Autotest is a great idea. When it worked for me, I loved it. But I hardly ever used it. Our complicated codebase choked on it - something to do with accounts as subdomains or double-loading of test_helper when running the test suite or some such. Frankly, I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the multiple two-hour wild goose chases to try to get the lovely software to work for me. Unfortunately I wasn’t up to the task.

Yesterday at Harvest we launched a little API-accessible robot for our team communication app, Co-op. There are many uses for this API hook, from deploy notices to code commits to fun daily team affirmations. You are only limited by your imagination!

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  <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2613/3717759035_c0b60e1ca4_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Den Heinemeier Hansson" /><br />
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New Rails handles a lot of timezone stuff for you. Set the appropriate time zone for the request and get an object from the DB, it’s created_at date will be translated from UTC to the request’s time zone.

When writing tests, it is often desirable to bend time to test limits and edges of the day. It is especially useful to warp time to test results across the timezones of the world. Manipulating time is also useful to assure a day of the week, month or year every time the test runs.

Rails apps love flash messages. Little notes providing information, confirmation or warnings to the user. Typically implemented in a partial like so:

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<a href="http://www.windycityrails.org">
<img src="http://m.windycityrails.org/images/windycityrails_125.gif" width="125" height="125" alt="WindyCityRails - September 20, 2008 - I'm attending!" style="border:none;" />

Four years baby. Soon the blog will be toting a lunch pail and school bag, off to decades of education. Next thing I know, my little baby will be married and have little blogs of its own. Blog, you grow up so fast!

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

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/96/225360722_8ef2a43077_m.jpg" width="240" height="160" alt="Hay Rake Third Version" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbat/">JBAT</a></div>

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  <img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/45/139177165_e3855c6686_m_d.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Dung repository" /><br />
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  <div class="text">Photo by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cheesygarlicboy/">Chambo25</a></div>

For several years now, I’ve been using a VBA script on my Windows PC to pull photo files off my compact flash card, rename them, place them into handy folders, and copy them out to my photo storage area. When I switched to Mac, I knew the VBA script was going to be short lived. This weekend I finally laid it to rest.