http://www.mokisystems.com/blog Addressing such topics as: web programming, design, ruby on rails, cake php, postgresql, linux, seo Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:34:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Moki Systems is seeking a full-time Ruby on Rails developer. The person should be a self starter, willing and able to figure things out on their own. Applicant should have experience with Ruby on Rails, MVC programming concepts, MySQL and/or PostgreSQL experience and the ability to learn new technologies. Any ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/were-hiring/ Whenever I find myself typing the same thing over and over again, I have to come up with some way to avoid the repetition. And one thing I do a lot is fill out web forms that require things like credit card numbers and unique email addresses. For a while ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/linux-clipboard-snippets/ So I had this problem with a record that was being saved even though it failed validation: cc = CreditCard.new(:card_number => 'invalid') >> cc.save => false >> cc.id => 3 That one had me stumped for a while until I realized I was carelessly using update_attribute in my custom writer: def card_number=(num) update_attribute(:crypted_card_number, encrypt(num)) end And we all ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/savings-records-that-fail-validation/ >> (19.99 * 100).to_i => 1998 >> (9.99 * 100).to_i => 999 Someone please tell me what's up with that! In the meantime: >> (19.99 * 100).to_s.to_i => 1999 http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/ruby-thinks-1999-100to_i-1998/ We ran into a few little gotchas with ActiveRecord's find method when upgrading from Rails 2.1.1 to 2.2.2. The solutions are pretty trivial, so the main lesson here is to test your code so things like this get caught by your test suite and not the client. Gotcha #1 >> Rails.version => "2.1.1" >> ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/a-couple-rails-find-gotchas/ Some time ago I had a situation where a clients SQL database was about 70GB larger than they expected it to be. That is like 10 times larger than they expected. They asked me to trouble shoot the problem; with no clue as to what the problem should be. To begin with ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/how-large-is-an-individual-table-in-microsoft-sql-server/ In the words of Tim Pope "TextMate may be the latest craze for developing Ruby on Rails applications, but Vim is forever" Here's how I use vim (and gnome-terminal) to program in Rails on Ubuntu. I have a ruby script that opens two gnome-terminals each with 9 tabs each. That may seem ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/vim-as-a-ruby-on-rails-ide/ So after tediously going through your entire site and extracting all displayed strings to a separate translation file, how do you know you didn't miss something somewhere? My solution was to create a quick rake task that machine translates my English yaml file to something else. A quick sudo aptitude ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/using-rails-new-i18n-support-in-real-life-part-the-fourth/ What happens when you add a new string to your default locale file and forget about the other languages? Well, by default it'll raise a MissingTranslationData and your users will see an ugly string the likes of "es-MX, marketing_interface, index, title". Wouldn't it be better to at least try and ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/using-rails-new-i18n-support-in-real-life-part-the-third/ A few more thoughts on handling I18n for real projects. Images The way I handled images was pretty simple. Just added this application_helper: # Translated image tag def timage_tag(source, options = {}) image_tag("#{I18n.locale}/#{source}", options) end Then I created a directory in public/images for each of the supported ... http://www.mokisystems.com/blog/using-rails-new-i18n-support-in-real-life-part-the-second/