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First Design Considerations

Now the interesting part begins! In an early phase like this I like to look at the problem I want to solve from different angles to get a feeling for implementation options. The output will look like an unsorted collection of notes – and that’s what it is! I don’t claim that this is the best approach around but this helps me to get a better grip of the problem.

Includes Reinventing the Wheel, Too (Probably)

Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.

What the author doesn’t say is that he’s doing this in the wilderness while wearing a business suit.

Single Table Inheritance with Rails

What is it?

With single table inheritance you have a base model which inherits from ActiveRecord::Base, then one or more sub-classes, which inherit from the base model.

Intridea's Hackon in Portland, Maine

I’m pleased to announce Intridea’s Hackon, a 3-day co-working and unconference event we’ve organized at the Portland Harbor Hotel in Portland, Maine June 18-20th.

Thursday and Friday (17/18th) will be for informal hacking, coworking, and discussion and as we attempt to backfill interesting talks for Saturday (20th).

5 Simple rules for managing your Email Inbox

A few years ago, one of the most time consuming but un-productive parts of my day was checking and managing email Inbox.

Two New Posters

We’ve recently completed (and had printed) a couple of new A4-sized posters for the University of Sheffield, one advertising a series of lectures by the renowned philosopher Stephen Stich & the other promoting an MPhil degree in Political Theory.

Ruby & Word: Counting Words and Pages

Someone recently asked how to get a count of the number of words and pages in a Microsoft Word document. This is done by calling the ComputeStatistics() method on a Range or Document object.

As an example (play along at home), let's imagine that you have a Word document open. Your first step is to use the win32ole library's connect() method to connect to the existing instance of Word:

When the Cliche is All You Have

There are moments when I’m really happy not to live in the US any longer. This is one of them, because I simply know that if I lived & worked there, I’d have to make an eagle-based logo for a consulting company. Because, as I’m sure you’ve twigged, they’re keen-eyed consultants who know what’s what.

And not because they’re nearly extinct.

Double Shot #473

Looking forward to the weekend, when I can actually be productive.

Problems with Sqlite3 on Leopard?

Although I’d installed it before, I’d never had occasion to use Sqlite until now.

I had Sqlite3 binary installed, as well as the sqlite3-ruby gem, but trying to use sqlite in Ruby would throw this

no such file to load -- sqlite3

Reinstalling sqlite3 or the Ruby gem made no difference. And I could open sqlite3 at the console just fine. Ruby didn’t see it though. The solution was here. Ditching the gem and compiling from source fixed things.

Articles | Rails Fire

Articles

Testing Rails with Rack::Test

The biggest news in Rails 2.3 is its support for Rack, the WSGI inspired Ruby web server interface.

Facebook Style Multi Select

Facebook Style Multi SelectWe've got a couple of projects on the go right now where a Facebook style multi-select (with or without autocomplete) is a good fit for making the user interface more, err, useable.

Webbynode: A New Rails-Focused VPS Host Worth Checking Out

webbynode.png

RailsLab: Rack, Metal, and Rails Middleware

Just published a new Scaling Rails screencast, this one covering Rack, Metal, and some of the Rails Middleware internals. By the end of this screencast you should know how to use Metal to help Scale your Rails apps, and how to write Rails Middleware.

Summary

RailsLab: Rack, Metal, and Rails Middleware

Just published a new Scaling Rails screencast, this one covering Rack, Metal, and some of the Rails Middleware internals. By the end of this screencast you should know how to use Metal to help Scale your Rails apps, and how to write Rails Middleware.

Forcing I18n locale in a block

Since we have been using I18n in Partigi for the last months we have notice that we were always repeating ourselves when localising a sentence like this:

This film has been saved by 4 friends

What is special in this sentece is that, depending on the number of friends that saved the film, the sentence could be "This film has been saved by one friend". It can be solved with pluralize helper, but it requires the counter to be at the beginning of the sentence.

Who really won the olympics?

Olympic rings I’ve just finished the excellent Freakonomics book.

Git

For those readers of my blog who don’t live in the rails world I highly recommend checking out Git, a distributed version control system. It has been big in the rails world since early this year for several good reasons:

Ruby Manor

Ruby Manor Frame Yesterday I spoke at and attended Ruby Manor.

New plugins

I’ve just pushed two plugins to github. The first is an improvement on the standard Defensio plugin that only checks the validity of your API key when posting articles or comments.

Phil Ripperger | Rails Fire

Phil Ripperger

Rails Envy Podcast – Episode #093

Episode #093. Dan Benjamin (Playgrounder, Hivelogic) is back this week. We’ve got a ton of news this week and just maybe an awkward moment or two. Also, I mis-pronounced John Mettreaux’s name wrong, calling him Jake. Sorry about that.

Update: We’re now accepting stories and feedback to @railsenvy on Twitter. You know, if you feel like letting us know about something.

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