I have mostly shifted my main development language to Ruby, as most of the work I do tends to be pretty well covered with
Rails. That's not new, however - What
is new is that I feel I have got to the point where I actually have something to
share. And it feels very good.
So my next couple of posts (three, actually) will be covering some plugins I've written. They are, of course, just sketched - but they work reliably enough to be deemed as useful by their author ;-)
Today I will start by blogging about
RealFK. Of course, I will be copying from its documentation/description - I wrote it as well, so I'm not really plagiarizing my own site. I'm not suing
self. You can of course also
browse the RealFK SVN tree.
References
Rails is built upon a "dumb database" concept. Rails assumes the database will not force restrictions upon the user - i.e. that the model validators are all there is. But I disagree ;-) I was raised with PostgreSQL, not with MySQL, and I do believe the database can and should impose sane values - It should impose trust on the data..
So, if you want to create a relation field, properly acting as a foreign key and refering to another table, instead of doing it via the
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition#column (or even
ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition#references) methods, declare them with
add_refrence:
def self.up
create_table :proposals do t
(...)
end
create_table :proposal_types do t
(...)
end
create_table :proposal_statuses do t
(...)
end
add_reference :proposals, :proposal_types
add_reference :proposals, :proposal_statuses, :null => false, :default => 1
end
The corresponding fields (
proposal_type_id and
proposal_status_id, respectively) will be created in
proposals, and the RDBMS will impose a Foreign Key constraint. The references can be removed via
remove_reference, i.e., for inclusion in
down migrations:
def self.down
remove_reference :proposals, :proposal_types
remove_reference :proposals, :proposal_statuses
drop_table :proposal_statuses
drop_table :proposal_types
drop_table :proposals
end
Of course, in this case the
remove_reference call is not really needed - But if you are dropping a table that is referred to from a table that will remain existing, you will have to remove the foreign key constraints (that is, the referring columns).
Join (HABTM) tables
When you define a simple
has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) relation in your model, you are expected to create an extra table representing this relation. This is a very simple table (i.e. it has only a row for each of the related table‘s IDs), and it carries foreign key constraints.
Please note that join tables
are not supposed to carry any extra columns - If you need to add information to join tables, think twice and better use a
has_many :elements, :through => :othermodel declaration, and create the
othermodel table manually. To create a HABTM table representing that each person can attend many conferences and each conference can be attended by many people:
def self.up
create_table :people do t
(...)
end
create_table :conferences do t
(...)
end
create_habtm :people, :conferences
end
def self.down
drop_habtm :people, :conferences
drop_table :people
drop_table :conferences
end
The last call will create a
conferences_people table (according to Rails' conventions, table names are sorted alphabetically to get the join table‘s name).
Note that in this case, in the
down migration, the
drop_habtm call
must appear before the
drop_table calls, as it carries foreign key constraints.
The McCain campaign made a great tactical move by choosing Sarah Palin. She appeals to all the constituencies where McCain was weak: women, Christians, Libertarians, small state residents, energy policy wonks, corruption fighters, capitalists, gun enthusiasts, and Tina Fey fetishists.
Downsides? She is inexperienced in national affairs but I really don't think the average voter will care. After all many of them were willing to overlook a similar level of inexperience in Obama. And there is one minor possible ethics situation which again will only excite the true believers. When it turns out to be overblown it may actually rebound in Palins favor as an example of MSM manipulation.
She can also take the change meme away from the Democrats though that was already on the rocks what with the FISA vote and the choice of Neil Kinnock as his VP nominee. No, the lacklustre convention in Denver clearly showed that far from being the post-ideological, audaciously hopeful candidate of the future, Barack Obama is merely John Kerry with rhythm.
So what do the Dems have have left? The traditional Democratic themes of "We're not Bush" (that worked sooo well the last two times didn't it?) and "The Earth is about to explode in a fiery cataclysm." As the situation in Iraq improves, the economy climbs upwards from recession and petrol prices continue to come down its going to be harder to sustain the necessary level of gloom and doom.
While Republicans shouldn't exhale just yet (and the title of this post is just a teensy bit hyperbolic,) things are looking pretty good for us at the moment.
Late last year, I spent some time disentangling
The first thing to do is to include the portions of cwidget that our
program will use. Most importantly, we need the 
The most dynamic segment of the software industry that I'm aware of is web programming. Flamewars rage about frameworks and browsers and standards and whatnot, and the openness of the whole thing feels like some of the things that made me fall in love with computing as a whole and Free Software in particular. The problem with all that openness is that it's rather difficult to navigate. Aside from the obvious issues with browser incompatibilities, there's an enormous amount of software solutions on the server side, spanning languages, libraries, and frameworks. Each one is an ecosystem to itself, often being large and complicated.
I'm pretty impressed with the new 
I switched from 
It's actually a pretty good piece of technobabble. The register
names and use of 0x80 suggest whoever wrote this has at least
some familiarity with x86 assembly. It would have been slightly
better if they called the "microshell" a "microkernel" and put the
system call in eax before calling the interrupt, but
if you believe Jack's amazing ability to get cell phone reception then
it's only a small issue!
This should really be titled A movie vaguely representing
Beowulf, but all sexed up with various salubrious elements .
Hrothgar was treated much better in the original; and all the
blatant and gratuitous sexuality brought in into the movie was a
turn off. But then, I might be in the minority of the audience who
had any familiarity with the poem.
The characters in the movie seemed two dimensional caricatures
(the only compelling performance was from Grendel s mother). And
the changes made to the story line also lost the prowling menace of
the latter years of the king of the Geats.
After watching Hollywood debacles like this one, I am driven to
wonder about why Hollywood writers seem to think they can so
improve upon the work of writers whose story has stood the test of
time. Making Beowulf into a boastful liar and cheat (even in the
tale of the sea monsters his men imply that that they knew their
lord was a liar) in an age where honor and battle prowess were
everything I mean, what were the producers thinking?
Most certainly not a movie I am going to recommend.
I had not researched the movie much before I went into the show,
and it was a surprise to me to see that this was an animated movie
a la Final Fantasy , and while I was impressed with the computer
graphics (reflections in general, and reflections of ripples in the
water were astounding), the not a cartoon but not a realistic movie
experience was a trifle distracting, and detracted from telling the
tale.
I like IMAX 3d, and the glasses are improving.
The 
Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors
for 2008's Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive
coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do.
Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website:
Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD