Dynamic Date in Rails Fixture

While I was happily creating a fixture to test my newly created Article model, I found out that the <%= Time.now %> that I used in the fixture was dumping nil’s into the db. ;-(

That was suppose to work, at least long time ago… I still recall reading the first Rails book… The rails api didn’t say much about the dates in dynamic fixtures…

Well, let’s be a little skeptical, and say… Time.now.strftime(“%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S”).

Ha! It worked!

But it’s a kinda too long…

Hum… what else does google has to offer?

There was a ticket open with the same issue: Time.now in a fixture return nil. Guess I am not the first ;-)

<%= Time.now.to_s(:db) %>

There, this is much prettier ;-)

Oh, here is a bonus link for more Dynamic Fixture stuff!

• Update: Formatting Time

Turning off Activerecord timestamp

Context: I was trying to increment an article’s views column every time when a reader has viewed the article.

Problem: Whenever I increment the article.views, article.updated_at will be updated by the rails through magic column. That’s not what I want, since updated_at should mean it was last updated by the author of the article, not the reader?!

I could stay with the new meaning of the updated_at, really last_viewed_at, but being a little stubborn, I decided to try out my luck on google.

Ref 1: hacking activerecord’s automatic timestamps

A lot of good stuff, but a lot of errors, too… didn’t work for me.

Ref 2: Turning off Magic Columns

Ahh… But it’s not so thread safe, is it? ;-) The good thing that I learned from Ref 1.

Ref 3: Database Conventions

A lot of good info, but doesn’t totally solve my problem. At least I know that meta class is very useful in this threading scenario. ;-)

Ref 4: Seeing Metaclasses Clearly

Aha… That’s really tricky ;-)

Ref 5: So how do I use remove_method?

Ref 6: This one is coming from me ;-)

  def increment_views
   class << self
     def record_timestamps; false; end
   end

   self.increment! :views

   class << self
     remove_method :record_timestamps
   end
 end

Javascript get the local file path in Mozilla

This function gives you the local file path of the file (nsIFile).

function getLocalFilePath(file) {
 // file is nsIFile
 var ios = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/network/io-service;1"]
                     .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIIOService);
 var fileHandler = ios.getProtocolHandler("file")
                     .QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIFileProtocolHandler);
 var URL = fileHandler.getURLSpecFromFile(file);
 return URL;
}

svn ignore files and directories

Ignore files and directories
The svn:ignore property can be set on filename patterns and directories.

svn propset svn:ignore PATTERN directory PATH
svn propset svn:ignore directory PATH

Edit property setting
Subversion properties can be edited using svn’s propedit function.

svn propedit svn:ignore PATH
svn propget svn:ignore PATH

PATH is assumed current working directory if not specified. If PATTERN is not specified, an editor window will open and let you edit patterns.

ActiveRecord Session for Rails

I know that this is probably all over the Internet, this is just an entry for my own convenience.

• Uncomment the ‘config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store’ from the app/config/environment.rb
• rake db:sessions:create
• rake migrate

Restart your server, and you are done!

XUL Tree

• http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/seltree.html
• http://xulplanet.com/references/objref/TreeContentView.html
• http://xulplanet.com/references/objref/TreeColumn.html
• http://xulplanet.com/references/objref/TreeSelection.html
• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Code_snippets:Tree
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Example_code

Firefox Extension file I/O

Reference:

• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Code_snippets:File_I/O
• Accessing_Data_Files_From_Components
• http://www.rietta.com/firefox/Tutorial/prefs.html
• http://jslib.mozdev.org/

Router setup and port forwarding

Portforward.com is a great home/office router configuration guide for a lot of network applications!

• http://portforward.com/

Canyouseeme.org is a neat little web application that checks to see if the port that you configured on your router is really effective!

• http://canyouseeme.org/

RDF Resources

Here are some good info for RDFs ;-)

• http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/intrordf.html
  
• http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/mozsdk/rdfstart.php
  
• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/RDF_in_Mozilla_FAQ
  
• http://dev.hyperstruct.net/mozlab
  
• http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/examples.html
  
• http://jslib.mozdev.org/libraries/rdf/rdf.html
  
• http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/rdfds/
  
• http://www.arielworks.net/works/codeyard/hercules
  
• http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.rdf/topics
  
• http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/