Firebug works on Firefox 3 now

30 July 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology

Previously I wrote about a disappointing misunderstanding between FF3 and Firebug that rendered the first useless in my daily life. The latest release of Firebug (1.2 Beta) seems to have fixes to all problems that I encountered and my yesterday’s JS / CSS debugging session went smoothly. So it seems it’s a FF3 party time.

Conditional Function Definitions in IE5

23 July 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology

It looks like all cool kids except for IE5 know what to do with this:

if (some_condition) {
    function f() { alert("true"); }
} else {
    function f() { alert("false"); }
}

When calling f(), Firefox and Safari will show “true” when some_condition was TRUE at the load time, and “false” when it evaluated to FALSE. IE5 pays attention to the if-else construction (and no code will be executed in the else-block if the some_condition is FALSE), but it DOES redefine the function. Yes, even though it’s in that block that’s not being executed.

Be careful!

Rails 2.1 Is Out

1 June 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology rails

Rails

3 hours ago Rails 2.1 was finally released into the wild, and there’s the officials report for your reading pleasure. I’m still a bit concerned about the RSpec compatibility, but since I already found a sufficient replacement – Shoulda and Mocha – there may not be as many worries.

So, let’s give it a round of aplause. Great job!

Little Luck With Rails 2.1 Yet

20 May 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology rails

Rails

Following the concise yet complete instructions on how to start using the Rails 2.1.0 release candidate from the awesome Getting Rails 2.1 RC1 podcast, I gave it a very quick spin today in one of my projects.

Right after the installation one of the gems refused to work. It was HAML – an excellent HTML builder extension – that blamed Rails for not having some hook registration function call. Taking the latest master copy from github of HAML (which is 1.9.0 there at the moment) solved the problem, but then something else jumped out. RSpec doesn’t work very well with Rails 2.1 at its present state, and every controller test was yelling at me.

Let’s say, it was a bad luck and hopefully I’ll do better next time when they finally release the thing. Got back to Rails 2.0.2 for now.

Firebug Crashes Firefox3

12 May 2008 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ technology

I’m a huge fan of Firebug – the top notch JavaScript / CSS debugging plug-in for Firefox – but recently it became completely unusable to me.

Further Thoughts on Git and Rails

18 April 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology

The idea of replacing (or augmenting) Subversion with Git in the development practice is quite fascinating. It’s a part of an agile development methodology to respond to client feedback and changes of mind quickly. Sometimes they ask for a small change that has to go before that monstrous feature you are already working for quite a while, and it hammers on the head. What on Earth do I need to do now? Roll everything back, apply a change, deploy and then paste my changes back and move on? That’s fine once, twice, but hey when it’s a habit… It’s a reality and this is how it is most of the time in development, in real life, everywhere.

Rails, TinyMCE and JavaScript in IFrame

17 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology rails

Browsers developed some really bizarre means of user data protection over the year of evolution. One of many is the JavaScript cross-domain protection. If you load a web-page into an IFRAME and access its DOM model or the model of the parent document from the loaded page, you get what you deserve – a permissions violation error that looks like ”Permissions Exception” (in IE) and ”uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property …” or similar in (FireFox). All is simple and clear once you know what to expect. It’s all logical. Today however I faced something different, really different and odd.

Thoughts on Git

14 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology

Many of you, my readers, do programming for a living. Those who started early used CVS before they switched to Subversion, and there are many who still use it thinking it’s the best this world can offer. We, as lazy beings, look for faster and easier ways to accomplish things. We use version control systems that fit our needs, and personally, I felt that I’m doing the right thing when migrated to Subversion several years ago. So far, working mostly solely on the code base of the projects, I find it sufficient and convincingly simple.

Checking fav.or.it

11 April 2008 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ technology

The invitation letter from fav.or.it almost made it to my spam folder today. The name looked suspicious and I had not a clue what on Earth do they need from me again. Now I recall asking to drop me a note when the beta-testing becomes available about half a year ago. Quite a wait if you ask me. At least, I got my chance to join in and give it a quick spin. Here are my notes.

Rails: When an Uninitialized Constant Hits the Vent

29 January 2008 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ technology ruby

Last two weeks I was seeing the production server of one of my clients hit the same error over and over with no visible pattern. This second it works, the next it fails and leaves the Mongrel cluster in an undefined state somewhere between this world and hell.

The error I’m referring to is:

NameError (uninitialized constant MyModule::Utils::NetSession)
... backtrace follows ...

I need to repeat that it comes and goes under some non-obvious circumstances, and is hard to recreate. Fortunately, I found the solution and here’s what it was.