Articles written in December 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
New Design
I wanted to play with Liquid, Mephisto’s templating engine. So in the process, I thought I’d create a custom theme for this sporadically updated blog.
I’ve added a few plugins and some code highlighting as well. Fun fun.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Boolean Columns
Just found this little tidbit about returning a boolean from a tinyint column tonight on the rails wiki...
Columns which are either boolean or tinyint(1) are recognised as booleans by ActiveRecord. So, if you have a table “people” and a column “rocks tinyint(1)”, you can say:
person = People.find(1)
person.rocks = trueHowever, person.rocks will return an integer, and Ruby thinks that 0 is true. If you want to test for truth, use person.rocks?, like this view example:
<% if person.rocks? %>
You rock, dude!
<% end %>I did not know that. Pretty dang cool.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Go ahead, cheat (It's ok!)
Though I'm fairly weened from intellisense from my .NET days, I still find myself always needing some type of reference when writing Ruby or Rails projects. There's always a browser tab with the Rails API, noobkit, or some other cheatsheet . While cheatsheets are pretty and all, they are sometimes just a hassle to find and go it when you just need that little syntax helper. So what do I do, I cheat.
This little command line tool provides a wealth of help at the tip of your fingertips.
gem install cheatThen see what cheats are available.
cheat sheetsOr just run one (I use this one a lot)
cheat strftimeThere are just hundreds out there. And you can edit (fix) one or add your own. The app is just a command line front end to a wiki. Pretty sweet.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Ruby Debug
So one of the hardest things to do in a highly dynamic language is to debug code. If you feel the same way, check out the ruby-debug gem. Rails 2.0 now has full support for it and it’s a real “step forward, into, and out” debugger.
Here’s a great screencast to get you started. If you use cheat (which I highly recommend), simply type cheat rubydebug in the console to see all the options.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Subversion Icons for TextMate
Here’s a great plugin for TextMate by Ciarán Walsh to overlay the status icon on each file/folder under subversion.
Grab the most recent release (as of today) here.
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