Collected Writings
Handle Legacy Semester Naming With Ease
Thursday, January 07, 2010
If you’re at Cornell University, that is.
Cornell used to use an archaic numeric coding system to designate different semesters, 70 = Fall, 20 = Spring, etc. But a few years ago, the University switched from that system to a new one, using letters: F = Fall, S = Spring, U = Summer. [...]
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Ruby Trick Of the Day
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I was browsing through the Rails source code, and came across this nice little snippet. To paraphrase:
["val1","val2","val3"] * '&'
# returns => "val1&val2&val3"
Yes, multiplying an array by a string does the equivalent of an array join() method. So the above is equivalent to:
["val1","val2","val3"].join('&')
# returns => "val1&val2&val3"
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Using Google To Host Your Javascript Assets
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Well, not all of them, but some big ones.
I noticed the other day, via Google’s AJAX Libraries page, that they host a variety of popular JS frameworks that you can load directly via the standard <script/> tag. So instead of hosting, say, JQuery, on my own server, I can just reference Google’s copy like this:
<script [...]
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The Morning Read
Monday, November 16, 2009
Metaprogramming in Ruby seems to be today’s topic:
Understanding Ruby Singleton Classes – a.k.a. “anonymous classes”, these are not to be confused with the singleton pattern, which was news to me.
Metaprogramming in Ruby: It’s All About the Self – details the subtle differences in the “self” object during runtime and the effects of Ruby’s “metaclass” structure.
The [...]
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CU Web Forum Talk Up on SlideShare
Sunday, November 15, 2009
For any interested parties, I posted my recent talk where I presented about Ruby on Rails to the Cornell Web Development community. The talk is two parts, the first being a background to Ruby on Rails, and the second covering the challenges and payoffs that came from integrating Rails into our PHP/Oracle environment.
You can [...]
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Oracle ENV Vars in Phusion Passenger
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Rails’ oracle adapter needs to see your Oracle environment variables in order to hook up to the database. In an old post, I described how to do that before Phusion Passenger could handle it naturally. As of 2.2.3, Passenger can now pass server ENV variables to the Rails environment directly, via the “PassEnv” [...]
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