August 2008

The last few days I wrote some unit tests for a project I’m currently working on (and which, by the way, should be released to public in a few weeks time). To easily be able to change attributes of my models and not rely on fixtures, I’m using the fixture_replacement plugin and actsasgeocodable to easily deal with address translations and that stuff (it introduces various attributes, like street, country, postal code,…). The last one comes with a nice option, normalized_address, which will update the information in your model with the information it got from the geocoding service (and thus will correct invalid postal codes, etc.).

Well, again, this feature is really handy but can lead to problems if you forgot that you activated it and just want to change the postal code of one of your models. Because the geocoder will still find the right address (mainly because the street name is the same) and actsasgeocodable will correct the invalid postal code for you. And you gonna have no clue why it won’t take the postal code you’ve used in fixture_replacement’s helper methods.

A simple fix for that is to add the following setup method into your unit tests:

def setup
  # This ensures that we can set individual attributes of our model
  # without being overridden by acts_as_geocodable.
  Property.acts_as_geocodable_options[:normalize_address] = false
end

Working for quite a big company has the disadvantage that you cannot now all the people there and their respective telephone numbers (especially when you were lucky enough not to get one of those Blackberry things). I’m pretty bad at remembering telephone numbers - which is actually not quite true, I still know all the numbers of my primary school friends - so for me it would be quite useful if my Nokia phone would support wildcards for phone numbers. So that I could even tell that the call is coming from within my company, even if I don’t have the exact name of the caller.

I guess every Mac users know the problem: You’re talking with your friends, showing them some drawing, snippet of code or website, talk even more with them and your Mac activates its screensaver and locks down the Keychain. For me that results in entering my password three times (one for login, one for iScrobbler and one for Safari’s Keychain access). Annoying.

But I discovered (or merely googled) a small tool which prevents your Mac from activating the screensaver, dimming down the screen or even going to sleep: Caffeine. Trust me, you need this tool.

I finally managed to take a week off and I declare the following week as the week where I will do things which I love (thank you, Mr Roosevelt for the following quote):

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

Another link which emphasizes the above quote comes from one of the Github founders, Chris Wanstrath, who gave a keynote at Ruby Hoedown. Time to look at my github account again and devote some hours to some projects (anyone in need of a OpenStreetMap -> Shape-File converter?).

Zach Klein wrote a few days ago a story about his flaws. He said that when he was asked about them in college, he couldn’t name them.

I can’t name them either.

But I’m working on it, even if I actually don’t want to. Today I discovered one of them.

I’m impatient. I guess I’ve always been. When I was still a kid, not too young anymore, I knew where my mum hid my christmas presents. I did have a look at some of them, not all, but some. That didn’t annul the joy when I actually got them, because I know what was lying under the christmas tree (again, not all of them, I didn’t unpack them or so).

I was also one of the guys who where quite unhappy when it came to the mid of summer because I knew school was still not going to start for a long time. And I guess I’m a doer. I was never one of those guys who was passive at school, who waited for other students to say something or to act. I wanted to show what I can do and I did.

Now I’m no longer a student, but an employee. And it makes me quite nervous to see what our competition did while we were talking about what we might can do. I wanna build things, I wanna do something, I wanna make progress, actively.

I guess that’s also one of my flaws in my personal life (well, no, I do know that it is a flaw). I can’t wait for things to happen, I need them to happen, I want to influence them and just can’t wait for it). Why do I write all that? Well, because I guess things are changing here. And I can only wait and see. Which makes me uncomfortable and pretty much puzzled.

I got some strange error today when I tried to deploy one of my rails projects to my slice at slicehost. The problem was that I had a newer version of Hpricot running on the slice (0.6.161) versus 0.6 on my local machine. The following line failed:

Hpricot::XChar::PREDEFINED_U.merge!({" " => 32})

Ahm, okay. I didn’t see any changes made to the overall layout of Hpricot so I suspect that line should work. Any ideas?

(If anyone is interested in the meaning of the above line, check this ticket).

…and I’ve never dealt with them, but today I found some small glitch on Vimeo. If you’re running Safari, you will notice that the color of the corners of the different sections does not match the surrounding background color.

I guess the problem lies within the color profile, which is some self configured one and not sRGB (well, at least that’s what I found out while doing some 2-minute research).

I just wanted to register an .at domain and couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price: €72.00 for the first year. That would make about 10 (!!!) .com domains registered with Dreamhost.com. Can anybody tell me what justifies the price on nic.at?