Free idea: pastie like installation instructions

Sometimes when I google for installation instructions (for a gem, plugin whatever) I come across with blog posts containing old and out of dated installation instructions (old versions for example).
Why not create a pastie like engine for people to create and search for the most updated instructions? This engine should be smart enough to get a URL/svn/git/FTP address and fetch the latest file for each entry.
Of douse, a widget for bloggers should be mandatory.
I don't have the time to do it alone, if anyone feels like picking up this glove with me, just tell me.

Periodical AJAX requests and Session Expiry

My current applicaiton requires a session expiry feature, so fat, pretty ordinary, i decided to use the limited sessions plugin, as i always do.
The problem came up when i found out, that sessions aren't being released after the desired time had passed.
What was the problem?

first we will need to understand how rails uses sessions, basically it's something like that

• session is retrieved from whereever it is. (ActiveRecordStore,CookieStore...)
• Controller#Action is being preformed
• Session is saved

now, where is the problem? when using periodical ajax calls, the session is being updated as it is after every action, so the 'updated_at' field, (required by the plugin) is updated, what causes the expiry interval (assuming it's bigger than the periodical AJAX calls's interval) to never be met. so no session expiry.

Solution

In my application.rb, i have a before_filter which updated the session with user_id in order to relate the session to the user, i migrated another field into the session table so i can keep my own track over changes, named it 'last_updated' like that

class AddCustomUpdateDateToSessions < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :sessions, :last_updated, :datetime
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column :sessions, :last_updated
  end
end

and changed the application.rb method to update the new field, instead of the 'updated_at' field, and prevented my AJAX requests to update to the session, no need.

before_filter :update_session
  def update_session
    unless request.xhr?
      if logged_in?
        if session.model.user_id.nil?
          session.model.update_attribute(:user_id, current_user.id)
        end
        session.model.update_attribute(:last_updated, DateTime.now)
      end
    end 
  end

(yeah, i know it can be done better.) i also needed to change all the 'updated_at' references to 'last_updated' field inside the plugin's limited_sessions.rb, in order to completely take control over the session update flag. now it's working and my ajax calls do not cause the expiry interval to expire.

attachment_fu and minimagick resize bug

In one of my latest projects i was using the attachement_fu plugin to handle image uploads.
The attachement_fu plugin enables the option to select an image processor engine between ImageScience, Rmagick add MiniMagick:

1. Rmagick
   Kinda bulky, leaking but fully functional
   
2. MiniMagick
   Simple version of Rmagick, simple and small.
3. ImageSceince
   Small, nice, and quick.

i decided to use MiniMagick as my processor, i installed the gem:

 sudo gem install mini_magick

and added a specific :processor option to my Logo model.

has_attachment :content_type => :image, 
                   :storage => :file_system, 
                   :max_size => 2.megabytes,
                   :resize_to => 'x100',
                   :processor => :mini_magick

but when i was uploading an image, i was was expecting it to be resized based on the options i specified in the model. imagine how surprised i was when i found out that the image is not being resized.

checking the log found the following error:

Exception working with image: ImageMagick command (identify "/var/folders/Bv/Bvbna8-OH548ZWju8naF4U+++TI/-Tmp-/minimagick11451-0") failed: Error Given 32512

Googling it didn't help me much (except from finding other people with the same problem), so i decided to switch to ImageScience instead (RMagick is out of the question of course).

 sudo gem install image_science

this will include all most all dependencies, the freeImage dependency is also needed.
us mac/darwin users can simply use port:

  sudo port selfupdate
  sudo port install freeimage

now change the processor in the model

has_attachment :content_type => :image, 
                   :storage => :file_system, 
                   :max_size => 2.megabytes,
                   :resize_to => 'x100',
                   :processor => :image_science

and now it's working. yeah!.

Skype Weblinks - Call a skype user or send an IM message in a html page

When the user has installed Skype, one can open Skype directly from a webpage. The protocol is skype:skypename - and some other optional flags.

The example will use my skype username, but i am sure you will be able to get the hang of it.

Call a skype user
The optional flag is call - to force Skype to call somebody. It can also be left out - but if the user changed the default behavior to e.g. chat - Skype will open an IM session instead. So - go the save way and use the call - flag.

Example: call a Skype user

<a href="skype:eladmeidar?call">Call</a>

Send an Skype IM message to a Skype user

The optional flag is chat. See the example below to see the usage in a html page.
Example: send a chat message to a Skype user

<a href="skype:eladmeidar?chat">Chat</a>

Send a voicemail to a Skype user
The optional flag is voicemail - as you might have guessed.
Example: send a voicemail to Skype user

<a href="skype:eladmeidar?voicemail">Voice mail</a>

Create a Skype conference call with multiple users
This is as easy as the examples above - just more usernames before the "?" and call as flag.
Example: create a Skype conference call

<a href="skype:eladmeidar;otherfriend123?call">call 2 friends</a>

Create a conference chat with multiple users
Same as conference call - with chat as flag.
Example: open a conference chat with multiple users - in html

<a href="skype:eladmeidar;otherfriend123?chat">Chat with 2 friends </a>

i am now working on a rails plugin to implement this automated use for Rails applications

Rails 2.2: Getting Started link list

General Documentation and Guides

From railsinside.com

Rails 2.2 Release Notes - A very solid set of release notes for 2.2 with basic coverage of the new features (with short code examples and links) as well as a list of deprecated features. They were compiled by Ruby / Rails Inside's very own Mike Gunderloy!

Upgrading RubyGems to 1.3.x - Depending on your setup, Rails 2.2 may demand that you upgrade to RubyGems 1.3.x. This is not as easy as it might usually be, however. Mike Gunderloy gives some tips in case you get stuck.

Rails Security Guide - Steer clear of security issues in your Rails 2.2 applications by reading the Ruby on Rails Security Guide. Who said Rails has poor documentation? This is incredible!

Rails 2.2 Screencast - Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer of Rails Envy put together a very solid Rails 2.2 screencast. It costs $9, but it covers a lot of ground over 44 minutes - learn about etags, connection pooling, new enumerable methods, new test helpers, and more.

Rails 2.2 - What's New - In association with EnvyCasts, Carlos Brando and Carl Youngblood present Rails 2.2 - What's New, a 118 page PDF covering all of the changes and additions to Rails 2.2. It's available in a package deal with the screencast (above) too.

InfoQ's Glance - InfoQ's Mirko Stocker takes a quick glance at some of Rails 2.2's new features.

New Features

Thread Safety - Rails 2.2 is now "thread safe." In October, Pratik Naik wrote a summary of why this is a big deal as well as some gotchas (basically, don't use class variables, use mutexes, etc.) Charles Nutter has also written What Thread-safe Rails Means which answers several pertinent questions.

Internationalization - The Rails Internationalization effort has its own homepage at http://rails-i18n.org/ which features lots of links to how-tos, tips, documentation, and demos. They also have a Google group / mailing list where you can get help, make suggestions, etc.

Basic Language Internationalization - It's a little old, but Simple Localization in Rails 2.2 gives a very quick, code-driven example of how basic internationalization works in Rails 2.2 (some of the set up is easier now, but it mostly applies).

Localization / Internationalization Demo App - Clemens Kofler has put together a demo app that shows off some of Rails 2.2's internationalization and localization features. If being knee deep in code is the best way for you to learn, jump in!

Layouts for ActionMailer - As of Rails 2.2, you can now use layouts in your ActionMailer views.

Connection Pooling - The connection pooling in Rails 2.2 allows Rails to distribute database requests across a pool of database connections. This can cause less lockups. In collaboration with a non-blocking MySQL driver, serious performance increases could result in certain situations.

Specify Join Table Conditions with Hashes - Do you need to run a find (or similar) query across a join? Now you can just specify the conditions for the joined tables in a hash, much like local tables conditions!

Limited Resource Routes - You can now limit map.resources to creating certain methods. For example, you might not want destroy or index methods - you can now specify these with :only and :except.

Memoization - Stop rolling your own memoization in Rails apps. Clemens Kofler demonstrates Rails 2.2's newly rolled-in memoization features. It's just a single method! If you have a view that calls on a calculated attribute often, this will give you some serious performance gains.

Custom Length Tokenizer for Validations - You can now specify a tokenizer of your own construction for validates_length_of validations.

Array#second through Array#tenth - If you're a bad programmer, you can now demonstrate it to the world by using the new Array#second, Array#third, Array#fourth, and so forth, methods. I've put it in my calendar to look for open source Rails apps using Array#seventh in six months time and to call them out on Rails Inside ;-)

Note: This list only takes into account some of the new features in Rails 2.2. There are a lot more! Read the release notes and the Rails 2.2 - What's New PDF to get the full picture.

Miscellaneous

restful-authentication-i18n - Want an authentication plugin for Rails 2.2 that supports internationalization? Take a look at result-authentication-i18n!

Barebones Apps - Check out Rails Inside's 7 Barebones Rails Apps to Kick Start Your Development Process.

Deploying on JBoss - You can now easily deploy a Rails app to a JBoss server. With Rails 2.2's significantly improved JRuby support, this makes rolling out Rails apps in the enterprise a breeze!

Installing Rails on Ubuntu Hardy Heron - Simon St Laurent has put together two Rails useful installation videos. One for servers, and one for the desktop.

REST for Rails 2 - Are you still in Rails 1.x land or not using REST at all? Would you like to? Geoffrey Grosenbach has put together a screencast showing you how it should be done.

A Better Rails Logo - The Rails Logo (as used at the head of this post) was created by Kevin Milden and is distrubuted under the BY-ND Creative Commons Licence. i personally like the older one.

Rails 2.2: Quick Feature list

Rails 2.2 was just released, and ryan strieks again with a great post.

let’s take a peek at some of the major new features (as determined by yours truly – feel free to pipe up with features that I’ve missed).

Rails 2.2.2 requires rubygems v 1.3.1, so before you upgrade make sure to do a sudo gem update --system.

Rails 2.2 Features

• :except and :only Routing Options
• Better Conditional GET Support
• Connection Pools (Rails 2.2 is thread-safe!)
• Mailer Layouts
• Shallow Routes
• Simpler Conditional Get Support, And Even Better Conditional GET Support
• Standard Internationalization Framework
• Get Your Metaclass
• Easy Memoization
• Easy Join Table Conditions
• Custom Length Validation Tokenizer
• Collection Partial Variable Naming

i am personnalt still on 2.1, and i don't think i will upgrade at this moment, but some features look very-needed in fact.

Printer Friendly Pages

CSS is a great new tool for web designers. Now it is more widely supported, and browser-makers are sticking to the
W3C standards, we can begin to explore the possibilities it has offered us since the 90s but that we could not make
use of.
CSS allows you to separate your design from your markup, making maintenance infinitely easier, and your site more
likely to work in different devices, both of which are definite pluses. It also, however, allows you to tell a page to
display a different way depending upon what device is being used to render it.
This is achieved using the "media" attribute of the "<link>" or "<style>" tags, like so:
There are several media types available to you - all, aural, braille, handheld, print, projection, screen, tty, tv - and a
list of available media types with more detail is available from W3C (where you can find out more about media
groups, as well).
With such a range of options, you can, if you like, create one HTML document that will display exactly as you like
depending entirely upon which device is being used to view it. You can hide large images from PDAs, you can specify
seperate font styling for overhead projectors - you can write your site so that it works well with the technology at the <link media="screen" href="style.css" type="text/css">
<style media="screen" type="text/css">
user's disposal. And one very useful side effect of this is that you can specify an entire print style without the need
for copies of every page of your content, like the following, that will use the "normal.css" style sheet for screens, and
the "printer.css" style sheet when printing.

 <link media="screen" href="normal.css" type="text/css"> 
 <link media="print" href="printer.css" type="text/css">

For print styling, there are a lot of factors to consider. Are many users going to want to print out your header? No.
But do you want your logo on the page? Yes. Is the navigation worth printing? No. Each item on a web page serves a
purpose, and on paper, that may not be worth much.
It is best, then, to start at the beginning. With an unstyled HTML document. Pick a page to start working on, and
remove all styles from it. With an unformatted page in front of you, it should be pretty easy to see what needs styling
and how, but don't rush in. There's a lot to think about.

FONTS
Fonts are very different on the web to print. Sans-serif fonts are, allegedly, the best to use on the web. Serif fonts
are, apparently, better on paper. So first things first, set your font to a serif font you like (personally, I like Georgia
for Windows). As with picking all fonts, make sure you provide alternatives for those without the first-choice font.
Font sizing is a bit different on paper too. It's usually best just to leave this to the default, but if you want to specify a
font, make sure you run plenty of tests to make sure it's easily legible.

* { 
    font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; 
    font-size: 12pt; 
} 

LINKS
Links are not going to be a lot of use on paper, by their very nature. But that does not make them useless.

a { 
    color:#000000; 
    text-decoration: underline; 
} 
 
a:after { 
    content: " ( "attr(href)" )";
}

The above, if added to a printer style sheet, will make all links black and underlined, and add the address of the link
in brackets afterwards, meaning that if a user did want to visit any site linked to from that page at a later date, they
can.

SPACING
In print, margins and spacings are as important as with the web. There is no harm in adding in a little space
between words and lines, and a decent gap around the edges, if it will make a print-version easier to read.

HIDE USELESS STUFF
You can hide elements in this style sheet easily enough, using display none. This will save some space on the paper,
and reduce useless junk on the page, something the user will be very grateful for. Elements worth hiding are usually
form elements, some images, marquees, and flash content. If you are unsure, print the page and then work through
that page deciding what is useful and what is not.

body { 
    padding: 10%; 
    line-height: 1.2; 
    word-spacing: 1px; 
} 

COLORS
Print colors will show up very differently to screen colors, especially as a high proportion still have black and
white printers. Even those who don't will be grateful to you if you keep the proportion of color to a minimum,
simply because of the expense.
Highlight and emphasize things using italics, underlining, boldness and size in your print style sheet. Remove all references to colors where you can, save to set colors to black.

PAGE ADDRESS
You may want to add the address of the page itself to the page, and hide it, except when the page is printed, so that
the user can return to your page later if they wish.

TELL THE USER
A user may see a page without a "printer friendly" link and print anyway, but they may be put off. Try and add a note
to your page explaining that the page they are now viewing is printer friendly, and encouraging them to print it.

PING.fm

Just join ping.fm. it's not micro blogging, it's a fat man's blogging.

Rails date Range

Holy Shmoly! Sometimes Rails and ruby just blows me away,

Let’s assume you are trying to find a bunch of records between a time frame.

  class Call < ActiveRecord::Base
    named_scope :by_month, lambda { |d| { :conditions  => { :date  => d.beginning_of_month..d.end_of_month } } }
  end

simply specify a range

and running (the named_scope )

  this_months_calls = Call.by_month Date.today

And Rails will return all the calls that were recorded during the current month. Love it.

Git vs. Mercurial

Personally I'm more a fan of Git with the main reason being: Branching.

As far as I know Git still has problems handling Windows which is something Mercurial has never had to worry about. But since i am not a windows user (lover, or any other positive opinion holder), i don't really care.


Git

Pros
Lots of features
More hosting options.
Faster - slightly.
GitHub.
Solid local branch support.

Cons
Poor Windows support
Rubbish logo
Silly, long SHA1 hash of revisions.
You need to keep 'packing' the repo
History fiddling.


Mercurial

Pros
Portable
Its built with Python
Easily extensible using Python
Cool logo
Better documentation.
Local integer revision numbers on top of the SHA1
No need to keep packing/optimising.
Smaller repo footprint.
Better patch support (bundles and such)
Easy to learn.

Cons
Smaller feature set.
Few 3rd party hosting options.
Fewer 3rd party apps and plugins.
Smaller community.
Slower development.


Who Uses What

Mercurial
Mozilla
OpenSolaris
Aptitude
Netbeans
Dovecot

Git
Ruby on Rails Core
Linux Kernel
Google Android
Beryl
Fedora


Who Needs What
Mercurial is great for people who want to dive into distributed version control and get busy. Its clean, fast and easy to learn.

Git is for those who wish to fully exercise the benefits of source control and avoid the down's often happen when collaborating code.

goosh.org: a Google Command Line!

http://goosh.org/ is a command line interface for Google and some other related services such as wikipedia and YouTube.
Goosh (Google Shell) is a google-interface that behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.
goosh was written by Stefan Grothkopp <grothkopp@gmail.com>
it is NOT an official google product!

Google Chat Video

Google is rolling out video and voice capabilities for the chat function that is embedded in the Gmail interface. It's a bare-bones voice and video-conferencing service, but it's simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail.

It's no Skype, though. Gmail Video and Voice, as it's called, can't connect to the plain phone network, as Skype's paid service can. And there are plenty of other optional features missing, like a voice call recorder.

MochaUI: Javascript User interface library

MochaUI is a web applications user interface library built on the Mootools JavaScript framework.

Uses:

Web Applications
Web Desktops
Web Sites
Widgets
Standalone Windows and Modal Dialogs

Get it and watch demos here

CSS Graphs Helper for Ruby on Rails

source: http://nubyonrails.com/pages/css_graphs
A Ruby on Rails helper for making simple graphs. The graphs use only CSS/HTML (and an optional gradient image).
Vertical bar graphs, horizontal bar graphs, and complex bar graphs with an image marker.



Install:

./script/plugin install http://topfunky.net/svn/plugins/css_graphs

Generate:

# No arguments are needed
./script/generate css_graphs

Examples:



Find out more on the source @ Nuby on Rails

Common RJS mistake/error on Ruby on Rails

When you use some of your ajax helpers, such as link_to_remote, with the :update parameter in order to update a specific DOM element AND you specify page.replace_html or any other RJS syntax that handles other DOM ID, it will return the result expected, nothing will be updated on the :update pointer DOM ID.

Simply choose one, if you use :update, return an html or render a partial in your action instead of rendering RJS.
If you require multiple changes, use RJS and no :update parameter.