I haven’t posted for quite a long time. The thing is I moved to a new place and I’m really busy on working clients + setting up my new office + dealing with way too much paperwork. Anyway, enough excuses, here are few tips that I believe will be useful to some of you: ZenTest Autotest I love autotes...

RSpec is an awesome testing framework. On top of being the first Ruby BDD framework the core team is doing a great job in enhancing our testing experience and therefore the quality of our code. This time, I don’t want to introduce to the latest changes but instead showing you what Josh Knowles, Brya...

Being a consultant is great, being a consultant working exclusively with Ruby is awesome, being a Ruby consultant using Agile methods on great projects with cool clients is just super-awesome. The English language doesn’t seem to have a word/expression defining this feeling without using the “f-word...

Supporting TimeZones is a serious pain in a developer’s neck. Thankfully, Rails comes with a bunch of tools making our life easier. One of my Rails patch just got merged in Rails Edge (Future Rails 2.1) and I believe it will make my life just a tiny be more enjoyable. Let’s look at a simple scenario...

What’s new? Rails default database is now sqlite3. If you are running Leopard, everything is already setup for you. As DHH mentioned, just “rails -d mysql your_app_name” if you want to generate a new app preconfigured for MySQL. Sqlite3 is great and if the only reason why you didn’t give it a try is...

I just released Googlecharts 0.1.0 (few bug fixes and enhancements). The first thing you want to do is to install the gem sudo gem install googlecharts The second thing you want to do is check the great brand new website for googlecharts The third thing you want to do is to recommend me on Working w...

update Nov 11: the gem is finally available there or simply: sudo gem install googlecharts Note that I’m working on merging this gem with another Google Charts gem. (see comments for more info about that) I’ve been working on a Google Chart Gem that I have ready for a beta release but unfortunately,...

I was recently asked by Rubyist friend (Josh Knowles) how I was organizing my Javascript files when using LowPro. LowPro is the best solution for doing Unobtrusive Javascript using Prototype. With the help of LowPro, you define behaviors that get triggered by the user. This is great, however, you’ll...

During Thanksgiving break I had fun with a friend of mine working on a Ruby challenge while digesting the traditional turkey. The challenge was quite simple, create a small library that can generate random words from the English dictionary. But of course there was a twist. One should be able to choo...

I recently bugged Rick Olson so much about attachment_fu that he gave me SVN access to fix few bugs. Rick being really busy with ActiveReload he didn’t spend too much time maintaining attachment_fu. On my side of things, I’ve been using attachment_fu on a lot of projects and I’ve been fixing bugs an...

If you’ve read my post on Ajax pagination you know that I’m a big fan of Dan Webb’s LowPro unobtrusive javascript library. Doing Unobtrusive Javascript (UJS) is basically registering event handlers programmatically using CSS selectors to select the elements to register. In other words : keeping thin...

A bit more than a month ago I posted a tutorial on how to use Flash with Rails to create some awesome/sexy graphs. Since a lot of people seemed interested by the topic, the SDRuby guys asked me to do a intro talk on how to create Sexy Charts with super sexy Rails. In the mean time, a lot of people w...

Few of you contacted me to let me know that my RSS feed was always getting reset up to few times a day. (Thanks Josh). It looks like a Mephisto problem, so if you subscribed to the mephisto feed, please switch to this feed: https://feeds.feedburner.com/railsontherun I made sure to clean up the blog ...

As a good Rubyist, I do TDD and even BDD. Since I’ve started using RSpec I’ve started writing tests against my views. RSpec makes things really easy and I’ve been enjoying testing my views. I’m not the only one having fun, check this great post from Mr Planet Argon aka Robby Russel Recently I was wo...

I’ve been a freelancer/consultant/contractor/mercenary for many years now. However, until now, I used to do that on the side. Few months ago, after thinking a lot about it, I finally decided that freelancing was what I wanted to do. I left my job and started my own adventure. The first reason for th...

date = “NOV” slug = “NOV/sexy-charts-in-less-than-5-minutes” Last time, in our ‘do it in less than 5 minutes’ series, we saw how to add quickly and simply add Ajax pagination. This time we’ll see how to add some sexy/fancy charts to your rails app. The goal is to end up with something like: Various ...

updated Nov 26 to reflect the recent low pro changes. (please use low pro 0.5 and Prototype 1.6) Recently one of my client asked me to add ‘ajax’ pagination to his application. His site already had a very nice pagination using the excellent will_paginate from Mislav and the guys(PJ & Chris) from err...

That’s kind of cool, I was reading a post about DHH Keynote at RailsConf Europe when I realized that DHH mentioned one of my contribution to Rails Edge. “small, but to me significant improvement has also found its way to Rails 2.0: You can now create the needed databases with a rake command. By runn...

By now, you should have heard about ambition if not read the latest post from the author. Ambition has a simple goal: making you stop writing SQL in your queries and only stick to Ruby. (who cares if you use ActiveRecord, Sequel, DataMapper or another ORM) I’m so used to the ActiveRecord way of quer...

I’m glad to announce a major update of Globalite. First off I’d like to thank all the translators who helped with this release. Globalite now support its first Asian language: Chinese! Ivan Chang did an awesome job creating a localization file in Chinese for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Main Land China. I’...

I’m almost ready to update Globalite with 2 major changes: Support for Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong and main land China) thanks to Ivan Chang Better support for Active Record error messages in forms (based on contribution from Ivan) I’m writing more tests and updating the sample app before releasing t...

Josh Knowles shared with me a great video about working methodologies, client relationship and project management. Check it out, it’s really worth it.

Recently, I got really annoyed at some code I had to work on. The main reason was that the developer I was working with likes making everything super DRY. While I hate repetitions I like being able to understand the code I’m reading and I want to be able to quickly refactor it. Anyway, I got over it...

The Seattle.rb guys did it again! After releasing the excellent Zentest suite, imageScience, Heckle and much more, Ryan Davis and his crew came back with great news. From Saturday, August 4th to Tuesday, August 7th, the Ruby Hit Squad was in full effect. After almost 4 days working almost none stop,...

is one of my favorite web application of the moment. It got publicly released last April (2007) by the activereload ninjas. Since then, they also released but I’ll keep that for another post. I’ve been using Lighthouse for a little while and I have to admit that I was a bit confused at first. I’d li...

I just released a simple plugin that I use to backup and restore databases instead of using a mysql dump. check out the plugin page File structure will look like that: I use this plugin to backup my apps running in production. When I need to debug an application, I just need to restore the db locall...

Here is another type for attachment_fu users. This evening I wanted to try Railroad to generate one of my app diagram. I alreay wrote my own script generating a .dot file that I usually import in omnigraffle before exporting a pretty version for my clients. The thing is, my script is quite simple an...

I recently had to deal with an interesting challenge. I had to write a simple interface between a rails app and a Flash application. Nothing hard and if you browse the archives, you’ll find examples and tutorials on how to create a REST interface to communicate between Rails and Flash. The thing was...

I recently had a discussion with someone(not really familiar with Ruby and its frameworks) and this person didn’t realize the power of IRB and the Rails console. Not, this irb, the Ruby IRB. According to wikipedia IRB is a shell for programming in the object-oriented scripting language Ruby. IRB is ...

resftul_authentication is a great plugin, but not always resftful… especially if like me you dropped unit test for RSpec. I have a set of RSpec examples I use all the time on all my projects requiring restful_authentication, obviously I always end up tweaking them because each application has its sp...