Ramblings

Been a while since I’ve written.  I’ve been sick and working on a side project.  That said, I’ll be writing more……
Today’s note/reminder is a gotcha about YUI datasources.  If you have JSON feeding the datasource and you’re getting back more fields in the results than you’re expecting, the datasource will not behave properly.  For example, [...]

A coworker and I discovered an issue with jboss’ run.sh (which starts the app server).  The problem lies in different flavours of unix (or unix-like) shells returning different values for wait.
The relevant code is:

# Wait until the background process exits
WAIT_STATUS=0
[...]

More about methods, it’s inspired/spurred by a comment on methods, public_methods, and private_methods by Pit Captain. It also corrects some misconceptions I had (and may have (wrongly) given others).
I’ve added a new category, “eating crow” for this and any other postings where I step back and re-evaluate my posts. This is [...]

For a project I’m currently working on I wanted to make some “bubble” tooltips.  In order to cut down on the size/number of images, I’m using css sprites.  A quick google reveals that nobody else has (at least on the first page) put together tooltips using sprites.  The technique will work with any sort of [...]

I found out something interesting today.  Per the W3C, the total “width” that a block element uses is:
If ‘left’ or ‘right’ are given as ‘auto’, their computed value is 0. The following constraints must hold between the other properties:
‘margin-left’ + ‘border-left-width’ + ‘padding-left’ + ‘width’ + ‘padding-right’ + ‘border-right-width’ + ‘margin-right’ = width of containing [...]

Yesterday, I posted an article entitled Break my code, please, wherein I posted a very fragile piece of code, with the challenge to find ways in which to break it.
What follows is a discussion of the code and why it is bad/fragile/easily broken…..

This is partly for myself, and partly for anyone after me…..
I have a controller generated via rspec_scaffold — yes, I know, it might not be what all the cool kids are doing, but it works.  I also have restful_authentication set up to use rspec.  So, when I go to add before_filter :login_required, autotest frowns at [...]

autotest / zentest are really useful tools.  However, it’s important to remember to run migrations for the test database — otherwise your tests will fail (miserably!)
I’ve found the following to be helpful for using autotest:

Getting started with Autotest - Continuous Testing
Autotest RSpec Notifications for Ubuntu « My Pragmatig life

Ruby’s injection is very useful, but if you don’t remember one key fact, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.