Space Babies

RailsWayCon: I am attending

joost — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:03:35 +0000

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!

It’s nice being able to take the ICE bullet-train and spend a few days submerged in Rails/Rubyness. And I get to meet old friends in Berlin and see the city. I might even bring my entire family. Drop me a (private) comment here if you’re going as well and want to hook up.

Fake Multiple Table Inheritance

joost — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:58:59 +0000

For many years now a pattern has emerged in my Rails websites. Most models will have Title, Description, Online at, Offline at, Is visible, Url and Image_file_name fields. It screams to be solved using an underlying common model using the “is_a” pattern. There is no clean way to solve this in Rails. I discovered this post though, which outlines a good method to solve this problem.

For the sake of Google I am going to spend the rest of this post using various phrases in the hopes of tying this post to various (desperate) searches, as I have done so many times in the past. Multiple Table Inheritance with Active Record describes the pattern in which you have a has_one relationship between your models and a common subset of attributes. Your model will always have the other “has_one” shared model, they are tied together. Its attributes become part of the model itself. It solves the problem of a Content Management System in which you always have a title, description and publication dates for lots of different objects.

Unobtrusive mp3 player

joost — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:28:15 +0000

Last year, unobtrusive javascript really hit the scene and my sites no exception. I’ve been perfecting the technique to show an mp3 audio player, which I have debuted at radio6.nl this week. It’s a tiny bit of Javascript with a big help from jQuery.

Basically what you want is to create an mp3 player on the fly, instead of embedding this with an OBJECT tag. This keeps the page very light to load. It also makes sure that older browsers and mobile devices still see the regular mp3 file, so they can download it and play in some other way. It’s also great for search engines since it keeps all the markup semantic, and adds behaviour on top of that. Just like Tim Berners-Lee intended!

Last year I would probably have used things like swfobject or the Anarchy player. But there is no reason not to solve this in jQuery directly. All it takes is this little bit of javascript:

// replace all links to mp3 files with a flash player
$("a[href$='.mp3']").each(function(){
  var href = $(this).attr('href');
  var player = ' \
     \
     \
  '+$(this).html()+'';
  $(this).replaceWith(player);
});

Naturally this would be inside the document ready event.

Site.Config is just top-level hash that holds various functions related to the application. And I found the MP3 player here, it’s tiny and fast and even customizable, perfect for my needs.

Election special

joost — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:30:14 +0000

Seems like the crisis in our parliament has become global news. Guess “our boys” did some fine things in Uruzgan. Too bad the majority of the country wants to end the war. Anyway. I recently built the election special for www.radio1.nl. I just love how fast I can whip up specials like this in Ruby on Rails, and integrate it into the core of the app without making the code any dirtier.

Humor

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:13:30 +0000

http://smashfaceonkeyboardpostresult.com/

SQL query logging in Wordpress

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:35:13 +0000

After doing Rails development for so long, it’s ….. interesting to develop for other platforms once in a while. I am talking about WPMU, a pretty fantastic multi-blog platform. The lack of documentation is aggravating though, as is the absence of all my Rails tools like the console and the log. Well turns out you can have a sql log for Wordpress as well! This post tells you how, and it works.

Apple pulls sexual content from iTunes

joost — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:44:52 +0000

Apple, as puritan as any US company, has pulled all sexual apps from the iTunes store after “complaints”. Mysteriously, all the violent games remain. A MacRumors reader put it very succinctly:

So boobs are bad, but murdering cops is ok. Got it.

Mind you, these apps are all rated for 18+. So you have to wonder how these complaints even are possible. If you are a concerned parent pull the rating-switch on your child’s iPhone!

MegaMythen: play with the Greek Gods

joost — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:07:57 +0000

Late last year I have built the back-end for a very slick online game called MegaMythen. In this game you can play with the ancient Greek Gods and travel up mount Olympus. This game has launched today and it looks even better than I had imagined. The gameplay is very intuitive and smooth. I urge you to check it out even if you don’t play games at all: www.megamythen.nl.

The back-end is completely Rails of course and has a very small footprint. Just 8 controllers including all boilerplate code. The game uses this back-end via JSON and the admins can customize almost every aspect of the game, including in-game dialogs and images. Both myself and Daniël van Gils, the game developer, worked in Git and this has been a godsend.

For your previewing pleasure, some screenshots:

Cross-browser testing

joost — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:03:06 +0000

It’s one of the most tedious aspects of my job: cross-browser testing. Meaning: see if the stuff I have developed looks the same in all browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari and -ick- IE too). Luckily this can be automated, saving me lots of headaches and lots of different computers. Ta-daa! Litmusapp.

Start a new git remote branch

joost — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:43:07 +0000

Since I am tired of Googling it, I am going to post the commands required to start a new local branch in git, then push that to the origin, then pull it in to continue working on it. If you don’t know what I am talking about, that’s fine. I do.

$ git checkout -b zzz
# Let the hacking commence...
$ git push origin zzz
$ git checkout master # see note 2
$ git branch -f zzz origin/zzz
$ git checkout zzz
# Let the hacking continue...