S.E.A.N.I.C.U.S.

Ruby as Enterprise "Glue"

2006-07-17T18:30:00.000-05:00

Any experienced Rubyist knows that the language can be used to create short, powerful shell scripts and integrate disparate systems, even if the community is just now realizing how powerful Ruby can be in the enterprise.For example, today I was encountered with two problems. As a result of cleartext, unencrypted email addresses on the KCKCC website, many at the college are receiving lots of

Potential DSLs

2006-07-13T13:29:00.000-05:00

Sidebar: Yes I haven't posted here in a while -- I've been trying to get RadiantCMS to bend to my needs in terms of blogging, but that may be a ways off. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post...One of the recent patterns with Rails has been to move most things into Ruby. Most recently, developers are encouraged (but not required) to move their database definitions into

New site is live

2006-06-22T13:49:00.000-05:00

My new site, seancribbs.com is live! Today I got it hooked up with lighttpd so it runs MUCH faster. As soon as I get the weblogging functionality where I want it, I'll be moving my weblog over there. Until then, enjoy the rest of the site.I heartily recommend Textdrive. The signup process was painless, the support ticket for a lighttpd port took less than 2 hours, and their servers are rock

Design Guidelines

2006-06-21T08:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Sierra (one of the WS interns) and I sat down in our usual way to work on a design mockup/comp for the website redesign. The way we decided to start this time was to look at a bunch college websites and critique them. We came up with a bunch of things that we liked and disliked about them and ultimately -- although it wasn't our intention -- some guidelines about what makes a good

A few personal notes

2006-06-21T08:05:00.000-05:00

I decided to take the plunge and purchased some hosting from Textdrive this morning, and did a bunch of updates to my DynDNS account. Pretty soon, this blog will go away, in favor of my own site, the soon-to-be-registered seancribbs.com. My reasons for the change are these:I'm tired of Blogger's slow publishing time.I want more control over the layout, structure, and style of my blog.I want to

You learn something new everyday

2006-06-13T10:26:00.000-05:00

I reaffirmed this morning my previous habit of using console-printing as a debugging method. In trying to ferret out the FlexTimes problem (see yesterday's post), I found that part of my logic was flawed in the write_attribute. Here's a snippet that doesn't work:case column.klass # the AR column type when Date @attributes[attr_name] = Date.today.to_hash.update(value).to_date when Time @

My apologies

2006-06-12T16:51:00.000-05:00

I sincerely apologize to all of you who use FlexTimes. I committed many changes without verifying that they work. So here's the low-down.The overloading of ActiveRecord::Base.write_attribute does not work. I cannot figure out why. Maybe it's because it's a private method of AR::Base. Maybe it's because I'm not mixing it in correctly. Either way, it means automagic marshalling of Hashes into

New plugin! Learn about Rails!

2006-06-08T14:01:00.000-05:00

First order of business: I've released in_place_controls, ... IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!...errm check it out at RubyForge. If you want to try it, please check it out via SVN or the script/plugin command. Also, I fixed a serious bug in FlexTimes 1.5 so make sure to get the latest.Second, KCRUG will be hosting a Ruby on Rails workshop where you can learn how to build your own cool web applications!

Major FlexTimes update/refactor

2006-06-06T09:27:00.000-05:00

Prompted by a bug submitted to the project last night, I've decided to add some major stuff to FlexTimes:Many options that are normally passed through to the non-instance helpers (select_xxx) were not being passed, so I'm modifying datetime_select to cleanse the options hash and then pass it on to each helper. One example is :start_year. Unfortunately, because of the way the hash parameters

All is not lost

2006-05-26T09:27:00.000-05:00

To be short, my contract has been extended to June 30, at which point they'll be able to decide whether to take me on full-time as a regular employee. Until then, I'm trying to find some other work, hopefully telecommuting.

FlexTimes moved

2006-05-23T12:42:00.000-05:00

Because I'm leaving KCKCC, I have moved the FlexTimes plugin to RubyForge. Here is the project address: http://rubyforge.org/projects/flextimes/Subversion access is available via: svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/flextimesPlease submit any bugs or issues there.

Somebody set me up the bomb

2006-05-22T20:36:00.000-05:00

After a very productive day getting the podcasting portal even closer to production, Amber (my boss) asked me to come to her office.Then the bomb exploded. (All my base are belong to them!)Apparently, my position, which is on a contract basis, can no longer be funded. I have until Friday. :(Whether this means my podcasting portal will go live or not is still up in the air -- Amber has to talk to

Crisis averted and future plugins(?)

2006-05-19T17:28:00.000-05:00

This morning I completed uninstalling and reinstalling Ruby, RadRails, MySQL and all the gems I need.I checked the project back out and discovered I had the same problem as yesterday. I tried my Ruby file-sanitizing script again to no avail.Finally, on a hunch that it had was RadRails that corrupted my files, I copied their contents to an external editor and retyped about four different

Don't reboot your computer

2006-05-18T14:35:00.000-05:00

This morning I came in and started to work where I had left off last night. However, last night I had rebooted my machine since it had been a while. Apparently, that was a BAD IDEA.I kept getting really strange errors about illegal characters and whatnot. So, I thought maybe my files were corrupt. I tried editing them and removing any potentially bad characters, then saving. No effect.So

Speed bumps on the way to production

2006-05-10T12:07:00.000-05:00

I've been working for a few weeks on a Rails-based application that allows our campus to create, manage, and subscribe to podcasts. Much like the online employment applicaiton, writing this application has been a learning process (see some of my previous posts to get an idea of things I've encountered). Overall, the process has been smooth and the development timeline linear.However, in the

Do not underestimate the power of the block side!

2006-04-28T12:53:00.000-05:00

I discovered some powerful things you can do with blocks this week. Specifically, they make recursive calling patterns very powerful. Case in point: I needed a way to traverse a tree structure BACKWARDS toward the root from the child. Since trees are hierarchical data structures, a recursive method seemed the best. However, as I found in the "Richer Helpers" post, I needed to wrap the

Deploy long-range probe...erm Rails!

2006-04-24T23:02:00.000-05:00

Yes, I've watched too much Star Trek lately. But on the bright side, I successfully tested mod_fcgid on Apache 2.2 tonight. Things seem to work as expected, although, of course, it's not as speedy as lighttpd. So yes, Scott B., you can test Rails on my Linux box if you want.Onward and upward!(FYI: Using Fedora Core 5 with the FC-supplied RPMs, FastCGI and mod_fcgid compiled from tarballs,

Richer Helpers

2006-04-24T10:00:00.001-05:00

I learned a little about how ERb works today. What I've been trying to do is create a helper method that allows me to output a complex layout element (multiple div) and pass it an ERb block in my HTML template, but have the helper wrap its code around the block, much like the form_for method. I planned to use the XML Builder since it provides nice semantics and visually beautiful code. I

Another update for FT

2006-04-18T11:56:00.000-05:00

Scott Jungling, who is the only known user of FlexTimes besides myself, helped me debug a bunch of stuff yesterday. Thanks Scott!As a result of our discussion, I decided to add a little functionality to the model-side of the plugin that I had originally desired. I had originally been disappointed with Rails' helpers' handling of plain :date or :time columns. FlexTimes was supposed to handle

FlexTimes update

2006-04-17T12:29:00.000-05:00

I just committed a critical update to the FlexTimes plugin. Apparently, the logic in datetime_column was flawed and would only parse datetimes for the last column in the list. That flaw has been remedied.Also, I added a :minute_step => anInteger option so you can provide users with minute intervals within the hour, rather than all 60 options.Remember when you use this plugin that it "takes over

We're moving!

2006-04-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

I know I've posted a lot about technical stuff lately, but I wanted to share that Elizabeth and I have selected a place to move to and are going to move on Saturday, May 6 to a carriage house apartment in KCMO. Elizabeth will be closer to UMKC and I'll still be fairly close to major highways so I can get to KCKCC for work. The church will also be under a mile away. It's a little smaller than

FlexTimes plugin released!

2006-04-12T11:35:00.000-05:00

The flex_times plugin I recently mentioned is now available via SVN at:http://65.165.56.35/svn/flex_times/trunkPlease try it out and let me know what you think. The code is not especially pretty, but it is functional, and I'll be fixing that as time goes by.As I mentioned in my comment on the post announcing the plugin, you may put any string you want into the :order array, along with the

The long road to deployment

2006-04-10T14:53:00.000-05:00

You know, I posted a lot of stuff before about deploying Rails apps, and I'd like to recap and revise those comments.If you need to deploy applications quickly and have no prior bias toward servers, use lighttpd. I found it very easy to get my Rails apps running. However, I got discouraged when I had too much difficulty hosting more than one app on a single domain/vhost.Don't rule out Apache +

Tiiiiiiiiime is on my side! Yes it is...

2006-04-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

The first Rails project I completed for KCKCC has a lot of time and date functionality. Early on, I was quite disappointed with the flexibility of the time/date support in Rails. Specifically,Times can only be in 24-hour format.There's no time_select helper method, only datetime_select and date_select. Such a method would be helpful for those fields (DB-dependent) that are not complete DATETIMEs

KansasCity.rb

2006-04-04T15:34:00.000-05:00

A KC Ruby users group already exists.KCRUGThanks to Scott Raymond for the info and linkage.

RHEL is Evil

2006-04-04T09:51:00.000-05:00

...or at least our installation of it is evil. It seems that our RHEL box has everything installed FROM SOURCE (potentially) and not from RPMs as would be proper. At the very least, I would love to run up2date, but the system isn't registered. Go figure.This creates a situation affectionately known as "dependency hell".I've had the pressure on to get an application into production, but it

ActionMailer attachments

2006-04-03T10:42:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: Binary attachments seem to be broken on Windows because of a problem with the base64 encoding. See the bug I submitted.ActionMailer is a curious beast. I spent much of last week debugging and retooling what I thought was already working. In testing sending an email with a binary attachment, I found that the file size was smaller, and that the Word document I was using to test it

KC Rails Interest Group

2006-04-01T07:59:00.000-06:00

I'm thinking of starting a Kansas City-based Ruby on Rails UG/SIG. Since there seem to be several developers in the area, I'm hoping I can get them together.Some of the great things that could come of this:Contribute significantly as a group to the core Ruby on Rails codeDevelop F/OSS applications built on RailsHelp each other with Rails issues and problemsCollaborate on projects and thus help

Ok, so I was wrong...

2006-04-01T07:54:00.000-06:00

The other day I tried to deploy a new app on the same server with the config I had posted in previous posts. Although YMMV, I found that I could run one OR the other, not both apps. If I had both configs included, accessing either one of them would give me a 404.So I got onto the #lighttpd channel and asked about it. weigon (aka Jan, the author/maintainer of lighttpd) responded to me and we

Slight corrections

2006-03-10T08:50:00.000-06:00

One thing I failed to mention in my previous post has to do with your Rails configuration. Since each Rails application expects to be in the root URL path by default, you have to correct this by adding this line to either environment.rb or environments/production.rb (where I put mine).ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/myapp"This forces all URLs created by helper methods and

Riding the Rails

2006-02-27T15:15:00.000-06:00

At work I've been learning how to write web applications using Ruby on Rails. It's pretty awesome framework, but deployment can be a pain in the butt. Here's some tips for deployment.If possible, avoid Apache at all costs--there are just too many compatibility issues between FastCGI and Apache. Use lighttpd instead.If you have to use Apache (as in our case), set it up to do reverse proxying to

I should have known better...

2006-02-06T00:30:00.000-06:00

I posted on CL R&R this morning. As the title says, I should have known better than to walk into a flame war. I thought, idealistically, and naively, that I could make a difference and turn people's minds. However, it was the church where the lame don't walk and the blind definitely don't see. My main problems were this: 1) Christians who believe they're persecuted, 2) The idea that Islam (

This one's for Patch

2006-01-30T00:21:00.000-06:00

See the Rants and Raves section of KC craigslist sometime. What you may find could be amusing. Check out these posts (in chronological order):Strait thuggin' in the O.P.Strait Thuggin' in the O.P.In my parents SUVIt's tuff to be a gangstaAmong all the wanna-besI have a ruff lifeLivin' lower upper-classAin't nobody been what I've been throughI've got a F***ed up pastSo, when I'm in Wesport with

Well, hello again!

2006-01-30T00:06:00.000-06:00

So much to tell! I had to reformat my computer in December, thus losing all my Firefox passwords/cookies. So I couldn't remember my Blogger password. Actually it turns out what I forgot was my username not my password.Anyway...here's some news. I'll try to make it short and sweet.Christmas season went well, with a pulled-out-of-posterior spectacular performance by the choir, and a loss of

A Twist on Mad Libs

2005-11-15T22:59:00.000-06:00

On the way home tonight, I saw one of those placards that people sometimes have framing their license plates. This one said "Choose Life" on top and "Pray for an end to abortion" on the bottom. I thought it fitting that it was a KS license plate this thing was framing.Whether you agree with the politics of the placard, the structure (succintness, effectiveness) of the slogan is great. Good enough

What IS the matter with Kansas?

2005-11-09T07:16:00.000-06:00

Read the footnotes!

2005-10-14T14:42:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the most interesting things come up in sidebar discussions. Here's a good example, from The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. (pp. 319-320) Bear in mind that this is taken out of context.This formula is of course, not precisely that of the common Christian teaching, where, though Jesus is reported to have declared that "the kingdom of God is within you," the churches

Stop it!

2005-09-27T15:16:00.000-05:00

Hey PUNKS!Stop spamming my blog! It is not an avenue for free advertisements.Boy I wish Blogger logged IP addresses of comments.

Something you may not know about me...

2005-09-26T17:45:00.000-05:00

You are a Social Liberal (66% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (16% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist