http://www.frenzicmojo.net A boy and his blog Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:29:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I know, big surprise, something stops working in facebox. In this case, it's datepicker, which is actually a pretty nice little date selection plugin. Unfortunately, it uses HTML element ID attributes in order to function, and that means it all falls apart when facebox clones the HTML. After fiddling with ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/11/fun-with-jquery-datepicker-and-facebox/ A while back, I tweeted about how cool it was to have a software patch I submitted be accepted. You know what's cooler than that? Realizing that someone is actually using a plugin I wrote. I mean, working with open source, when you put something like that out there, it's with the idea ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/04/the-joys-of-open-source/ I know, I know. No one uses Solr anymore. Except me. And the guy that maintains acts_as_solr. And all those people who talk about it on twitter. Okay, so there are still a few people using it. This is for them. Just a quick note on how you can improve your ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/04/backgrounding-acts-as-solr/ SOAP, ugh. Obviously, as a Rails developer, I would love it if all web services offered a REST API. It would make my life easier and drastically reduce the development curve. Sadly, though, the majority of the services I've had to integrate with lately only offer SOAP. Thankfully, there's soap4r. Hiroshi Nakamura ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/03/dealing-with-session-headers-in-soap4r/ Sooner or later in the life cycle of any application, there comes a time when it makes sense to explore areas where backgrounding processes might improve your Users' experience. Right now, if you're looking to do that, the place to turn is Workling. The obvious candidates for this kind of backgrounding ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/02/working-with-workling/ This one is pretty obvious, but I'm going to say it anyway: Do not, I repeat, do not, rely on model validations to protect your database integrity! My example for this is a relatively minor one, but it could easily have been much worse: During the early development of an app I ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/01/learn-from-my-mistakes-1-model-validations/ The principle of fat models and skinny controllers is one that I first learned when I was initiated into the Rails community about a year and a half ago. Every single one of my fellow developers repeated it, almost like a mantra. The only problem was that no one seemed ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/01/thoughts-on-skinny-controllersfat-models-inspired-by-recent-refactoring/ I've noticed that my Windows XP image in VMWare occasionally drops its shared connection. I'll be plugging away, happily checking cross-browser compatibility (okay, that's a lie, I'm miserable when I check cross-browser compatibility, which only makes it worse when it stops working) when all of a sudden, nothing is ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2009/01/problems-with-vmware-fusion/ So, this was a pain: I spent about 2 hours this weekend trying to find an easy way to execute a SQL select statement while circumventing the ActiveRecord model. After scouring the web and some old code, I found this: Model.connection.select_rows(sql) It returns an array of arrays, each inner array representing a ... http://www.frenzicmojo.net/2008/04/getting-around-ar/