I’m busy working on a project that uses a lot of Ajax to deal with updates and lookups etc. Occasionally I write rubbish code and one of these methods break.

When using normal HTML this is not a problem because Rails presents the user with a nice message saying “We’re sorry but something went wrong…”.
But, with Ajax, Rails returns the exact same page which is useless in an Ajax call. Because of this, users are generally left without knowing if their request is taking a long time or has failed.

I took this test for fun. Despite being pretty easy, the silly part is that many of the answers are wrong, so I found myself guessing at what the person who wrote the test must have been thinking. Even basic things like how find_all won’t work anymore aren’t considered, etc.

Additionally, most of the questions could be responded to with ‘it depends.’ Like, well, if you have a named scope then that would work, or well the code you’re showing me would give an error, but that’s not an option, so I guess I just guess at what you mean.

Inspired by this post on recommendation systems and this one on classification I’ve been playing around with some of the large datasets on my different projects.

I’m not big on publicizing commercial works due to the obvious bias involved, but we’ve recently finished up the Oxford American College Dictionary and Thesaurus for the iPhone and our client was nice enough to give us a few free download codes. Never one to waste free stuff I thought I’d offer them up to my readers.