Arizona’s First Ruby Conference – SunnyConf 2010
Arizona’s first Ruby conference is happening soon. There’s a great group of speakers as well as lightning talks and hacking. If you’re interested in Ruby, this is a conference you won’t want to miss!
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
IE tries to be helpful when using JavaScript to set the href attribute
I have to believe that the developers behind Internet Explorer have good intentions. It might ruin my world view and trust in people if that turned out to not be the case. However, there are instances where they go too far.
In this case, Internet Explorer tries to be “helpful” by automatically setting the link text when you set the href attribute of an anchor tag. I present the details of when this will happen and how you can get around it.
IE7 resize window problem
When developing for the web, if there is one browser that will not look correct, it is almost guaranteed to be a version of IE.
This was the case when I recently encountered elements that appeared to have a fixed position when they were not styled in that way. The problem was only visible on IE7 and, as I discovered, was a known bug in IE since version 6.
This article describes two different solutions to this problem.
Honeypot Captchas for Rails
Honeypot captchas are a simple, unobtrusive way to try to combat automated form spam. I packaged some work I did a few years ago using this technique in Ruby on Rails forms and created a gem.
Quick Tip: Rails Named Bind Variables
Sometimes, Rails queries can get long and complicated. Using named bind variables is an easy way to give some context to the query and, when you need to supply the same value to multiple query conditions, can shorten the query parameters.
Quick Tip: Cucumber Works-in-Progress
Cucumber has a relatively new feature that allows you to tag individual scenarios as “should pass” versus “work-in-progress”. Rake tasks are provided that run the two groups of tagged scenarios separately.
Quick Tip: Rails Singularization of -ess
The Ruby on Rails built-in inflections don’t handle singularizing words like “business” or “address” correctly. Here’s a quick way to make sure it’s handled in your Rails project.
Fixing Multipart Uploads in Rack for Ruby 1.9
Describes a fatal error in Rack v1.0.0 that may need to be patched until a new version is released. If you’re seeing a “invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII” error, then read on!
Using Named Scopes in a Rails Plugin
I encountered a problem after extracting some common functionality into a Rails plugin that contained two named scopes. It was not returning the correct results and it took me a while to figure it out. With the help of Chris Chandler we determined the cause and a solution so that the named scopes work correctly from within a Rails plugin.
Quick Tip: Override Rails Generated URLs
I explore a quick and simple way to change the default URLs generated for a Ruby on Rails resource. With this tip, there’s no need to modify the usage of URL helpers or anything else in your code. After making the change URLs for that resource will be generated as you’ve specified them.
