This weekend, I switched our webserver from Apache 2.2 using name-based virtual hosts to Lighttpd 1.4.18. This was something I wanted to do for month now, since Lighttpd seems to be much easier to configure and maintain when it comes to name-based virtual hosts, FastCGI applications (like Ruby on Rails) and SSL. Since Lighttpd gains more and more popularity, there were almost no problems migrating from Apache to Lighttpd. Especially name-based virtual hosts are easier to configure in Lighttpd.
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If you use gettext in your web application, you'll sooner or later have to face the problem of handling links that should be embedded into a translated text. What can easily be done in a normal, non-localized template with ERb, can become a nightmare if used extensively in localized templates. However you can prevent yourself (and your translators) a lot of nightmares by using a small helper method.
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A minor bug in TMail (which is used in Rails' ActionMailer) got fixed finally.
About 2 years ago, I reported bug #6015 to the Ruby on Rails bug tracker. TMail's createforward method always returned the first body part of a newly created forwarded mail instead of the forwarded mail itself. Therefore the createforward method was practically useless. At that time, the ActionMailer and/or TMail developers didn't seem to be very active. Well... nobody cared about this for about two years.
After I heard that TMail got a new maintainer, I gave it another try and submitted bug #15445 to the newly created TMail bug tracker. Mikel (who is the new TMail maintainer) applied and tested a fix, so the upcoming TMail version will come without this bug. Thanks a lot, Mikel.
Let's hope this fix will make it into Rails 2.0 so that I can dump one more workaround in my application soon.
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This morning I faced a strange problem when trying to write RSpec tests for a user login action. Trying to setting the flash before doing a request, resulted in an unexpected Exception:
TypeError in 'SessionController logging in with correct credentials should redirect to the url_after_login url if given'
can't convert String into Integer
.../vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails/lib/spec/rails/dsl/behaviour/functional.rb:80:in 'flash'
./spec/controllers/session_controller_spec.rb:52:
./script/spec:4:
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Did you ever want to create multiple models in one action? E.g. if your user model has many email addresses, create a user record and his first email address when he signs up... Nick of Pivotal Blabs wrote a nice article about it -- but it almost drove me to despair this morning when I was trying to break it down to my user and email addresses model.
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Update: I put together the code below and created a rails plugin from it. It's called activerecord_symbolize on Github.
ActiveRecord does not natively suppport column types of ENUM or SET. If you want an attribute to act like an ENUM, you'll most probably use a string and restrict it to certain values using validates_inclusion_of. However, once you've got used to Ruby, you'd probably prefer to have symbols as values for these attributes. Here's a small and easy-to-use snippet that can be used to symbolize values of any ActiveRecord attribute.
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A few weeks ago, I bought a Cherry eVolution Marlin wireless desktop (it's a wireless, notebook-like keyboard and a laser-mouse, which are both connected to the PC using one little USB-receiver). Last weekend, when I turned on the PC, I realized that keyboard and mouse didn't work anymore. Neither keypresses nor mouse movements got to the PC anymore. Looking at the USB-receiver, I saw the red LED flashing rapidly.
It just looks like keyboard and receiver got out of sync and have to be re-connected or re-synced, e.g. like pressing connect buttons. However, neither the receiver nor mouse or keyboard have any hidden buttons or switches to initiate a re-connect and synchronize them.
I couldn't find any information on the net relating this issue, so I called the support hotline and found out that a rapidly flashing red LED at the receiver does indeed indicate that devices are out-of-sync. A friendly support assistant told me a way how the devices can be connected again.
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Capistrano 2.0 does not write a revisions.log anymore when deploying your application. However, I liked the revisions.log, because it gives you a clear history of which revision you deployed to your servers at which time. Therefore I wrote a little Capistrano recipe which updates an old-style revisions.log whenever you deploy or rollback your appliaction.
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I suppose, you know the great scope_out plugin for rails. If not, go check it out, since it's really great to define DRY scoped associations. Basically, you can use scope_out to define the scoped associations within the model the scope is applied to. However, what I'm missing is a feature like a default scope that can be applied to the model and scopes the default finder.
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