opensoul.org

For those using authlogic that have had issues with auditing your User model, version 1.0.2 of acts_as_audited should cure your woes.

All you need to do is exclude the last_request_at and perisable_token fields from being audited. We also excluded a few other fields that don’t need to be audited:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :except => [
    :crypted_password, 
    :persistence_token,
    :single_access_token,
    :perishable_token,
    :last_request_at,
  ]
end

Last week we launched Idea Foundry, the latest edition of our awesome training. We announced several great classes, including Advanced Rails and jQuery.

Advanced Rails

May 26–29 ● Holland, Michigan

So you drank the koolaid, learned Ruby on Rails and built some awesome sites, now what? Join us for a survey of advanced topics that will take your Rails apps to the next level. Scaling, building and consuming web services, writing plugins, contributing to Rails and so much more. See the Advanced Rails page for more info, and stay tuned for a sneak peek of the topics.

jQuery

May 13–15 ● Holland, Michigan

We’re excited to have Karl Swedberg, author of Learning jQuery and member of the jQuery project team, teaching a class on the ins-and-outs of jQuery. Karl’s an energetic teacher who knows jQuery better than almost anyone (he’s consistently one of the top posters on the jQuery mailing list). More Info

Other Classes

We’re also offering new installments of our popular Ruby on Rails and ExpressionEngine classes.

• ExpressionEngine — May 19–22 in Holland, Michigan
• Ruby on Rails — June 9–12 in Holland, Michigan

And we have one more awesome class that we’ll be announcing any day now. Stay tuned.

In our latest client project, we make use of at least 20 open source projects, from our beloved Rails, to great testing frameworks like RSpec, to plugins like Paperclip, to server-side software like Passenger, and many more. While we are appreciative of the hard work that goes into creating those projects for the first 2 seconds after we find them, we often take these libraries for granted.

As a small development company, we need any advantage we can get. It is the vibrant open source ecosystem that gives us a competitive advantage against the big guns. And not only do we benefit from the work of the community, our clients get more sophisticated software that costs less. Everyone wins.

Every project we get paid to write makes extensive use of open source software. We try to do our part to contribute back to the community, but our contributions definitely aren’t worth what we get out of the community. So we’ve come up with an idea…

At Collective Idea, any time we use an open source library in a project, we’re going to make a $10 donation on behalf of our client to that project. For our client, the cost is small: a couple hundred dollars in exchange for thousands of dollars worth of savings and better software.

We encourage you to do the same.

Project Maintainers

If you maintain a project on GitHub, do yourself a favor and make it easier for us to donate. GitHub lets you add your PayPal account to the project so all we have to do is click a button.

Yes, I’m making the assertion that preordered tree traversal is now cool. And I don’t mean just “pocket protector” cool, because it’s always been that, but now it’s “show your friends” cool.

For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, and don’t really care, but still want to be cool, skip to the next section. For all three of you that want to understand all the gory details, check out this MySQL DevZone article on managing hierarchical data.

What are you talking about?

I’m talking about putting hierarchical data into a relational database, and a plugin to make that easier. There are lots of reasons for trying to do this: organizational structures, genealogies, taxonomies, nested pages of a website, etc. It’s kinda like putting a square peg into a round hole, except that the square peg is made out of Play-Doh, so we can force it through the hole anyway, and we just have a little extra mess to deal with.

There were several Active Record plugins out there that tried to clean up the mess, but they were either buggy or incomplete.

We created awesome_nested_set to try to remedy that.

What makes this so awesome?

There’s a lot of things that makes this awesome, but my personal favorite is that awesome_nested_set makes use of Rails 2.1’s named_scope features¹, so most of the nested set methods return a scope that works as a finder. You can call find methods on it or access other named scopes.

class Department < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_nested_set
  named_scope :in_need_of_review, :lambda => {{
    :conditions => {:reviewed_at > 1.year.ago
  }}
end

chancellor = Department.create(:name => 'Chancellor')
aa = Department.create(:name => 'Academic Affairs').move_to_child_of(chancellor)
Department.create(:name => 'Admissions').move_to_child_of aa
Department.create(:name => 'Student Services',
  :reviewed_at => 3.months.ago).move_to_child_of aa

chancellor.descendants.in_need_of_review
rogue = chancellor.descendants.all(:conditions => 'manager_id IS NULL')

There’s lots more info in the README on GitHub, so check it out. Let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback.

1. It also backports named_scope for those still on Rails 2.0

We’ve been providing highly-praised Ruby on Rails training all over the world, and now we’re bringing it to San Antonio, Texas. We will be offering hands-on Ruby on Rails training in downtown San Antonio on January 20-23, 2009.

I’ve never been to San Antonio, so I’m really exited for this class. Any recommendations for things to check out?

Thanks to metatribe, a huge annoyance in acts_as_audited is now fixed: it works in development mode. Due to it’s dependance on Rails’ cache sweepers, which are only enabled when caching is, acts_as_audited didn’t work in development mode.

metatribe has a crafty solution, which took me a few minutes to believe it would even work. So pull the latest version and happy auditing.

Want to learn Rails but can’t scrounge up the cash for training? You can win a free spot at either our Rails session starting next Monday, August 25, or to an advanced Rails session whenever it’s announced.

All you have to do is Complete this brief survey about our upcoming Advanced Rails session. We’ll be drawing a winner at 5:00 TOMORROW, August 19.

Also, we still have some spots available for our Rails session next week, so head on over to the Sessions site to check it out.

The biggest complaint I get about acts_as_audited is finally fixed: if you want to use acts_as_audited on a model that uses attr_accessible, you can set the :protect option to false:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_audited :protect => false
  attr_accessible :name
end

This will prevent acts_as_audited from using attr_protected, which would cause Active Record to raise an error in combination with attr_accessible.

Get the latest code from GitHub

Update: Timothy N. Jones had a good suggestion to automatically disable attr_protected if attr_accessible has already been called. I updated acts_as_audited, so now you only have to set :protect to false if you are declaring attr_accessible after you call acts_as_audited.

Collective Idea is hosting another Ruby on Rails training on August 25-28, 2008. Our training is a new take on training: it makes it actually enjoyable! If you’re new to the Ruby world, or just want to get deeper into Rails, check it out.

The last session was a blast. People flew in from Orange County, New York City and the Midwest. We had pizza and beer at the brewery, grilled on the beach, played frisbee and sand volleyball, and of course, learned Rails.

I’m really looking forward to this next one!

Just a quick note to remind you that May 31 is the last day of early-bird pricing for the Ruby on Rails training. After Saturday, the price will go up from $1195 to $1495. (Who couldn’t use an extra $300?)

If you’re going to be at RailsConf, find us and get a discount code that gives you the early-bird price until June 6. We look forward to seeing you!

Collective Idea would like to welcome Brian Ryckbost. Brian started as our first intern 9 months ago, and, even after putting up with crap from Daniel and me, joins us today as a full-time employee. Congratulations, Brian, on graduating from intern to employee; you were the best intern we ever had!

Update: Daniel has a great post that explains the idea behind the training.

We’re really excited to announce Training by Collective Idea on June 23-26. Come spend 4 days in Holland, Michigan, learning Ruby and Rails. Whether you’re a Ruby newbie, or want to get better, this training is for you.

The training features hands-on training by people who know Rails inside and out, and have taught Ruby, Rails, and Rails deployment across the globe.

In your free time, you’ll get to explore Holland’s unique downtown, the fantastic sand dunes of Lake Michigan, or talk to other Rubyists over drinks.

Register today and save 20%. We look forward to seeing you!

At Collective Idea, we have a plugin called awesomeness that is…well, awesome. It’s a collection of things that we use in almost every project that aren’t generic enough to go into individual plugins (although some things may have evolved enough to be worthy of plugin status).

A while ago, I blogged a little snippet for backing up your remote database. Well, that snippet as evolved quite a bit, into it’s own set of rake and Capistrano tasks.

First, the rake tasks. You Can easily create a new local backup:

$ rake db:backup:create

This creates a backups directory in your project, with a subdirectory for each backup based on the timestamp. A backup consists of the schema.rb file and then a fixture for each table to hold the data. Why fixtures? Good question. Because we wanted the backups to be database independent.

You can easily restore your local database to the latest backup, or a specific version:

$ rake db:backup:restore VERSION=20080427214315

That’s nice, but what good are local backups? That’s where Capistrano comes in. Just add this to your config/deploy.rb:

load 'awesomeness/backup'

This adds some nifty remote backup support. Now, whenever cap deploy:migrations is run, a backup of your remote database will automagically be created and stored in the shared directory on the server. You can also have them transferred to your local machine by adding a callback in your deploy.rb:

after "backup:create", "backup:download"

Sometimes, you just want to take a snapshot of the server and plop it into your local database.

$ cap backup:mirror

How do I get this backup awesomeness?

Awesomeness now lives on Github (like the rest of the world). Fork it and let us know what you think.

While we’re not exactly freelancers at Collective Idea, we operate very much like freelancers; we are contractors that work mostly out of our homes on client projects. We share many of the benefits that freelancers enjoy, and experience many of the same challenges. In the coming days and maybe weeks, I will try to post some of the things I’ve found helpful from personal experience.

Seriously, take a shower, every day! Not only that, but take a shower first thing in the morning.

Working from home, it’s easy to get into the habit of stumbling out of bed, occasionally making a quick pass through the kitchen, and plopping down right at your desk. There were often days weeks where I would go straight from bed to my office and start working, not pausing to shower until mid-morning, noon, or sometimes even after work.

I’ve found that showering early in the morning has been helpful for several reasons:

1. Consistency: We are creatures of habit, and that is a good thing. We live in natural rhythms, and the beats that we move to are important for productivity. I’ll talk more about this in my next post.
2. Transition: When I first started working from home, what I missed the most was the drive or walk from home to work, and back again. Without it, I found it very difficult to make the mental transition from personal life to professional life. The two would often blur and I would spend the first half of my day distracted by personal matters while I was consumed by work in the evenings. Showering has become my morning transition. I take care of personal matters when I wake up–breakfast, bills, laundry, etc–and begin working immediately after I shower and get dressed.
3. Freshness: water is very refreshing, both physically and mentally. While I’m not one of them, many people find that they do their most creative thinking in the shower. But I do find that after I shower I’m very refreshed and sharp.

So there you have it: proper hygiene is as important for your professional life as it is for your personal life.

Up next: you’re a professional, show it with your hours.

This post is somewhat different from the typical format of this blog, so I’d love to hear your feedback. Also, I’m interested in any tips you may have as a freelancer or independent consultant. Send me an email or post your tips in the comments.