Olle Jonsson's blog

Fijord

Originally uploaded by oc girl.

Polar Rose made a change in direction, and dissolved their Ruby on Rails team, of which I was a member.

So, for all you heads out there, I am available for work. And, my current focus is JavaScript. And more of everything, as usual.

(The guys at P.R. have handled the closing of the team admirably. We parted on the friendliest of terms.)

I am looking around for an interesting job, and there seems to be no shortage of those. The Web is not finished yet!

See this Pastie, which makes use of File.socket?, Enumerable‘s amazing detect and an ERb variable.

On the #rubyonrails.se IRC channel, simmel made the recipe better by adding the check for File.socket?, instead of File.exists?. (File.socket? will follow symbolic links, as you can see in the pasted code.)

A recipe variation, you might call it.

Now that Rails 1.2 is out, and you switched to using the gems instead of Edge, you might find yourself having “a hard time” searching the Rails source code. Enter: a Bash alias to opening the Rails source in Textmate.

# readrails - an alias to open Textmate with the Rails source from Gems
# You need the GEM_HOME folder set to where your gems are (this is for portability)
# export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 # this is my GEM_HOME setting

export GEMSFOLDER="${GEM_HOME}/gems/" 
alias readrails="e ${GEMSFOLDER}rails-1.2.1 ${GEMSFOLDER}activerecord-1.15.1 ${GEMSFOLDER}actionwebservice-1.2.1 ${GEMSFOLDER}activesupport-1.4.0"

If the above is garbled, see this paste.

Problem in the above: the version numbers. They increase with each new release of these gems. A more polished version of this alias could look at the version numbers after the last dash, and figure out what version to use.

Update! Stop the presses!

Jonas B just made my thing lots better, by invoking Rubygems itself!

I wrapped his couple of lines into my alias, like this:

#
# readrails 0.2 - an alias to open Textmate with the Rails source from Gems
#

alias readrails="mate `ruby -rubygems -e "puts( ['rails', 'activerecord', 'actionwebservice', 'actionpack', 'activesupport'].collect { |gem| gems = Gem.source_index.find_name(gem); gems.last.full_gem_path; }.join(' '))"`"

And I pasted it at: http://pastie.caboo.se/36928 — this is getting better and better.

If you’d like to make it better still, just work Jonas’ original error-checking into the above as well:

paths = ['rails', 'activerecord', 'actionwebservice', 'activesupport'].collect do |gem|
gems = Gem.source_index.find_name gem
raise "gem '#{gem}' not found" if gems.empty?
gems.last.full_gem_path
end
paths.join ' '

My dear L is now working at Diginet Øresund. This event might be of interest to you, dear reader, should you live in the Nordic countries:

…Nordic Game Jam ’07, which is hosted by Diginet Øresund (my new job – I’ll be managing the event). Thought you might be interested. Or maybe you know someone else who might be.

• What: make a game on a weekend and meet other developers
• When: 2-4 February 2007 (last sign-up January 22)
• Where: IT University, Copenhagen
• Price: 250 DKK

Signup page for GameJam and more details about GameJam

Hope I’ll be seeing you there – if you need it, you can crash in our kitchen.