Coffee, Code and Candor

It’s obviously been a while since I’ve posted, so I wanted to provide an updated. I’ve been inured with too many things that have distracted me from my Rails project for a time, though I hope to return to it soon as I hope it will be profitable for me in more ways than […]

Have you ever wish you could tell Rails the name of the table that mapped to your model class?  Perhaps you want a model to represent a legacy table (which could be any table that already exists which is either too painful to recreate or over which you have no control).  Or perhaps you just […]

I got tired of seeing the deprecation warnings about the old Rails pagination helpers, so I decided to seek out a better approach, but of course I wasn’t going to implement it myself.  With all of the skilled Rails pros out there, I had every intent of leveraging someone’s else’s success.
I succeeded, thanks to Ilya […]

I need to be able to assert that a response from a Rails controller doesn’t contain certain content, for example when the same action will respond to both GET and POST methods.  In my case I’m writing a register method in a LoginController and I want it to render the same view, but if the […]

I recently resumed work on a Rails project I started a few months ago only to find that some of the functional tests that Rails generated for some scaffolding code were failing. These tests were failing on a fresh checkout from Subversion, so it was obvious that I’d neglected to run the functional tests […]

The JAD Java Decompiler is a handy tool for Java developers, both for academic use and for recovering your own code on those (hopefully) rare occasions when you lose the source but have the .class files.
I used to use JAD via the Jadclipse plugin for Eclipse in Windows. I switched to Ubuntu a few […]

I’m in the early stages of starting a new web application project for public use.  I’m currently trying to determine what language I want to use for the application.  Initially I considered Java, since I am a Java developer by profession.  But for the same reason I may choose not to use it.   […]

I recently bought a Mac Mini because I’ve wanted a Mac ever since Apple released Mac OS X and I’ve wanted one even more ever since they moved to the Intel platform. The Mini is an inexpensive way to get a Mac so I finally took the plunge (the $100 rebate from Micro Center […]

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a robust set of JavaScript controls and utilities for building interactive web applications. The library is released under the BSD license so it is free for use in all kinds of applications. Some of the available utilities include drag and drop, eventing, animation and a connection […]