Getting Things Done is a book by David Allen. The methodology from the book, commonly referred to as GTD, has become quite popular inside certain tech circles. I’ve been using GTD for roughly a year now. I can’t claim to be an expert at it, but it’s helped me stay … Continue reading
Something I frequently need to do when deploying a Rails application is determine the current migration version of a database. In the past, I’ve done this by bringing up mySQL and typing: SELECT version FROM schema_info Well, I’m finally tired of doing that so I cooked up this Rake task: … Continue reading
I’m proud to announce that Teascript went live early last week. It’s been a long several months since originally conceiving the idea, building the app, beta testing, and deploying but now it’s finally ready for prime time. Teascript is a Rails application that makes it easy to design and build … Continue reading
RailsConf registration is open. Time to scramble! From what I understand one-third of the seats are already taken. I’ll be speaking at the conference this year. Should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. See you there.
Mike Clark made a recent post on his blog about how to handle Rails versions with Capistrano. Very nice stuff. I’ve put his code samples to immediate use with an app I’m preparing to convert to Rails 1.2.1. I’ve run into some trouble this week, though, as I want to … Continue reading
I have a web site I’ve been working on that tends to go down at odd times during the night. It’s an issue with the web host, and due to financial constraints my client is not willing to relocate the site anytime soon. So I’m stuck with having to log … Continue reading
Dave Thomas’ keynote from last year’s EuroRailsConf is now online. It’s about 45 minutes long and well worth watching. Dave discusses terrorism, risk, and how it relates to Rails. This really scratched an itch for me because I’m in a work situation right now where I’m dealing with a great … Continue reading
Ever notice the cruft you get when running Rails tests from the command line? It’s horrible, especially if your project has more than a dozen test files: /opt/local/bin/ruby -Ilib:test “/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.7.1/lib/rake/rake_test_loader.rb” “test/unit/activity_test.rb” “test/unit/address_test.rb” “test/unit/application_helper_test.rb” “test/unit/course_calculations_test.rb” “test/unit/course_test.rb” “test/unit/course_type_test.rb” “test/unit/credit_hour_test.rb” “test/unit/email_test.rb” “test/unit/exam_test.rb” “test/unit/gender_test.rb” “test/unit/grade_test.rb” “test/unit/level_test.rb” “test/unit/notifier_test.rb” “test/unit/numeric_test.rb” “test/unit/obfuscator_test.rb” “test/unit/order_test.rb” “test/unit/school_test.rb” “test/unit/string_test.rb” “test/unit/student_test.rb” “test/unit/transcript_test.rb” … Continue reading
I began poking around the intriguing Rails-based Mephisto blogging engine this weekend. While the app itself looks quite promising, there is a noticeable absence of themes for it. I’m sure this will change, but in the meantime I thought I’d make my own contribution. The particular blog I’m converting originally … Continue reading
A friendly word of advice: don’t leave empty test fixtures in your Rails projects. In some situations, it can cause unexpected test failures that are quite nasty to track down.