http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog reflections on life, technology and brownies Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:09:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you are building a rails application that requires SSL for parts of your site, you are probably going to use the SSL requirement plugin. But that alone isn't going to allow you to run your code in development. You can easily see this after you enable ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2009/09/runnning-https-in-your-rails-development-environment/ The MigrateWar Rails plugin makes it easy to create database schema on deployment machines when you deploy via JRuby/War Files. This is especially helpful on Windows machines, where you cannot use Capistrano easily. Capistrano is a powerful deployment tool that is considered 'state of the practice' by anyone deploying ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/04/announcing-the-migrate_war-rails-plugin/ I just posted this to craigslist: I am web developer who specializes in Ruby on Rails contracts and works remotely from my home office. Currently looking for new projects, I'm open to conversations about new contract possibilities. My company is Silverchair Solutions, an agile web development consultancy. I have over ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/04/ruby-on-rails-contractor-i-am-available-one-of-the-advanced-rails-recipes-book-contributors/ Ok its been awhile since this occurred, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I have been included as one of the authors of the Pragmatic Studio's Advanced Rails Recipes Book. I contributed a chapter on creating Wizards. You can check it out ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/04/im-an-author/ I have an OpenId, I have found it useful. But frankly its just another thing that I have to remember. Somthing that I can't forget is my website url. What if you could set up some kind of cool forwarding that allows me to use my ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/03/using-your-website-url-as-your-openid/ For those of us who live in the rails world, fantastic tools like Capistrano have made deployment drop-dead simple. And since I do some Cocoa work I found myself wanting some of that same capistrano-esqe love in my Cocoa deployments. The Sparkle framework handles most ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/03/automating-cocoa-deployments-with-sparkle-and-xcode/ Lately I have been using the wonderful acts_as_state_machine plugin for lots of cool stuff in my rails applications. The problem that I have run into though, is visualizing the state transitions that I have created. Typically, when I first learned about state machines back in Electrical Engineering ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2008/03/state-transition-diagrams-for-acts_as_state_machine/ Ok I know there are a million ways to do this "by hand", but if you have a .mac membership this is for free basically... automatic remote access to your machines on the internet via your .Mac account. If you look carefully under the .Mac settings for Leopard, there ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2007/11/remote-access-to-your-mac-via-back-to-my-mac-leopard/ Upon loading up the new release of OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I was very frustrated to find that Growl notifications no longer work when using Autotest. Apparently growlnotify, the command line app which makes the magic happen, isn't compatible. Read on to see how I got this work It turns ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2007/10/osx-leopard-rspec-autotest-growlgrowlnotify-workaround-2/ Found an interesting gotcha while trying out some of the new "User Interface in a Can" frameworks. If you use the new hasmany :through style declaration (rather than the old way hasandbelongsto_many) for modeling your many to many relationships in ActiveRecord, then that relationship cannot be editable in these ... http://www.silverchairsolutions.com/blog/2007/10/activescaffold-streamlined-woes/