A nice idea has led to a nice followup. The first Ruby Summer of Code will be held this year. It’s a program where students are paid to work on Ruby/Rails projects during summer break. Too bad a sponsorship costs $2500; I don’t have that kind of cash lying around. I sure like the idea though. Here’s hoping for cool new software in the fall!
How many data can you put in a Tweet? Well, 140 characters. Think again. By using encoding software, like ZIP, you can put a whole lot more into one little Tweet. There is even an International Longest Tweet Contest for it. The record is something like 4000 characters!
I wrote a small Ruby on Rails plugin that transmits the production database. It works either way: from the server to your local computer or from your computer to the server. The latter, of course, should only be used with caution. Read more.
Yesterday I promised to blog about my work with HTML5 and a major .nl website. The website in question is radio1.nl and early this morning I relaunched the site. Response has been very positive so far.
HTML5, the next version of the language of the web, is a wonderful thing. It’s a real step forward in terms of semantics and making browsers more powerful. Any day now I will relaunch a major website done completely in HTML5. Working on that, I discovered some caveats implementing the audio tag.
Validating e-mail addresses can be a pain. Most of the time you want some syntax checking, just to prevent the most horrible abuse. But more often than not some actual e-mail address pops up that is invalidated by your regular expression. Continue reading
Quite a few weeks ago I completed an application to submit your birthday boy or girl for Z@ppelin. It features birthday cake recipes, on-the-fly PDF generation, party downloads, and features all jarigen for any given day. It’s pretty cool. The best part of it: every day three people are selected to appear on national TV!
I have just seriously spent four hours debugging the most inane bug, this year, so far. In an ActiveRecord before_create method, I was setting a boolean value based on a bunch of fields in the object. My specs kept returning ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound all of a sudden, but the errors hash was empty. The database was fine, too. And no matter what I would do, these records would just not persist to the database. Aargh! Finally I gave up and had a snack. After coming back and spending quite some time staring at the problem I did a quick Google and lo and behold. When a before filter in ActiveRecord returns false, the save is cancelled. Yeeeaaaahh. Gotcha!
If you’re like me, you maintain a mix of both old and new Rails apps. If you’re even more like me, you have no Rails apps that store Latin1 data any more (having converted them all some time around 2007). Yet your tables are still defined DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1. Time to fix that.
Being part of the Rails community is great. It’s filled with admirable people like Katz, Koz, en Fuchs. All are active Rails core members. So I decided to go to RailsWayCon 2010 and meet them in Berlin!