Echographia

What happened, see, was that I finally started using my aforementioned old Rails app in earnest, and when I did, I discovered that… I couldn’t log out. I didn’t actually need to log out, but it bugged me. I dug around a little. I could log out in development mode, but not production mode. The logout method thought it was working, but when the next page loaded I was still logged in. Something to do with sessions and cookies.

Something down in the depths of the authentication system, and I thought, well, I could try to debug this ancient plugin that I didn’t write, and that has probably never been updated to newer versions of Rails… or I could try out one of those new systems I’ve been reading about. That have documentation, and support, and Rails 2.3 compatibility. How hard could it be?
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This week I updated the authentication system in an old Rails app from the pre-REST acts_as_authenticated plugin to thoughtbot’s shiny new Clearance gem. What follows isn’t a how-to (because really, who else is going to be making this switch?) but it might be useful for someone. May the Great Gazoogle guide them to these shores.
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… but it was touch and go there for a while.

RubyMine is out, and I’d felt positive enough about the beta that I wanted to give it a try… but I didn’t want to do it in any existing working directory, in case it did stupid stuff with my files. So, simple enough, just clone the git repository:

[556] RubymineProjects $ git clone ~/Documents/workspace/tourette
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/eostrom/RubymineProjects/tourette/.git/
fatal: object 3a37e547408f1f955337bade61807ef021608760 is corrupted

Fatal?!? I don’t like the sound of that.
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This morning I exhumed an old Rails project and started cranking it forward from Rails 1.2.2 to the current version, 2.3.2. That’s about two years of Rails develpopment. This afternoon I got all the tests passing except for two (and I think they’re failing because Yahoo has changed its geocoder)… and then I found the other stash of tests. So, still working on it.

I spent some time tonight sidetracked by tools. In Emacs, thanks to Ryan Davis, I can shift-mouse-3 on pretty much any line in a stack trace and be taken to the right line in the right file. But under Rails 2.3 it doesn’t always work: (more…)

… the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. Three talks I like so far, for different reasons: (more…)

Quick thoughts on trying out the RubyMine IDE (based on IntelliJ IDEA) today: (more…)

After the Barefoot site launched, I got a lot of nice feedback about it, mostly from people who work for the cafe.  “Looks great!” they said, and I wasn’t quite sure how to react.  I was proud of how the site worked, but the look of the site, I thought, was entirely thanks to Conrad Altmann, the designer.

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Here’s a simpler version of that last post using Rich Kilmer’s HotCocoa library. I also use the approach I suggested at the end of the last post: Build a menu each time it’s requested, instead of trying to keep one at the ready.
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I’ve been wanting to write a Mac application since I got this computer a year or so ago. Still haven’t, but today I ran through a MacRuby/Cocoa tutorial, and I’m hoping to find the time to code the app I have in mind soon, before I forget whatever I just learned. More about that if it happens.

My original plan was to make the app accessible from the global menu bar, but then I learned that Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines discourage it, and you know how I love guidelines. And humans. So instead I’m going to use a Dock menu. The main advantage of both, for my purposes, is that after you take some action, control returns immediately to whatever application you were using; perfect for programs you use for a moment now and then, but don’t really spend time in.

Anyway, I thought I’d share what I learned about implementing Dock menus in MacRuby. (more…)

Yesterday was the first day of February Album Writing Month, so of course I kicked things off by sinking three hours into writing a script that I could have found on the Internet somewhere. See, last week I cleaned out my GMail inbox. Since I haven’t done that, like, ever, that meant reading a lot of old and unimportant mail - like, for example, the July 2008 DreamHost newsletter, which mentioned their Entire Account Backup service, which gives you a downloadable copy of all your data for a given account. I love backups, so in the interest of being able to archive that newsletter, I kicked off a backup right then and there.
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