Stupid Rails Gothcha 00

Ok so, its another of those situations, where I spent way too long trying to track down strange behavior in my code, and I don't want to repeat the process. So I'm writing it down to help myself remember. And maybe just maybe someone else will find this post and save themselves a couple of hours.

So here's the situation I have two very similar views for different models. On one the footer mysteriously shows up in the middle of the page and the other works fine with the footer showing up at the bottom like it should.

It turns out that rails views, at least ".html.erb" ones, cannot handle comments in

<% %>

blocks. I had code like:

<% for @collection.each do |thing| %>
    display thing ...
<% end #each %>

Which caused the footer in the middle issue. When I changed it to:

<% for @collection.each do |thing| %>
    display thing ...
<% end %>

The view was fixed and the day was saved! What the fuck rails, comments should never ever break things! Grrr, anyway live an learn and remember no comments in your views, lest the rails daemons become angry.

Stupid Authlogic Trick 0

I'm helping a friend setup authlogic and we both ran into issues when trying to setup test accounts. So remember kids, when creating a user that uses authlogic's acts_as_authentic you must set both :password and :password_confirmation. 


Also you can get surprisingly  far without  actually putting acts_as_authentic in your user model. So don't forget that one either.

This is truely frightining!

Apparently New Jersey is batshit and so is this judge.  How can "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God" possibly be part of a state constitution? It's so completely out of line with the Bill of Rights.

Beyond that I call into question the judgment of Mr. Camarata. How can the religious/anti-religious views of the parent be considered to "deprive" the child of her "privilege" to worship "Almighty God"? At worst this clause prevents the parents from from forbidding their daughter from worshiping "Almighty God", or otherwise preventing her from doing so.

Hopefully the Burkes win their appeal and Mr. Camarata gets disbarred for gross incompetence.  

Blog Conversion

I just converted www.madscienceguild.org from a bluehost+wordpress blog to a blogger blog! I didn't feel like paying to renew hosting with bluehost, so I decided to just move it over. The process was pretty simple once I found wordpress2blogger.appspot.com which allows you to convert your wordpress export xml files directly to blogger export files which can then be imported into blogger. Huzah!

git - One command to rule them all.

I have only recently learned the joy that is git. For the longest time I thought "SVN works for me why learn a new version control system." Well, as cliche as is sound, you don't know what your missing until you've used it. Two things really impress me with git, the ease of branching and the ability to "commit changes" to a local repo without "push"ing them to the main repo. These two features really put git significantly above Subversion.

Needles to say, after seeing the light and deciding that git is the way, I wanted to migrate one of my subversion projects to git. So I googled "converting svn to git" and found quite a few answers out there. The OS X solution was:

port uninstall git-core
port install git-core +svn

and...

git-svn clone SUBVERSION REPO

However after running the uninstall and reinstall no magical git-svn command showed up. This frustrated me to no end for the better part of an hour. Until I found a blog post that informed me that git had spiffied up the git tools. The new syntax is apparently:

git svn BLAH BLAH BLAH

So essentially a series of 'git-*' commands have all been distilled down into the main 'git' command, which is really neat. Less executables to clutter up tab completion lists, and one stop shopping for all your git needs. I think this is really important so let me repeat it, commands like "git-svn" have for the most part been replaced with "git svn". Spread the word.

Stupid Google Trick 01

So Google is being awesome and stupid at the same time. They have made gmail accounts openids, well sorta. It's just that no one accepts '@gmail.com' as an openid since that's not in the specs.

If you want to actually be able to use your gmail account as an openid go to http://openid-provider.appspot.com/ and follow the instructions there.

Fuck you google, why can't you just provide `http://gmail.com/openid/` for full compatibility with standards.

PHP is a messy hack.

So I'm building a php site for a client from scratch.... I know I know I should be using a framework of some sort. However I don't want to bill my client for learning Cake or what have you. Anyway I decided to implement (a simple version at least) Rails' "flash" functionality for the site. If you're unfamiliar with Rails' flash, its basically a kick ass way to pass data from one page to another.

You put a message such as "Thanks for signing up!" Into the flash and then redirect the user to their new account page (or whatever) then as long as the account page is setup to display "flash" messages, It will show you message and then remove it from the flash. This is really handy for displaying one time messages without sending the user to a basically useless page.

So I cooked up this:

// Make sure sessions are active.
session_name("campaign63");
session_start() or die("session failed to start");

// Displays and clears flash data
function display_flash()
{
    //Check for and display flashes
    if(isset($_SESSION['flash_notice']))
    {   
        echo '
' . $_SESSION['flash_notice'] . "
 \n";
        unset($_SESSION['flash_notice']);
    }   
    if(isset($_SESSION['flash_warn']))
    {   
        echo '
' . $_SESSION['flash_warn'] . "
 \n";
        unset($_SESSION['flash_warn']);
    }   
}

Then all I need to do is run the following in the page I want the flash to show up in:

require_once"flash.inc.php";

and...

display_flash();

Where I want the flash to show up. And here is where things get messy. So the next step is redirecting users to a page setup to display the flash. The standard way of redirecting with PHP is:

header("Location: URL");

Which is a horrible hack and only works if header info hasn't already been sent. I thought I could work around it so I started pasting it all over my existing pages. Turns out that it worked some of the time but not all the time, and it seemed totally random to me.

Luckily for me I'm working on a VPS from Rimu hosting which means that I have root access to a virtual server for $20 per month! So I found http_redirect in the pecl_http package. Installed PECL and then installed pecl_http. I replaced all instances of `header("Location: Url");` with `http_redirect("page.php");" and now my flashes work just fine!

Lesson learned, PHP does not work out of the box. It is simply broken. The pecl_http library rocks! Don't get hosting from a provider who doesn't support it.