Use Streamlined with Rails!
It takes the whole concept of views and cranks it up a notch.
If you don’t trust me (and why would you…) then watch the screencast.

Wanna use link_to, but dynamically change one of the options (like class)?
Here’s a cool tip for changing it based on the current controller / action:

Highlight link for current action

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE

New version 0.7 is out. Gotta love the RHTML editor and Mongrel sever support.

From Ruby on Rails’ weblog:

Have you ever wanted to write Rails routes using a URL’s subdomain? What about routing based on whether a request was HTTP vs HTTPS? Well, now you can. Recently Dan Webb released his Request Routing Plugin for public use. This plugin lets you create routing rules that use a whole slew of new properties: domain, subdomain, method, port, remote_ip, content_type, accepts, request_uri, and protocol.

You can obtain the plugin from Dan’s subversion repository:

ruby script/plugin install \
http://svn.vivabit.net/external/rubylibs/request_routing/


I’ve learned several life lessons recently. I’ll share:

1. The tech scene down here in the valley rocks. I attended the Phoenix Linux Users Group last week and heard a sweet presentation by Vince from Google about Linux on the Enterprise Desktop. Nice work - especially about the specifics with Linux (Unix) user scalability issues. Two other cool things happened. I sat by someone taking notes with an Apple Newton (go figure) and more importantly I won the big prize in the raffle swag give-away - a Google Lava-lamp! That sweet baby is going on my desk right next to my well-worn Ruby pickaxe book. BAM!

2. We got to see the Mesa Arizona LDS Temple Easter Paegent. It was a great show and the weather was awesome (as usual). Bailey even managed to stay awake through the whole thing, though she fell asleep soon after hitting the carseat.

3. Rails generally blows on Oracle. Besides the v1.1 issue I found in Active Record, it seems that the whole concept of Rapid Application Development is lost on most Oracle DBA. (Why do you want 3 sepearate users? Why would you automatically blow away your test environment? Blah, blah, blah.) Do what I did - Even if you don’t have root - install mysql and be done with it. (It really isn’t that hard - I even did it on Solaris 8 without gcc)

FYI: If you’re running Oracle ‘oci’ adapter for Rails and you just upgraded to Rails 1.1 (ActiveRecord 1.14.0) listen up!

Are you getting messages like:

wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)

RAILS_ROOT: script/../config/..

There’s a patch in to fix it

see: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/59811#54488

One of the best things about my current position is all the time I’m getting to spend with Ruby and Rails. After having written 3 different web frameworks myself for internal projects, Rails is *so* freaking cool.

I just saw this on diggdot.us: Rails 1.1 updates!

One of the many things that I’m excited to play with is RJS. The default AJAX stuff was nice, but no easy to customize without having to drill into the javascript. With RJS, life just keeps getting better.

Thanks David.

I’m back - the blog is back up and now I’m coming to you live from Arizona.

My new job is with the Apollo Group (#38 in Computerworld’s Top 100 IT workplaces in the USA) doing release automation, systems admin and other sundry things.

One of the most exciting things I’ll be doing in diving head first into Ruby and Rails. I’m working on porting all our deployment scripts to Ruby (Capistrano?) and build a nice web interface using Rails. Peachy!