I am current working on a project and needed a date picker. I found a pretty decent one called CalendarDateSelect that integrates very nice with Ruby on Rails. It comes with a few themes. All you have to do is include the corresponding style sheet. It is pretty easy to customize as well.
March, 2008
29
Mar 08
DatePicker for Rails
20
Mar 08
Time Machine works with Mail
In Leopard, Apple introduced a new backup solution that is pretty sweet. It is called time machine. It allows you to go to any folder in any point in time. It makes backups of changed files every hour for a day, every day for a week, and a backup for every week for as much space you have. Many products offer this kind of solution, however, I think that apple again differentiates themselves by the ease of retrieving files from your backup with the elegant user interface. Below is a video of this in action. What really amazed me tonight was that it just wasn’t folders/files you can retrieve, it works with applications. I entered time machine while i was in my mail program. My desktop dropped as I entered time machine and my computer went into the time machine universe. All of a sudden I was able to go view my inbox at what it looked like at any point in time. Try not to be too jealous Jeff.
13
Mar 08
View Source
Tonight I was visiting space150’s website. I decided to view the source of their website because I was curious and there was a surprise. Check it out! Pretty clever if you ask me.
10
Mar 08
Team Foundation Server Build Performance
Today I spent some time trying to improve the speed of our CI/Nightly builds with TFS. While we found out that it was a backup solution that was causing the majority of our problems, I also found that we were not doing incremental builds. If you put this at the bottom of your TFSBuild.proj file, TFS will only do get of the files that have changed instead of getting all files. Doing this took a 10 minute build down to 20 seconds. Much Better!
true
true
false
9
Mar 08
Code Camp – Spring 2008
Even though I got made fun of for about a half hour straight last week at leadership training for going to Code Camp by sales/marketing people, I thought I would mention the next code camp is coming up on April 5th. I am pumped up for this one because it has a variety of sessions that are different from the MDC conference and previous code camps. I am a little sick of hearing about LINQ and the 3.5 framework. This one has sessions on the MVC framework and SQL Server 2008. There is even a Ruby on Rails one. Since this is on a Saturday, typically a non-work day, I am going to this session and not even going to feel guilty. It is an introduction class though so I don’t know how in depth it is going to get, but I am sure I can get something out of it. Here is a schedule for the event. Did I mention that it is free?
9
Mar 08
F1 Web Challenge
It has been one week since the F1 Web Challenge and I think I have finally recovered. It was a very fun event. It was actually longer than 24 hours. I was up for 36 hours!! It was on the U of M campus (St. Paul). There were eight of us on a team. My team consisted of 4 other co-workers, 2 former co-workers and one back up who worked for the sponsoring company. We had six developers, one webmaster and one project manager/BA. IMO, David probably worked the hardest. I think next year if we do this again, we need to bring two webmasters. Our organization was Hope Chest for Breast Cancer. They have a very unique business model in which they receive very high end merchandise from donors and turn around and sell it in one of their two stores for a fraction of the price. The proceeds are then given to organizations that assist people living with breast cancer. They were very energetic and prepared. They did have a lot of requests though so we weren’t able to get them all done, but they do have a functional website. It is not up yet though. I hope we will have it up within the next two weeks. Below are some screenshots. Next year we will also need to have a designated driver. I got 30 minutes out of the cities and realized I was going towards Duluth and not St. Cloud!
8
Mar 08
Set Validation in Ruby
Today I was trying to figure out how to validate if a user entered a number in a given set. I searched the internet high and low and could only figure out how to validate a range. I actually found the solution in a book, so I thought I would post it.
class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_presence_of :name, :description
validates_inclusion_of :storypoints, :in=>[1,2,3,5,8,13], :
message =>"Story Points must be 1,2,3,5,8 or 13"
belongs_to :sprint
end
4
Mar 08
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
I found a Ruby on Rails tutorial today that I thought I would share because it was easy to follow and it is targeted for version 2.0.2. This tutorial is a little bit more extensive than ones I have posted in the past. In this tutorial you will use scaffolding. This also includes setting up relationships between you entities/database tables. You also work with validation. I thought this was particularly interesting because it is extremely easy to specify if a variable in a Model class and specify if it is required or if it must be greater then a value and that will bubble up to the web page when the user is submitting the page. There is no need to add controls to the page and specify the fields they are validating and what that validation criteria is. This tutorial will also show you how to write a simple unit test for your code as well. You can find the tutorial at:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html