It’s not exactly a hardship, but here’s a simple method for doing that:

Just put that into your .bashrc and you’re ready to go.

Put this in your test_helper.rb file and you’re good to go.

Here’s what a standard unit test looks like now.

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 test "protected attributes" do
  assert_protected_attribute User, :is_admin
 end

Note that you don’t have to instantiate anything now. No mucking about with fixtures or factories.

I wish that more tutorial sites used a layout like this.

2009-08-23T00:00:00-04:00 http://trevoroke.com/blog/2009/08/23/cheap-branches-ease-development It looks like Josh Susser has much the same daily workflow as I have. Take a read, it’s a good example of how cheap local branches can make your development life a whole bunch easier.

I’ve already moved the main project over to slicehost, and since I’m already paying for the space I thought it would be a great idea to host my repositories there.

It was a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be.

One of the requirements of the install is that I connect to the git repository over ssh. I’ve got it set up so that my ssh server is listening on port 30000 and it authenticates using a public key. No faffing about with passwords here!

Here’s what I did.

Install Git

The first thing we need to do is install git. I’m using aptitude, so this would be done like this:

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sudo aptidude install git-core

Now you’re ready to create the actual repository.

Create Your Remote Repository

While still connected to your slice, enter the following. Change anything you need to, of course.

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mkdir ~/repos/example.git cd ~/repos/example.git git init

It doesn’t really get much easier than that.

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### Create Your Local Repository

Now we go to work on making the local repsitory. All of this is on your local machine:

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mkdir example
cd example
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m "initial repository import"
git remote add origin ssh://username@yourdomain/example.git

In my case, the ssh section would be:

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ssh://trevor@66.453.44.xxx:30000/home/trevor/repos/example.git

Push!

Now all you have to do is push your local changes back to the remote server. On your local machine: @ git push origin master @ That’s it. You’re done.

This is mostly based on the commonthread 2009-04-18T00:00:00-04:00 http://trevoroke.com/blog/2009/04/18/quick-edit-in-wordpress I was going through my old posts and converting some of the old uncategorized links to something a bit more useful. Uncategorized doesn’t really count as useful as far as I can tell. Three edits in, I notice the Quick Edit link and give that a try.

Honestly, I’ve had more fun working with Joomla.

I’ve found that a certain segment of the gig-giving set like to give limits on how long a project should take. Not in the “we’d really like this finished by Friday” kind of way but in the “This should not take an experienced developer more than one hour - please ensure your estimate is less than this limit” kind of way.

Where are they getting this information? What makes them think that they are qualified to make this call?

Hell - I just found one today that read “I believe the right person can write this in twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes!

I can’t think of any program that I could write for a person in under twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to get the spec, think it through, code up a solution, test the hell out of it, compile the solution, and then bundle the thing up and send it on it’s way. I’m a pretty quick programmer, but that’s just not going to happen.

Here’s a hint for the certain segment of the gig-giving set. Recognize why you’re bringing in an expert. Make your request as detailed as possible and ask for quotes with estimates from multiple people. You should start to see an average after you get some responses. This will give you a ballpark figure for how much time (and therefore money) to budget. If someone gives you a wildly overblown estimate you can either find out why (your spec might be hard to understand) or try to find out why.

You’ll be happier and you’ll get some responses from people who might actually be able to get you what you want.

It’s a pretty common task. It’s one of the reasons I put a div with the id of “leftNav” in there.

So.

Anyway.

Their web guy tried to make their own div for the navigational elements and pooched it. Really badly. And then sent off a whiny email about how we won’t help them with anything.

I can see screwing up. Everyone’s done it. Everyone’s made stupid mistakes that they’re just completely blind to. Sometimes you’re just too close to the code. And sometimes you just haven’t learned enough yet.

Just don’t try to pin your mistakes on someone else.

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irb ActiveRecord::Base.connection
tables drop_table "rogue_table" tables

Another fr’instance. When I’m learning the interface for a new class, I often have to refer to it a few times. The consle along with some meta=programming goodness make this a snap. So, to find all methods with “tag” in it:

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MyClass.methods.sort.grep(/tag/)

That’s it.

Nice.

Unfortunately my install didn’t work properly. I kept getting “is not a taggable model” errors. And that just wouldn’t do.

Solution:

1. move require ‘tagging_extensions’ to above the initialization block;
2. add require ‘has_many_polymorphs’ right above that;
3. restart Mongrel and console;

You should be good to go now.

edit

Of course, it’s right there in the documentation if I had just looked a little harder. Go Team Me!

That being said, I haven’t used it as my primary code editor in a very long time. I’ve been doing a lot of GUI work, and emacs isn’t really cut out for that. Add in the refactoring support that most modern IDEs and I’ve been quite willing to leave most of the work to another program.

Now that I’m doing a lot more in rails, I find that I’m in emacs more and more. I’ve dumped all of the other editors and i just spend all of my time in emacs. I’m using emacs-rails which is a minor mode that ties together the ruby major mode along with a snippet editor, links to generation and migration methods, easy and smart navigation (as in jump straight to the correct controller or helper), and lots of little things I haven’t got around to playing with yet.

On top of that, I get to keep all of the keyboard shortcuts that I’ve already learned.

I’m going to post more about emacs in future posts. I’ll probably show some parts of my .emacs file as well.

I finally got the chance to change that last week on a test port of some existing ASP.Net software. The existing codebase is a bit of a nightmare, mainly due to the type of programming that ASP.Net requires. All of the abstractions just feel wrong to me like there’s this great mass of people who just don’t really get what the web is all about. It’s really showing it’s roots. I love linq, and I love C# with the .Net library, but that ASP.Net crap has to curl up and die.

Anyway, back to rails. I’ve been coding PHP pages and sites for years now and I’m really comfortable with the language. So much so that I didn’t want to lose the advantages that experience bring with it. Because of that was using MVC frameworks built in PHP (Code Igniter is the best that I found out there).

I should have changed a lot sooner.

I’m just blazing thorugh the code base. My PHP skills are helping rather than hindering. The abstractions actually make sense.

I like it.

I’m not a fanboy yet (there are many places where rails would be far too heavyweight) but I do like it a lot.

I mean, I’m good at the greenfield design stage, and I do love the flash of creativity. But I much prefer this stage. The final extra-polishing that goes into making a product complete.

It’s pretty satisfying.