YAML Cookbook 3
While researching what some of the YAML syntax was doing in Ben Bleything's article on DRY'ing up your database config, I ran across the YAML Cookbook. I've only ever used YAML for my database.yml and test fixtures, so I was really surprised to see the power YAML affords the Ruby programmer. Check it out, you will find a few things useful in your fixtures and I'm sure other ideas on it's use will come to you as you see how powerful it is.
Installing Raspell on Intel Mac 8
I'm working on an app that Special Education therapists use to track service logs on their clients for medicaid billing purposes. While the application requirements are pretty simple (with the exception of the PDF Reports), the requirement that was at the top of their list was spell checking.
Most of the work for a Rails based Spell Checker has been done already by Dee Zsombor in his How to build an AJAX-ed spellchecker with Ruby On Rails article. In his article he shows how to use Raspell (the Ruby ASpell bindings) to implement an AJAX based spell checker in Rails. While his tutorial worked great on Linux, Raspell failed to compile (manually or using the gem) on Intel Mac. The compiler was complaining of multiple symbol errors defined in raspell.h. Even though it had pre-processor IFNDEF statements, it still acted like it was including the header multiple times. While there may be another way to fix this, the quick and simple way was to take all the code from dictinfo.c and aspell.c and inject it into raspell.c. Problem solved.
Hopefully, in a few weeks, I'll be able to release a Rails SpellChecker Plugin which will enable spell checking on any text field/area with a simple Rails helper method.
Most of the work for a Rails based Spell Checker has been done already by Dee Zsombor in his How to build an AJAX-ed spellchecker with Ruby On Rails article. In his article he shows how to use Raspell (the Ruby ASpell bindings) to implement an AJAX based spell checker in Rails. While his tutorial worked great on Linux, Raspell failed to compile (manually or using the gem) on Intel Mac. The compiler was complaining of multiple symbol errors defined in raspell.h. Even though it had pre-processor IFNDEF statements, it still acted like it was including the header multiple times. While there may be another way to fix this, the quick and simple way was to take all the code from dictinfo.c and aspell.c and inject it into raspell.c. Problem solved.
Hopefully, in a few weeks, I'll be able to release a Rails SpellChecker Plugin which will enable spell checking on any text field/area with a simple Rails helper method.
Macbook Battery Dead 7
Well, finally ran into my first problem with the new Macbook. My battery will only power a laptop for about 10 minutes before shutting down (actually it just turns off). Jeremy Hubert was nice enough to swap batteries with me and sure enough, within a few minutes, his laptop shut down as well. Hoping to get to the Apple Store here in Chicago to get a replacement.
RailsConf Update 3
The first day has been filled with ups and downs. It started great with Dave Thomas challenging DHH's philosophies on Rails. His call for foreign keys and non-integer primary keys I think was dead on. I hope it gains some traction among the core developers. I started work on this awhile back but got no feedback whatsoever from core. Its definately not a very elegant solution but I think it will benefit Rails in the long run.
Mike Clarks Introduction to Capistrano was pretty good. Although I don't personally plan to use it until it works in parallel, it's still a pretty nice piece of software, although I still prefer my multicast notification and ftp-diff pull solution better. Maybe I should make Castripano???
The next session doesn't even deserve any mention, if you were stuck in it then you know what I'm talking about.
Dr. Stefan Kaes' session on Optimizing Rails had a lot of excellent material presented, although his presentation style was pretty dry. Much better talking to him in person.
I'm sure Martin Fowlers keynote was filled with insight, unfortunately, most of the caboosers were busy negotiating how many and what type of pizzas to get for dinner.
Afterwards, we acquired a room in the hotel and had some famous Chicago Deep Dish pizza from Giordanos. Think this is the first time in my life 2 pieces of pizza has filled me up, gotta love Chicago pizza!
Paul Graham's poetic speech was excellent and dealt with some items that I struggle with, mainly about taking risk. I have a lot of good ideas for applications, but my inner self talks me out of them before I even start coding.
To cap off the night, Why the lucky stiff did his thing. While I can certainly appreciate Why's artistic creativity, it was beyond the scope of my understanding. The only thing that I understood was Robert Scoble killing David Heinemeier Hansson. Others really seemed to enjoy it though. I imagine better acoustics would have improved the act.
Let's hope tomorrow continues to improve on the quality of the sessions and keynotes.
Mike Clarks Introduction to Capistrano was pretty good. Although I don't personally plan to use it until it works in parallel, it's still a pretty nice piece of software, although I still prefer my multicast notification and ftp-diff pull solution better. Maybe I should make Castripano???
The next session doesn't even deserve any mention, if you were stuck in it then you know what I'm talking about.
Dr. Stefan Kaes' session on Optimizing Rails had a lot of excellent material presented, although his presentation style was pretty dry. Much better talking to him in person.
I'm sure Martin Fowlers keynote was filled with insight, unfortunately, most of the caboosers were busy negotiating how many and what type of pizzas to get for dinner.
Afterwards, we acquired a room in the hotel and had some famous Chicago Deep Dish pizza from Giordanos. Think this is the first time in my life 2 pieces of pizza has filled me up, gotta love Chicago pizza!
Paul Graham's poetic speech was excellent and dealt with some items that I struggle with, mainly about taking risk. I have a lot of good ideas for applications, but my inner self talks me out of them before I even start coding.
To cap off the night, Why the lucky stiff did his thing. While I can certainly appreciate Why's artistic creativity, it was beyond the scope of my understanding. The only thing that I understood was Robert Scoble killing David Heinemeier Hansson. Others really seemed to enjoy it though. I imagine better acoustics would have improved the act.
Let's hope tomorrow continues to improve on the quality of the sessions and keynotes.
Hello Chicago!
After a 2 hour delay due to severe thunderstorms, I finally arrived in Chicago to slightly overcast skies and warm humid air. I'm checked into the Wyndham (room 151) and it turns out most of the caboosers went out to eat. I found Amy Hoy (eriberri on irc) and Blake and enjoyed a quiet dinner with them. I didn't realize the main conference doesn't actually start until Friday so I hope the "self-organizing" sessions are worthwhile tomorrow.
I haven't flown anywhere for quite awhile and I guess lighters are on the "banned" list of items for carry on (ironically, matches are ok????). So after my lighters got confiscated, I had to pay $6 for a pack of matches. The good news is, they came with a free pack of cigarettes.
More later as the conference progresses....
I haven't flown anywhere for quite awhile and I guess lighters are on the "banned" list of items for carry on (ironically, matches are ok????). So after my lighters got confiscated, I had to pay $6 for a pack of matches. The good news is, they came with a free pack of cigarettes.
More later as the conference progresses....
Blogging is hard work 4
Well, I lost control of my blog for a little while but I think I have it back to a sane usable state. Hopefully the new Typo engine will handle spam a little better than it's predecessor. Once I started getting traffic all the spammers started having a field day with my site and I didn't have the time to stay on top of it. We'll see how it goes now.
Unfortunately, I had to lose all the existing comments to fix it. Haven't looked into the exact method of how they are spamming it but I have a feeling that I will need to add some sort of verification system to Typo to maintain it.