration. But my favourite part was when he turned IBM on me and started to talk codswallop about The Cloud.

The Cloud, man.

"Steve, you could have your leads integrated with your Facebook, your LinkedIn, your Twitter. If you don't leverage The Cloud, you're going to get left behind. The Cloud is the future of selling."

The call ended there as the cow manure detector was off the chart and I've been known to get belligerent towards the parties of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).  What a real shame that the whole affair spiralled from "What great customer service!" to "I'm gonna blog about this jackass"

In the meantime, our CRM solution which is a custom Rails application that we built, is serving our needs nicely. Let us know if you need some custom software done right.

[Warning, this is a programmer post. It gets Blurby!]

We’ve upgraded almost all of our applications to Rails 2.3.5 and Ruby 1.9. All things said, it was not easy.

So here are my top 5 tips for upgrading your Rails applications to use Ruby 1.9

The MySQL Ruby Gem

If you use MySQL, use this mysql-ruby fork by  Loren Segal. It wouldn’t install as a gem so I downloaded the code from GitHub and turned it into a gem. Email me if you want the gem.

The MySQL Database

The columns and tables in our databases had to be converted to UTF-8. These commands came in handy

/* Here's 1 command altering a table, and 2 commands altering the first 2 fields in that table */
alter table users character set utf8;
alter table users modify email varchar(255) character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci;
alter table users modify crypted_password varchar(255) character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci;
/* etc.... */

Then I put these lines in my.cnf

[mysqld]
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

UTF-8 + Rails + Ruby 1.9

Watch for UTF-8/ASCII problems. In combination with the above, I would advise

• Putting # coding utf-8 at the top of your ruby code
• Putting these lines into your environment.rb

Encoding.default_internal = 'utf-8'

Encoding.default_external = 'utf-8'

• [Update - 29/03/2010]  - Consider using these 2 patches to force UTF-8 encoding.

Maintaining Multiple Ruby versions

Use Ruby Version Manager. This is very useful if, like me, you have a number of Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 applications running. Ruby Switcher makes it easy to install new Ruby VM’s and switch between them.  Note, it installs Ruby 1.9 off your home directory. Edit the script to change this.

Test

All of our applications have a healthy mixture of Test Unit tests, and Selenium tests. Converting to 1.9 would have been terrifying without this safety net.  It’s been said enough already, but if you’re not testing your code, I would advise that you start now.

If you’ve any questions about converting your Rails applications to Ruby 1.9, just email me or comment below.