Whenever by Javan Makhmali is an excellent way to manage the cron tasks that relate to your ruby app. It provides a very powerful and readable ruby syntax for planning a job schedule.

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Today I had a fun trial-and-error exploration of Ruby SOAP messaging. By “fun” I mean “hair-rippingly excruciating.”

Basic SOAP calls are pretty easy with the wsdlDriver inherent in Ruby. Here’s how you’d wrap MailBuild’s Subscriber.Add function in Ruby:

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/zhartley/">zhartley</a></div>

So there’s a Category that has many Expenses. The expenses for a category are destroyed when the category is destroyed. Elsewhere in my logic I would like to know if the category is removable based on whether it has any expenses and, if it does, whether any of the expenses it has are greater than zero.

I had to solve a hairy problem recently. For a select number of pages on a site, I needed to pop up a secondary window along with the current action. This window contained a request for filling out a survey (held at a third party site). The survey URL was variable depending on the page I arrived at.

Since early this summer, I have had a severely annoying problem with my Ruby consoles (irb and script/console). My spacebar quit functioning, making quick testing of Ruby and Rails functionality quite limited and in some cases impossible. I’ll give you two versions of my story. First the short version.

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/darlingsnail/">DarlingSnail</a></div>

Previously I discussed getting my feet wet with has_many_polymorphs. In that article I promised a follow-up dealing with checkboxes in a polymorphic world. As I started keying the article, I ran into a much better description of the overall issue by Dylan Fareed (I presume) at I Am Still Alive. Take a look at his has_many_polymorphs overview.

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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/always13/">always13</a></div>

On a recent project, I needed to simulate the YouTube-ish text field selection box. You know the one where you can easily select and copy a link or embed code to send on to your friends. You click in the box, the text is automatically selected, and you can quickly copy the text.

Update: Don’t bother with the crap I spewed below. Just head over to Rail Spikes. There are a couple options if you read the post and comments.

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Recently I implemented a true maintenance page on Scrawlers using Mike Clark’s excellent HOWTO. Clark’s directions show you how to create a more dynamic maintenance page than the standard HTML version we all know and love. It’s a good technique.

This morning I spent a good while hashing on a problem in some new code I’m updating for a freelance project. I added a couple callbacks to an ActiveRecord model, and things that previously worked were broken. Unfortunately there were no errors in the model or exceptions in the system to give me a hint as to what went wrong. When I finally uncovered the problem, I was thankful that it was something I had never run into before.

I have been with Netflix for over seven years now. Or I should say, I had been up until last Friday. Ultimately, it came down to none of us having enough time to actually watch DVDs from Netflix. When time was available to view films, we either needed to kowtow to The Kid’s viewability needs (she’s only 3, after all) or else we had such a large pool of movies we haven’t seen that larger immediate choice became key.