Rails ActiveRecord models have a lifecycle that developers are allowed to hook into. But while most of us know about before_save and after_update, there are a few lesser unknown callbacks that are good to know about before you reinvent them. In this post, I'll cover all of the available ActiveRecord lifecycle callbacks, and also show how you can define custom callbacks for normal ruby objects.

I use the Chrome history tab when I forget about something I've looked up in the past. I initially thought that the data would be stored in a CSV or XML file and thought I could do some string munging for kicks and giggles. To my delight, when I looked in the "Application Support" directory for Chrome, I found several data-rich sqlite databases ready for mining. With a few Ruby tricks, I found some cool data. All the code this article covers is available on the chrome_spy project.