Finally! After many weeks I managed to track down a very strange bug. When parsing RSS feeds using Ruby’s built-in RSS::Parser, sometimes I would get bombs in Rails when trying to insert item.pubDate into the database.
It is what Muad’dib said: “fear is the mind-killer” (full quote below). Oh I feared installing RMagick on OS X. The fear nearly paralyzed me (well not really). Turns out I had nothing to fear.
These are the features I am most pleased with. Thanks to Carlos Brando, who created an excellent free PDF. Hey my name is in there too! [return-path bug fix]
I came across an interesting pastie to setup two often-used Subversion tasks inside a Rails project. I decided to add my own twist to it and namespace the thing. I think it can be very helpful, rock it!
I completed a hefty process of hooking Facebook up to a Rails application. Now that it’s done I am so proud. Read the entire saga on bembamedia.
So I work on a few Rails apps that need i18n. I thought the purrrrrfect tool to do this with would be Globalize. It seemed the most active and the least cumbersome. But lo and behold. The project has disappeared from the face of the earth and left me fucking screwed! How is that for Open Source? Continue reading
Tears are welling up… no I cannot hold it in any more! Another changeset in Rails means that one of my patches is now included in Rails again. This one fixes the return-path header in emails. Ahhh … it’s so satisfying to see them grow up.
Amsterdam Weekly, the finest English-language cultural paper in the country, is in dire straits. I gave my best years I’ve been involved with the paper since the start, programming their CMS and writing small pieces. Now one of their investors has pulled out, and they are asking readers to buy pieces of the paper. They have doctored a very unique and fun way for you to do this. By purchasing blocks, you make the actual paper appear.
More and more of my patches are being accepted into Rails Core. This one contains just a bunch of tests, but it applies to a ‘return path’ fix that will be included soon as well. Cool!
I just came to a sad realisation: any method you declare inside a controller (such as a private helper method) is not available inside a RJS block. I can see why (blocks introduce scope) but it’s still annoying.
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