Advogato blog for dan

Way(land) back when

Tue, 2 Apr 2013 22:10:06 GMT

It’s been a little while since I made progress on psadan ($dayjob and daddy duty), but from looking at the commit log I see it’s even longer since I wrote about any of it. So:

I wrote a macro. with-sync does what he name suggests: it executes its body, then sends a sync message to the wl_display, then waits for the callback. This is the standard Wayland way to make sure that stuff has finished happening before doing more stuff. The actual macro implementation was pretty similar to writing macros in CL except that the quasiquote escape is ~ not , – and that this is a Lisp-1, so declaring a local variable called promise turns out to be a bad idea when you also want to call the function (promise)

We refactored the handle-message and listen functions to return the new state of the agent that runs them, instead of keeping the globals in an atom inside it. Bcause we only update globals through the agent, this saves us from having to keep them in an atom, which felt kind of ugly.

And finally: psadan now parses the wl_drm protocol as well as the regular one – that bit was easy, it’s just another file of XML to parse. This is however where I got bogged down quite comprehensively in how we actually use the stuff though: there are a lot of bits. I’m hoping that JOGL , possibly in conjunction with its Pbuffer support, is (a) relevant, (b) sufficient, but even then there’s titting around with ioctls to be done which is not readily doable in the JVM.

In mysterious way(land)s

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:10:17 GMT

Why are our bind messages to wl_registry erroring out?

 
15:19 &lt; daniels> yeah, wl_registry_bind is a special case - i think it's the 
                 one non-autogenerated marshaller we have
15:32 &lt; daniels> actually no, sorry, i'm lying through my teeth
15:32 &lt; daniels> it's no longer autogenerated
15:32 &lt; daniels> but the parser expands new_id to interface + version + id
15:33 &lt; daniels> it used to be hand-written, but is now autogenerated
15:33 &lt; daniels> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/tree/src/scanner.c#n614
16:28 &lt; jekstrand> dan_b: It is a somewhat-special case.  Basically, every time 
                   there's a new_id that does not have any type information 
                   specified, two aditional pieces of information (interface 
                   name and version) get added.
16:29 &lt; jekstrand> dan_b: That really should be documented, but it's not.  I 
                   had to grep through the scanner.c file to find it all.

Armed with this additional info the fix was fairly straightforward: I augmented the XML parsing/protocol generation to stick an additional pair of arguments into each message that contains a new_id and no interface.

Thanks to both daniels and jekstrand on irc for clearing it up.

The long way(land) round

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:10:11 GMT

The latest round of psadan hacking was motivated by two goals

that it would be good to actually remember the globals we’re receiving when we send get_registry to the magic registry object

that if we’re going to ask for a callback when all the globals are notified, we should wait for it before continuing.

We went down a couple or three dead ends on our way to this goal, but eventually we settled on creating an agent responsible for listening to the connection (I called it channel, in the absence of any better ideas) and dispatching (using a handle-message multimethod) to some code appropriate for each kind of message we’re receiving.

Learnings

multimethods the clojure way are pretty versatile: you can dispatch on pretty much any property – or derived property – of the function argument, not just on type. In our case that’s the interface name and the message (event) name:

 (defmulti handle-message 
   (fn [conn m] 
     [(:name (:interface m)) (:message m)]))
 
 (defmethod handle-message [:wl_registry :global] [conn m]
   (let [[name interface version] (:args m)]
     (conn/register-global conn name interface version)))
 
 (defmethod handle-message [:wl_callback :done] [conn m]
   (let [object (conn/get-object  conn (:object-id m))
	 promise (:promise object)]
     (when promise
       (deliver promise m))))
 
 (defmethod handle-message :default [conn m]
   (println [“unknown message” (:name (:interface m)) (:message m)]))

we handle the “tell me when you’re done” requirement with a promise. The get-globals code adds an unfulfilled promise to the callback object it creates, then once it has sent out its messages it derefs the promise , causing it to wait until something delivers the promise. That something is the handle-message implementation for wl_callback, for which, see above.

we were trying to map handle-message onto each of the messages parsed out of the buffer, but not doing anything with the result. Given that map is lazy, this meant our handle-message code was for the most part not being called. Surrounding the map form with a dorun fixed this.

you send work to an agent with (send fn ...) or (send-off fn ...) which invoke the fn with the current state of the agent, not with the agent itself. Which is fine but offers no facility for the agent to send work to itself – happily, the global/magic/special variable *agent*, which evaluates to the currently running agent if any is, works nicely for this purpose
```
(defn listen [conn]
  (let [buf (conn/read-buffer conn)
        messages (buf/parse-messages buf conn :events)]
    (dorun (map #(handle-message conn %) messages)))
  (send-off agent listen)
  conn)
(send-off channel listen)
```

the ‘name’ field in a global is (confusingly) a number, and (more confusingly still) not an object id. Object number 3 in our client is a wl_callback object, whereas the global named 3 is .. well, let’s check …

psadan.core> (def channel (chan/open-channel “/home/dan/private/wayland-0”))
#’psadan.core/channel
psadan.core> (chan/get-registry channel)
;; [debug output elided]
{:object-id 3, :bytes 12, :interface {:index 2, :name :wl_callback, :requests (), :events ({:index 0, :name :done, :summary nil, :args ({:name “serial”, :type :uint, :interface nil})}), :enums ()}, :message :done, :args (-115)}
psadan.core> (get @(:globals @channel) 3)
{:interface :screenshooter, :version 1}

Next up? At some point we need to decide whether sending messages should be done by the channel or whether it’s OK to carry on doing that directly in whatever thread we happen to be in. But what would be much more fun is to see if we can actually render a window…

Finding a Way(land)

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:09:16 GMT

In the next round we shall be sending it the messages we have so lovingly composed from whole cloth and see if it reacts the same way as it did when the same bytes were sent from weston-info

And the answer is … yes, pretty much. We had to fix up our string parsing to make sense of the replies, but watch:

psadan.core> (def connection (conn/open-connection "/home/dan/private/wayland-0"))
#'psadan.core/connection
psadan.core> (defn test-send-message []
  (let [registry
        (conn/remember-object
         connection
         {:id 2 :interface (proto/find-interface-by-name :wl_registry)})
        done-cb
        (conn/remember-object
         connection
         {:id 3 :interface (proto/find-interface-by-name :wl_callback)})
        ]
    (conn/write-buffer connection
                       (buf/pack-message connection (:display connection)
                                         :requests :get_registry [registry]))
    (conn/write-buffer connection
                       (buf/pack-message connection (:display connection)
                                         :requests :sync [done-cb]))
    registry))

#'psadan.core/test-send-message
psadan.core> (test-send-message)
{:id 2, :interface {:index 1, :name :wl_registry, :requests ({:index 0, :name :bind, :summary "bind an object to the display", :args ({:name "name", :type :uint, :interface nil} {:name "id", :type :new_id, :interface nil})}), :events ({:index 0, :name :global, :summary "announce global object", :args ({:name "name", :type :uint, :interface nil} {:name "interface", :type :string, :interface nil} {:name "version", :type :uint, :interface nil})} {:index 1, :name :global_remove, :summary "announce removal of global object", :args ({:name "name", :type :uint, :interface nil})}), :enums ()}}
psadan.core> (def received (read-buffer connection))
#'psadan.core/received
psadan.core> (pprint (map (fn [x] [(:object-id x) (:message x) (:args x)]) (buf/parse-messages received connection :events)))
nil
([2 :global (1 "wl_display" 1)]
 [2 :global (2 "wl_compositor" 2)]
 [2 :global (3 "screenshooter" 1)]
 [2 :global (4 "text_cursor_position" 1)]
 [2 :global (5 "text_model_factory" 1)]
 [2 :global (6 "wl_data_device_manager" 1)]
 [2 :global (7 "wl_shm" 1)]
 [2 :global (8 "wl_seat" 1)]
 [2 :global (9 "input_method" 1)]
 [2 :global (10 "wl_output" 1)]
 [2 :global (11 "wl_drm" 1)]
 [2 :global (12 "wl_shell" 1)]
 [2 :global (13 "desktop_shell" 1)]
 [2 :global (14 "screensaver" 1)]
 [2 :global (15 "input_panel" 1)]
 [2 :global (16 "workspace_manager" 1)]
 [3 :done (58)]
 [1 :delete_id (3)])

My interpretation of what’s happening here is that we’re sending to the server a ‘tell object 2 about all your global objects’ message, followed by a ‘tell object 3 done when you’re finished doing stuff’ message, and as you can see from the output, the reply is a bunch of ids for global objects sent to object 2, a done event sent to object 3, and then a delete_id event for object 3 sent to object 1. I’m actually not sure why that last one triggers, as I don’t think I asked it to. Perhaps it’s just tidying up for me.

I’m also handwaving – if not actually handdrowning – a litle bit, because really … are these :global messages sent to object 2 or from object 2? For the moment, I am using the two directions interchangeably, which is probably not a recipe for an easier future life, but in the meantime I can continue to tread water.

It’s instructive, or at least reassuring, to compare this stuff with what weston-info says:

interface: 'wl_display', version: 1, name: 1
interface: 'wl_compositor', version: 2, name: 2
interface: 'screenshooter', version: 1, name: 3
interface: 'text_cursor_position', version: 1, name: 4
interface: 'text_model_factory', version: 1, name: 5
interface: 'wl_data_device_manager', version: 1, name: 6
interface: 'wl_shm', version: 1, name: 7
	formats: XRGB8888 ARGB8888
interface: 'wl_seat', version: 1, name: 8
	capabilities: pointer keyboard
interface: 'input_method', version: 1, name: 9
interface: 'wl_output', version: 1, name: 10
	x: 0, y: 0,
	physical_width: 1024 mm, physical_height: 640 mm,
	make: 'xwayland', model: 'none',
	subpixel_orientation: unknown, output_tranform: normal,
	mode:
		width: 1024 px, height: 640 px, refresh: 60 Hz,
		flags: current preferred
interface: 'wl_drm', version: 1, name: 11
interface: 'wl_shell', version: 1, name: 12
interface: 'desktop_shell', version: 1, name: 13
interface: 'screensaver', version: 1, name: 14
interface: 'input_panel', version: 1, name: 15
interface: 'workspace_manager', version: 1, name: 16

Top Wayland tip for today: it appears to be the case that you can make the C library clients log protocol exchanges to stderr by putting WAYLAND_DEBUG=client in the environment. When doing that it’s clear to see that weston-info is making a couple of additional requests that we’re not. We could add them, but I think the more pressing concern is to make it do something with the events we’re getting already – if it’s sending us details of global objects that we might need to know about, we should at a minimum be storing those details somewhere instead of throwing them away …

One more step along the Wayland

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:08:47 GMT

Yesterday’s lunchtime hacking was all about splitting the project into multiple files and getting it into git and onto Github – note that the mere fact of it being publically browsable does not imply that it will run, build, walk, make tea, perform any other useful function, or even forbear from exploding inside your computer and rendering the SSD to molten slag. Nor that I’m not still ashamed of it. It just keeps me slightly more honest.

Today I implemented enough of pack-message to be able to recreate the initial client→compositor message that we observed weston-info send last week. Still taking extraordinary liberties with signed vs unsigned longs, and plase note that all this code will work only on little-endian machines (there are any big-endian machines left?).

Lessons, puzzles

Leiningen does not need you to list the source files in your repository individually: it finds them magically. I believed otherwise for a while, but it turned out (slightly embarrassingly) that I had a parenthesis i the wrong place. My working hypothesis is that it assumes there is one namespace for each file, and any reference to a namespace it doesn’t know about it can be satisfied by loading a file with that name.

If I type (in-ns 'psadan.core) at the repl and that ns does not include a (:refer-clojure) form, I can’t use the symbols in clojure.core at the repl. I have not observed a similar issue wrt uses of clojure.core/foo in core.clj itself, just at the repl.

atoms! An atom is dead simple, really – conceptually at least, if not also under the hood: it’s a wrapper for an object that lets you look inside with deref and lets you change what’s inside with swap!. For each connection we use an atom holding a mapping from object ids to the corresponding objects, which starts out holding the singleton object for wl_display and then needs to be updated each time we generate an object locally and each time we learn of a new object from the peer.

(defn open-connection [name]
  (let [s (cx.ath.matthew.unix.UnixSocket. name)
        in (. s getInputStream)
        out (. s getOutputStream)
        wl-display (global-object-factory)
        ]
    {:socket s
     :input in
     :output out
     :display wl-display
     :objects (atom (assoc {} 1 wl-display))
     }))

(defn remember-object [conn id object]
  ;; (swap r fn args...) gets the current value of the atom inside r,
  ;; which for the sake of argument we shall call oldval, then sets the atom
  ;; to the result of calling (fn oldval args...)
  (swap! (:objects conn) assoc id object)
  object)

(defn get-object [conn id]
  ;; @foo is another way to write (deref foo)
  (let [o (get @(:objects conn) id)]
    o))

I have probably not chosen the fastest possible way of building up the messages I plan to send, in terms of fiddling around sticking vectors of bytes together. Will worry about that later if it turns out to be a bottleneck (but suggestions are welcome).

There was not a lot of Wayland learning this time. In the next round we shall be sending it the messages we have so lovingly composed from whole cloth and see if it reacts the same way as it did when the same bytes were sent from weston-info

Still some way(land) to go

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 23:09:03 GMT

Ignoring, because I can, this whole Ubuntu Mir thing completely, I have begun to learn stuff about the Wayland protocol (and about Clojure, with which I am still at the constantly-having-to-google-stuff stage). Some random notes on what I have learnt so far

First off: Java has no builtin support for talking to unix-domain (AF_FILE) sockets. And nobody seems to make a Maven-packaged library that does it either. This is a shame because Leiningen makes Maven manageable, but anything unmavened involved tedious mucking around. Eventually I did

:; apt-get install libunixsocket-java
:; cat project.clj
(defproject psadan "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "FIXME: write description"
  :resource-paths ["/usr/share/java/unix-0.5.jar"]
  :url "http://example.com/FIXME"
  :jvm-opts ["-Djava.library.path=native/:/usr/lib/jni/"]
  :main psadan.core
  :license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
            :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.3.0"]
                 [org.clojure/data.zip "0.1.1"]
                 ])

which seems to be holding up. Then I opened a socket and tried reading from it in the hope of getting some lovely protocoly stuff

(defn open-socket [name]
  (let [s (cx.ath.matthew.unix.UnixSocket. name)
        in (. s getInputStream)
        out (. s getOutputStream)
        ]
    {:socket s :input in :output out}))
(def socket (open-socket “/home/dan/private/wayland-0”))
(defn rd []
  (let [buf (byte-array 1024)]
    (. (:input socket) (read buf))
    buf))

and watched it hang. After some time looking at documentation and mucking about with strace to see if it was trying to read the full buffer instead of doing the dhort read I wanted it to, I eventually thought to use socat instead of clojure. It turns out that the client is expected to make the first request before the server sends anything, and with the use of strace weston-info I was able to find out what.

26335 sendmsg(3, {msg_name(0)=NULL, msg_iov(1)=[{"\1\0\0\0\1\0\f\0\2\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\f\0\3\0\0\0", 24}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, MSG_DONTWAIT|MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 24

Time to start writing some code to parse wayland.xml so we can actually find out what this means. The usual way to do XML parsing in clojure seems to be using zippers and the easy examples seem to be somewhat lacking or slightly ungooglable. You need a project dependency on org.clojure/data.zip and a bunch of package requires, then you call clojure.zip/xml-zip on the return value of clojure.xml/parse and that gets you a zipper

(ns psadan.core
  (:require [clojure.xml]
            [clojure.data.zip :as dz]
            [clojure.data.zip.xml :as x]
            [clojure.walk]
            [clojure.zip :as z]))

;; [...]

(def the-protocol
  (->
   "/home/dan/wayland/source/wayland/protocol/wayland.xml"
   clojure.xml/parse
   z/xml-zip
   parse-protocol))

where I have conveniently left out the definition of parse-protocol and everything it calls because it’s longwinded and tedious (but the code will be on github as soon as I’m not ashamed of it) but it might hypothetically do things like

(x/xml-> my-zipper :protocol :interface :request)

to descend the tree through <protocol> <interface> <request> and return all the elements. Use the similarly named x/xml1-> to get the first matching element. The return values from these things are themselves zippers and you can call up, down etc – or xml-> again – to traverse the tree further, then eventually call node when you want to get the element itself. So e.g.

(defn parse-interface [i n]
  ;; n is a badly named zippered xml object thingy
  (let [el (z/node n)
        requests (map-indexed parse-message (x/xml-> n :request))
        events (map-indexed parse-message (x/xml-> n :event))
        enums (map parse-enum (x/xml-> n :enum))]
    {:index i
     :name (:name (:attrs el))
     :requests requests
     :events events
     :enums enums
     }))

So let’s handwave over the details and take it on trust that I have parsed the whole file. There are two other things I discovered - mostly thanks to the #wayland IRC channel participants – about the wayland wire protocol that the docs don’t mention:

where it says “The first word is the sender’s object id (32-bit)”, when it’s describing a message sent from client to compositor, what it means is “The first word is the target object’s id (32-bit)”.

object id 1 is special: it refers to the core global singleton object, which implements the interface wl_display

Given which, we can attempt to parse that first client→compositor message

psadan.core> (parse-messages-from-buf (vec (.getBytes "\1\0\0\0\1\0\f\0\2\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\f\0\3\0\0\0")) :requests)
({:object-id 1, :bytes 12, :interface "wl_display", :message "get_registry", :opcode 1, :args (2)} {:object-id 1, :bytes 12, :interface "wl_display", :message "sync", :opcode 0, :args (3)})

Looks plausible so far …

Next up, some code to create messages. And something, which may involve an atom, to map object ids to their corresponding interfaces as we learn them. After that, we find out what the Wayland FAQ really means by “shareable buffer”

Puppets at work

Fri, 1 Mar 2013 12:10:13 GMT

Another huge long gap between updates. I’d say that you might as well get used to it, but you probably are already. This is a short note to say that I have developed a Capistrano extension which runs Puppet as part of an app deploy, and you can read about it on the Simply Business tech blog

In other news, having confirmed that the X11 touchpad support is broken by design – the choice of whether to emulate mouse events (left click, middle click, drag etc) is set at a global level in the driver and cannot be overridden per client, so legacy mouse-only clients cannot meaningfully coexist with clients that usefully could handle touch events directly – I am working on a client implementation of the Wayland protocol in Clojure. I hope this will eventually will turn into a habitable text editor.

Something old, something new

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 22:09:35 GMT

Sorry for the silence. This has been a scheduling thing mostly: I managed to schedule ‘breaking my arm’ for about three days after ‘starting a new job’, and together with the ongoing project of ‘being a new Dad’ (I plan to pivot that one into just ‘being a Dad’ if and when I finally feel like I know what I’m doing – so maybe in about 20 years or so) this has left not much time for discretionary writing.

Something old: a couple of months ago Vsevolod Dyomkin emailed me to ask if I wanted to be featured in his series of interviews with Lisp hackers (or, in my case, former Lisp hackers). After keeping him waiting for unsnsionably long – partly due, of course, to the aforementioned bone breakage – finally I have sent him my answers and he has posted them

(I can’t decide if I’m actually serious about writing something justifying the existence of ASDF, or if I’m just going to let it lie. It can probably be summarised as “it made sense at the time”)

Something new:

New job: I’m now working at Simply Business, nominally as a Ruby programmer but in practice so far mostly doing Puppet and Vagrant and general devops-y deployment-y stuff. It’s slightly odd having a commute further than the spare bedroom (which is no longer actually spare now, please note) but I seem to have adjusted mostly to having to get up in the morning, and the walk to work is podcast time. Except when it’s Spotify time. Or when I take a bike, but for a 2km journey that often seems a bit like overkill.

New consumer toys. After dropping the Desire S and breaking the screen on it twice, I gave up and sniped a second hand Galaxy Nexus on Ebay. It’s a bit like running an Android phone, except that it has no stupid skins or preloaded apps, and it gets timely updates to the newest OS version. Seriously, there is a certain irony in the fact that a phone I chose because it was open and easy to reflash or root turns out to be the first Android phone I’ve owned that I haven’t needed to reflash or root. Flushed with that success (and, for the first time in a while, flush also with some ready cash), I bagged a tablet too. Nexus 7, Jelly Bean again, it’s basically like a big version of the phone except that it doesn’t make phone calls.

Debian on the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3B

Mon, 28 May 2012 13:07:32 GMT

There are other guides to getting Linux going on the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3B, but both that I’ve found are for Fedora. Mostly it’s the same in Debian, but here are some of the things I’ve spotted.

Install media

Recent versions of Debian install media images are created as hybrid ISO images, which means you can download them and dd them directly to a USB stick. This is what I did, with the Squeeze netinst image. The computer’s BIOS settings needed changing to look at USB before the internal SSD, but that’s not hard. I deselected all packages which resulted in a very minimal basic install, then added xfce4 and a few essential utilities using apt-get

Networking

The wired network works out of the box.

The wireless networking is courtesy of an Intel 6230 adapter “Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6230 [8086:0091] (rev 34)” (apparently this also does Bluetooth, but I haven’t tried that yet). This is not supported in Squeeze’s default kernel, but is available in Wheezy. After much swearing at backports I decided to do the apt-get upgrade dance

Touchpad

Touchpad handling worked in Squeeze and partially broke when I upgraded to get working wifi. Pointer movement worked fine, but tapping (for the uninitiated, “tapping” on the touchpad is simulating button presses by briefly touching the pressure-sensitive area instead of the hardware buttons below it) didn’t. On this system tapping is infinitely preferable to the hardware buttons, because it appears impossible to move the pointer while one of the hardware buttons is pressed – this makes window placement pretty tricky. The fix here is

synclient TapButton1=1 
synclient TapButton2=2 
synclient TapButton2=3 
synclient PalmDetect=1

which means you can use one finger to simulate button 1, two fingers simultaneously (note: not double-clicking, as I foolishly initially thought) to simulate button 2, and three for button 3. It also turns on palm detection, so that accidentally brushing the pad as you type won’t send your cursor off into the wild blue yonder.

This affect the current session only. To make it permanent you need to edit files: copy /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and add the lines

        Option "TapButton1" "1"
        Option "TapButton2" "2"
        Option "TapButton3" "3"
        Option "PalmDetect" "1"

in the first Section "InputClass" stanza

Suspend and hibernate

I had the same problem with suspend as John Teslade : it appears not to resume but in fact it works perfectly except for the display backlight. However, I had it harder because my Fn-F2 and Fn-F3 keys didn’t do anything. After determining with acpi_listen that Linux is listening to those keys (they send ACPI events video/brightnessdown and video/brightnessup respectively) and is capable of controlling the brightness (try e.g. xrandr --output eDP1 --set BACKLIGHT 1) I decided this must clearly be a 90% solved problem and that the missing link was probably somewhere in the Debian package archive. It was, it was xfce4-power-manager

After that, suspend and hibernate are both usable.

Battery life

Pretty poor right now (looks like about 3 hours), but I’ve just installed laptop-mode-tools which has turned most of the PowerTOP tunables from “Bad” to “Good”, so I will be disappointed if that doesn’t make a significant difference. We’ll see …

Changing sort order with ActiveRecord find_in_batches

Sat, 5 May 2012 16:09:16 GMT

The subject is Googlebait pure and simple, because the short version is that you can’t. The very slightly longer and significantly more defensible version is that you may be able to but they don’t want you to apparently because you might get the wrong answer if you mutate the data as you’re traversing it (and because it’s fast in MySql).

Personally I think the answer there is Well Don’t Do That Then (and who cares about MySql) but that’s just my opinion. If you want to order by, say, created_at descending, and perhaps you want to paginate the results, the only sensible conclusion to draw is that find_in_batches is just not intended for this use.

But it’s not an unreasonable use. So I wrote ar-as-batches which lets you do

Users.where(country_id: 44).order(:joined_at).offset(200).as_batches do |user|
  user.party_all_night!
end

and it all works as you’d expect. I should of course caution you that

you might get the wrong answer if you mutate the data as you’re traversing it (so Don’t Do That Then), and that
ordering by something other than id ascending may be slower in MySql.

I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of the tests , which check the generated queries by assigning a StringIO logger to ActiveRecord::Base.logger and then matching regexps in it after each test runs. There ought to be a better way. Perhaps there is a better way. Don’t know what though.