This week saw the launch of Z@PPzone: an new online world/game for children. It revolves around the five Z@PP characters Chica, B.B., Lizz, Olec and Spark. They all live on the Media Park and you can help them navigate the world of television.
Wow, purdee colors in my Capistrano output!
Google has just announced Java support for their App Engine. So what? Ruby on Rails on teh Google is what! Yes, sir, you too can deploy your Rails application absolutely free on Google’s infrastructure. See this post for more details. Nice. Wanna bet that Google will natively support Ruby in the future? (thanks Daniël)
This Scaling Rails episode led me to the Rack Contrib project on GitHub. This project contains some pretty neat middleware that can be a huge time-saver in developing Rails apps. I am going to use some of these for sure.
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!
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.
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!