http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005 Thoughts on life, programming and growth by Duane Johnson. Fri, 10 Feb 2006 23:51:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hot on the heels of my previous announcement, there is now a bundled_resource plugin that takes advantage of all of my previous work in this area at syncPEOPLE, plus some (download). What’s it for? If your development is in any way similar to mine, there are a number of useful resources out ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=39 One of the design goals of Family Connection is to make it very easy to install as a Rails application. That includes showing the user what errors are happening even during the installation. The Problem So what do I mean by that? Well, currently, whenever Rails encounters a database error ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=38 I’ve read two of C. Terry Warner’s books before and met him in person once. I can honestly recommend him as one of the most spiritually insightful people I know. With that said, I must also confess that I haven’t yet read the article I’m about to post: my mom ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=37 Whenever a Rails exception occurs, it spits out a backtrace full of filenames and line numbers. I’ve often thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just click on one of those and it would take me to the problem?” Well, it is nice—and you can use this ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=36 A friend of mine recently expressed interest in this code snippet, so I thought I’d send it out to anyone else who’s interested. This module makes it a lot easier to ‘require’ javascript and cascading stylesheet dependencies inside your views or controllers. By ‘convention’, the code will automatically ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=35 So I did some searching around the net and found this step-by-step guide to installing rmagick on OS X on the RubyForge site. It fails to mention, however, that there’s a much simpler way of doing things now through the ports system: $ sudo port install rb-rmagick Special thanks to whoever ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=34 Just thought I’d post this up for anyone looking to move to Ruby from a Java programming background: Andrew Glover has written an excellent article at IBM developerWorks on Ruby’s terse syntax and intelligent design decisions. He points out that his article is not a “Ruby on Rails” info packet—to ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=33 Just found out about this fantastic Firefox plugin that lets you blog about a web page while you’re visiting the page.  Cool! Performancing Firefox: Tabs, Windows and Browsers | Performancing.com http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=32 Let’s say we have the following has_and_belongs_to_many relationship: class Contacts < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :companies end class Company < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :contacts end Now, if you create a new contact: friend = Contact.new and then add some companies: friend.companies = [Company.new, Company.new] you will find that nothing was stored in the database. On the other hand, if ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=31 Going to church is one of the “sharpening the saw” activities in my life that inspire me to be a better person. Today, I was enlightened by our discussion in Sunday School (specifically, the Priesthood lesson) on the subject of Light, and I’d like to share a few principles ... http://inquirylabs.com/blog2005/?p=30