Ariejan.net

You have probably seen URL shorteners that use short, seemingly random strings to identify sites. These strings are not random, they are encoded integer values. My valerii gem allows you to easily and quickly encode and decode integer values. Let me show you.

I haven’t seen a schedule yet, but I’ve been told by Mark that I’ll be speaking at Rails Underground this year.

My talk will be on the topic of Git. In about 45 minutes time I’ll show you all the basic git features you’ll need on a daily basis. Not only that, but I’ll also explain how git manages all those commits and branches so you can be on your way to become a git power user.

I just released version 0.4.0 of the IMDB Ruby Gem into the wild. There are only a few minor updates:

Changes in 0.4.0

• Updates to the console ‘imdb’ utility
• Show the IMDB ID
• Show the full IMDB URL

Installation or upgrade

$ sudo gem install imdb

$ sudo gem update imdb

Issues, source or contributions

Let me pose a typical Rails situation:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :fancy_hat
end
 
class FancyHat < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person
end

Now, how can you get all the people that don’t have a fancy hat?

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :fancy_hat
 
  named_scope :hatless, :joins => 'LEFT JOIN fancy_hats ON fancy_hats.person_id = people.id', :conditions => 'fancy_hats.person_id IS NULL'
end

Now you can find all the hatless people you want.

FYI: Finding fancy hats that have no one to wear them is a lot easier, because the foreign key is stored in the fancy_hats table.

I just released version 0.1.0 of my IMDB gem which allows your app to search IMDB for IMDB movie ID’s and access most data that’s publicly available.

Installation

sudo gem install imdb

This will also install the dependencies Hpricot and HTTParty.

Usage

In your project, include the gem (and possibly rubygems as well).

Yay! warcraft-armory version 0.1.0 has been released!

The warcraft-armory gem allows your application to easily access information from the World of Warcraft Armory site.

This is an early version that allows the retrieval of character information from EU and US armories. But, more is in the making!

I’m currently writing some RSpec tests that use Time.now.

I want my model to calculate a duration and store the future time in the database. I’ve already specced the calculation of the duration, but I also want to spec that everything gets saved correctly. Here’s my first spec:

it "should do stuff" do
  m = Model.create()
  m.expires_at.should eql(Time.now + some_value)
end

This fails.

BaseApp is no longer maintained. There is a very good alternative called bort.

For the impatient: http://github.com/ariejan/baseapp

Got issues? Feature requests or patches? http://baseapp.lighthouseapp.com/

Every Rails developer has at least once developed an application that needed user authentication and some basic UI features like tabs and a sidebar. Ask yourself now: “how often have you installed and extended the restful_authentication plugin?”.

All Rails developers know the slogan “Skinny Controllers, Fat Models” and I heartily agree with it. Every conference you go to, you hear it. But there’s a problem! My Fat models got overweight!

ActiveRecord is great in providing CRUD for your data models. In some cases, however, it’s necessary to prevent write access to these models. The data may be provided by an external source and should only be used as a reference in your application, for example.