Whenever by Javan Makhmali is an excellent way to manage the cron tasks that relate to your ruby app. It provides a very powerful and readable ruby syntax for planning a job schedule.

I have dealt with optional parameters with default values in JavaScript plenty of times in the past. But for some reason it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to create a nice options hash like I use so frequently when writing my Ruby code. It really is quite simple.

This blog turns five today. Over the past year the blog has been relatively quiet, though I’ve put in a lot of time on a specific series of posts. I’m a little disheartened to see that the most frequently visited blog posts for the past year were all written in 2008 or 2007.

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John Nunemaker at RailsTips recently asked the Tubes what hardware and software was being used to complete work. Here’s my rundown.

Hardware

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hvc/2473208638/">bitmask</a></div>

When writing tests, it is often desirable to bend time to test limits and edges of the day. It is especially useful to warp time to test results across the timezones of the world. Manipulating time is also useful to assure a day of the week, month or year every time the test runs.

Ever find yourself annoyed by frequent talk of elections, memes and kitty-cats on Twitter? I have created a user script to apply to your Twitter Fluid instance or Firefox Greasemonkey install to enable regex whitelists and blacklists for filtering out tweets in your Twitter stream.

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  <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3117/2780063730_d5079ac01d_m.jpg" width="192" height="240" alt="Book : How To Use Internet To Earn A MAssive PassivBook : How To Use InBook : How To Use Internet To Earn ternet To Earn e Income In Your Pyjamas" /><br />

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<a href="http://www.windycityrails.org">
<img src="http://m.windycityrails.org/images/windycityrails_125.gif" width="125" height="125" alt="WindyCityRails - September 20, 2008 - I'm attending!" style="border:none;" />

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

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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!

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:

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

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

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

I’m on a quest to build an ergonomic Valhalla in my workspace. It’s a grueling, tireless quest for a freelancer on a budget. Herman Miller just ain’t in the cards. But Office Max and IKEA are, as long as I focus on what I really need to be comfortable.

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.

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.

(Note: David Heinemeier Hansson detests being called DHH. So I will be referring to him as Hansson. As if that is any better.)