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  <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2032/2541589315_d20f683b6c_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Baked NYC" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterhellberg/">Peter Hellberg</a></div>

Just wanted to drop a note in my blog, here, that I will be attending RailsConf from Friday through Sunday. If any lurkers out there are gonna be in attendance, do drop me a note. Let’s meet each other!

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/28/60990379_d52dd11d69_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Baked NYC" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/progoddess/">rachel is ...</a></div>

As I’ve started to play around here and there with ActiveResource, I’ve noticed lots of complaints about how ActiveResource’s implementation of HTTP basic auth leaves a lot to be desired. Specifically with regard to its lack of support for email addresses as usernames. This won’t work:

My relationship with Subversion is an ever growing one. Right now it is growing itself straight into git. I’m not sure how happy Subversion is with me. It’s complicated.

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/45/139177165_e3855c6686_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Dung repository" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cheesygarlicboy/">Chambo25</a></div>

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/4/9183721_1ec8cf6ef4_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Mad code rewrite" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/zhartley/">zhartley</a></div>

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/172347516_064bd42d14_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Assertive" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/schwarzerwolf/">ausi_blackwolf</a></div>

So there’s a Category that has many Expenses. The expenses for a category are destroyed when the category is destroyed. Elsewhere in my logic I would like to know if the category is removable based on whether it has any expenses and, if it does, whether any of the expenses it has are greater than zero.

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/rubbertoe/">rbatina</a></div>

Does that title make sense to you? If not, you’re not alone. I dealt with that bit of text for several hours the other day. It’s the beginning of an error message that my pea-sized brain could not parse for the life of me. I received the message while running a simple test involving an assert_select.

Since early this summer, I have had a severely annoying problem with my Ruby consoles (irb and script/console). My spacebar quit functioning, making quick testing of Ruby and Rails functionality quite limited and in some cases impossible. I’ll give you two versions of my story. First the short version.

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/31/46196140_010d9aeff9_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Broken Ping-Pong Table" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/darlingsnail/">DarlingSnail</a></div>

Previously I discussed getting my feet wet with has_many_polymorphs. In that article I promised a follow-up dealing with checkboxes in a polymorphic world. As I started keying the article, I ran into a much better description of the overall issue by Dylan Fareed (I presume) at I Am Still Alive. Take a look at his has_many_polymorphs overview.

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/always13/">always13</a></div>

The great thing about my worklife as of late is seemingly every week I get to learn something new. I don’t necessarily have to learn something new, but I certainly want to. My base of experience is growing and I’m arriving at a place where I can recognize when the unknown thing will likely be worth learning to create a more elegant solution. Thankfully I work with people who have a similar grasp on reality.

On a recent project, I needed to simulate the YouTube-ish text field selection box. You know the one where you can easily select and copy a link or embed code to send on to your friends. You click in the box, the text is automatically selected, and you can quickly copy the text.

Update: Don’t bother with the crap I spewed below. Just head over to Rail Spikes. There are a couple options if you read the post and comments.

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/204/524123975_bed8ab7cbb_m.jpg" width="240" height="160" alt="Cindy" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/georgiap/r">caribbean</a></div>

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  <img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1012/1025919868_ebf0df1a71_m.jpg" width="240" height="160" alt="Matt - rifle" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/amagill/">AMagill</a></div>

During some freelance work, we had a special requirement that I imagine a lot of people run into. A list of items returned from the database needed to be sorted by name while ignoring English articles: “a,” “an,” and “the.” Though I hate them with a passion, I knew regular expressions were the solution.

Recently I implemented a true maintenance page on Scrawlers using Mike Clark’s excellent HOWTO. Clark’s directions show you how to create a more dynamic maintenance page than the standard HTML version we all know and love. It’s a good technique.

Now that I’m managing Scrawlers’ server, I have the power to use a more appropriate Rails log rotation technique than I was allowed at Dreamhost. Specifically, I can use logrotate on my Ubuntu Slicehost slice.

This morning I spent a good while hashing on a problem in some new code I’m updating for a freelance project. I added a couple callbacks to an ActiveRecord model, and things that previously worked were broken. Unfortunately there were no errors in the model or exceptions in the system to give me a hint as to what went wrong. When I finally uncovered the problem, I was thankful that it was something I had never run into before.

On a recent Radiant customization project, I needed to write some tests for a front-end extension. One situation called for a stub object, so I built out the pathing and created the stub object as I’m used to doing in Rails. In extensions/extension_name/test/mocks/test I created a some_mailer.rb object to mock a mailer model, overriding the mailer’s deliver_mail method:

Following the advice of the Agile Web Development with Rails book, I sought to clear out sessions periodically from the Scrawlers database. I also took a hint from RealityForge.org and put the work directly in Rails, using script/runner to execute. Specifically I created a new model class: SessionCleaner (/app/models/sessioncleaner.rb).