Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Minor Gotcha with ActiveRecord query methods

Stumbled upon a gotcha with the ActiveRecord query methods you get for free, along side the normal attribute accessor methods. Its a "gotcha" in that I "gotcha" read the docs and Rails source a bit more in depth before making assumptions about how Rails works, but I'd rather pretend the fault is with Rails [...]

Relevance is looking for two super ninja hackers

My company, Relevance is looking to hire two more full time people. We are based in Chapel Hill, and we want everyone to be colocated or open to relocation.
In my short tenure here at Relevance (little over three months), I can safely say that this is the closest I've ever been to my perfect [...]

Understanding the Rails command

I ran a few quirks during the course of working on MultiRails and testing against the Rails 2.0 prerelease.
The first thing was tracking down what Rails version is actually used when you just run the "rails" command. This is important when you have many versions of Rails installed via gems, some of [...]

multi_rails has been released

MultiRails allows easy testing against multiple versions of Rails for
your Rails specific gem or plugin.
Use MultiRails to hook in Rails 2.0 testing in your continuous integration. Still working on Rails 2.0 support? Use MultiRails to see where your test suite falls down against the 2.0 preview releases of Rails.
sudo gem install multi_rails...view the [...]

Yall gonna go update some code, up in here, up ‘n here!”

A stupid script to update all projects within a directory. This could be massively improved.
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Simple script to svn up all directories within the current directory, or the

# specified directory.  Does not recurse, assumes we only need to go to the

# immediate directories.

# ex:> cd my_projects; upper    # svn up [...]

I’m feeling open sourcey…

Got some open source updates and releases coming soon:

My logic captcha plugin for Rails, BrainBuster, has recently been globalized by one creative user. I'd like to incorporate something into the next release to make it easy for people to extend the plugin in ways like this, but I'd like to avoid adding a "lang" [...]

Less Magic, Please

My development style tends towards less and less metaprogramming and magic these days. Its not for lack of ability or lack of capable coworkers. I work with some pretty sharp people, and I know they can grok whatever sort of voodoo method_missing module_eval mysticism I can throw at them. But lately I [...]

Overriding setup in Rail’s test_helper - impossible?

Is there a way that will just work for adding common setup code to test_helper? None of the below work:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

# this breaks fixtures in the acts_as_authenticated account_controller_test (but nowhere else, for some reason)...

  def setup

  end

PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

# this breaks things all over the place

  def setup

     super

  end

PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

# this [...]

Joining Relevance

I'm happy to announce that I have joined Relevance, a small software shop based in Chapel Hill, NC.
This is going to bring a lot of change for me and my family, one of which is moving across the country from Wisconsin to North Carolina. I love Wisconsin and being close to family, but my [...]

Zed for the win

We can all go home now.
Zed wins at the internet.
Choice quotes on my (nsfw) tumblelog.