Articles

It's time to play with 1.9

With Ruby 1.9 just around the corner, it’s time for you to start playing with it. While you’ll want to keep any production apps you have chugging away happily on 1.8, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not keeping up.

Read the CHANGELOG, so you know what to expect (or read the overview at eigenclass).

Install it alongside 1.8; here’s my method:

Personalise Site - Now implicitly gain a users geo data

The second version of the Personalise Site plugin has just been released and now includes methods to implicitly gain a users geo data.




These additions are intended to be used to further customise and improve a users browsing experience.





For example you may want to display content on a homepage that is relevant to a users location or you may want to automatically select the right country in a registration form to improve the signup experience.





Note.

"They"

The great thing about working with open source is that if you come across a bug, you can fix it yourself. It’s the whole underpinning of the success of the model. Every developer scratches their own itch, and the cumulative result is a vibrant and useful piece of software driven by an enthusiastic community. If you’ve been fortunate enough to be the steward of a successful open source project you’ve probably seen this in action.

If you’ve been working on a really successful open source project, you’ve probably seen something else happen.

Small Victories in Customer Service

I bought my wife a GPS from Amazon as an early Christmas present before Thanksgiving. I guess I was a little too eager because I ended up paying too much for it. Just a couple weeks later, Amazon advertised to me in one of their “may we suggest” ads the very same GPS for a lot less money. In the end, they refunded me the difference in price; but I can’t help but feel a little miffed by the whole experience.

The Auteurs

Yes, thats what has been keeping me busy for a while, The Auteurs.
From Studio@TheAuteurs,
"core idea of The Auteurs is to unite great, previously unavailable works of contemporary world cinema with an avid online film community"

Oh Hiatus Again.

I am finding it really difficult to cope up with blogging regularly and especially when I am working(read holidaying) in Goa!

I will keep the exciting stuff that I have been working on for future posts. for now enjoy "Gmail Live", what if gmail was developed by Microsoft,

Evil Twin Plugin

Seriously, I think I have something against Rails’ lib directory. We jumped from keeping gems in lib to vendor/gems back in March. Then we jumped from keeping generic Rake tasks in lib/tasks to Sake. Now we’re gonna jump again.

RubyConf stuff

Well. RubyConf was two weeks ago now and I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It was a different experience this year than last (understanding that last year was my first RubyConf), and I’m not sure whether I liked it better. I would have preferred a single track, although I completely acknowledge the reasons why multitrack made sense… I just didn’t like having to make decisions between two talks I really wanted to see, which happened at pretty much every junction.

Culture shock

I had a bit of a culture shock a couple of days ago. I saw a video of
the visual designer for IronRuby, named SapphireSteel. The tool looks very nice and polished.

Rackspace trouble knocks 37signals offline [back!]

Rackspace has had a major power incident at the data center keeping the 37signals suite of machines. Apparently, a traffic accident knocked power out to some vital cooling systems. When the power was restored through generators, the cooling systems failed to come back online.

They now have the cooling systems back up and are getting everything back online. We hope to be back very shortly.

No data has been harmed, the machines were preemptively shut down when the cooling systems failed.

Unit Testing JavaScript using Qunit . See live result and test code. | Rails Fire

Unit Testing JavaScript using Qunit . See live result and test code.

Send to friend

If you are in a hurry then take a look at these two links and you are done.

Introduction

Six months ago I wrote about JavaScript testing using blue-ridge, Screw.Unit, env.js and Rhino . Since then I have changed my thoughts about JavaScript testing in fundamental ways and I do not recommend writing JavaScript unit tests that would not run on an actual browser.

I could never do as good a job as Nicholas did on his blog on capturing thoughts on JavaScript unit testing. I agree with him 100%.

Since I do not recommend using rhino, what I do recommend. I like Qunit .

Getting started

Sometimes getting started is the most difficult part. There are lot of JavaScript testing tools in the market and the documentation of most of them show simple case of testing 2 + 2. That is not very helpful.

The good thing with Qunit is that if you ever want to see how to use Qunit then just look at the test code of jQuery. At the bottom of this page you will find links of other projects that user Qunit to write tests.

I don not want to look at jQuery test code. I use ruby on rails and I just want to get started

For my admin_data plugin I wrote a bunch of JavaScript tests . Take a look at them to get a feel for how to use Qunit for you ruby on rails application. Get the code from github and you can play with JavaScript test code.

Click here to see the test result for the tests written for admin_data. I have tested this test page with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 .