I've been busy putting together some plugins form misc work. If you did not catch my latest article Jack has_many :things where I covered GroupeScope, by all means check it out. I've also just finished up a pretty solid backport of NamedScope that can be found on my Github page. It bills itself as a well tested complete back port for rails 1.2.6 and 2.0.4.

One thing that has been a real help while I've been developing these plugins is this autotest class I put together specifically for developing rails plugins. I even got mention on rubyonrails.org. Sweet! More to come.

Resources

• The NamedScope plugin.
• The GroupedScope plugin.
• The RailsPlugin class for Autotest.
• Vilcus plug dactyloadapter. Developed specially for people who enjoy closing electrical circuits with their own fingers.

I am Jack's sofa, stereo and wardrobe... I make Jack's life complete. I reside in a ActiveRecord table called "things" and Jack is the only one that has the key. This is Jack's life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

As rails developers, we have done this simple relationship over and over again. I'm sure the has_many association is by far the most common in app/db design. It gives a single resource quick and easy access to others, but as your application grows, and depression sets in...

Tim Toady tells us that (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) and I am sure this is not the first and not likely the last blog post you will ever see that tells you the best way to install RAILS on OS X. Some people would just rather than go the simple path but I implore you, do it this way. Gaining the experience of compiling your own software will help you down the road when it comes time for doing more advanced things, especially deploying your RAILS app. When you are done, you will have a rock solid deployment environment for RAILS that will include:

I've been learning to or "trying to learn" Ruby on Rails for a few months now and things have always kept me from finishing the book that I purchased from those great publishers at the pragmatic bookshelf. My problem has been that sometimes other work has gotten in the way, but mostly it was because I did not have the core understanding of the basics for building web applications. Especially in the areas of object oriented programming and database languages. For me this was a big problem, I'm typically a fundamentalist when it comes to learning and applying knowledge. Knowing the details helps me understand the big picture and more importantly the confidence to know what I am doing is correct. So rather than learning super high level code, I decided to revisit the 3-foot section of the pool again by reading these two books.

Lately, I've been loving all things that can be solved by using RsyncX. It's my de facto backup utility and I just keep finding more and more tasks for it as each day goes by. It has become the hammer for all my system's needs. So when it came time for me to implement a nice little backup routine for the MySQL databases hosted here at ActionMoniker.com, it was the first tool I considered. My requirements were simple, I needed a SQL script of selected databases in logically named folders for each DB with time-stamps in the file name. Then step and repeat on a regular basis.