Archive for the ‘News’ Category

script.aculo.us multiple drag and drop

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Today I added multiple selection ability to to the scriptaculous sortable, a feature that is still missing on the main branch. Since this is a byproduct of the project I’m currently working on, it’s mere a demo of how to do it and not an actual patch for scripty. But maybe it could help you, if you have to do something similar… The demo is available at http://simplificator.com/scriptaculous-multidrag/.

Visual Impressions

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

The ‘heavy cloud’ project of Mia Marfurt is well under way - the bricks are laid and the wall takes shape - although still behind a wooden support structure. The opening will be on October 22nd - check out the web site.

Office Zurich

We added some pictures to our own site - a gallery of our offices for example, and more project and customer documentation. We’re using radiant as cms, so our page gained some flexibility. So we will have an easier time to keep it current.

miamarfurt.com

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

“Heavy wall” is an art-project by Mia Marfurt. Visit her new website to see what it is about.

acrush.net released

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

acrush.net went live (some days ago… but we were to busy to blog). Acrush is a protection sleeve for your iPhone 3G. I like the “glow in the dark” version :-).Acrush was born some days before apple expo in paris and we only had one day to get the website live. The Shop is beeing developed right now… please be patient.

flogger: unit test your flog scores

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Flog is a simple ABC metric (Assignments, Branches, Calls) for ruby code. It gives you a hint on size and complexity of your code. How to interprete your flog scores is a bit difficult. As usual in Software Engineering: ‘it depends’.

Jake Scruggs interpretes the values like this:

  • 0-10: Awesome
  • 11-20: Good enough
  • 21-40: Might need refactoring
  • 41-60: Possible to justify
  • 61-100: Danger
  • 100-200: Whoop, whoop, whoop
  • 200 + Someone please think of the children



(and smarticus says that a score of 60+ means ‘WTF are you doing’).



So how can you integrate this in your continous integration environment? Or just your in your unit tests?
Enter flogger:



def test_flog_scores()
assert_flog(’somefile.rb’)
end



Flogger just adds an assert_flog() assertion which you can use in your unit tests. Simple.


Find more in the README

Long workday

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Beat: OK, i’ve upped Cruise Control we now can use it again with github.com. What projects do you want me to add ?
Pascal: Why not all of them. It will surely make us write better software
Beat: “The race for quality has no finish line so technically it’s more like a death march”

Time zones in Rails 2.1

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Rails 2.1 has pretty good support of Time Zones. It’s possible to save user-specific time zones. So if your users are from different zones, you can display the output in the corresponding zone of the user.
To set a default time zone, add config.time_zone in environment.rb. For the output, set the current time zone in before filters via application controller.

def set_zoneTime.zone = @user.time_zone if @userend

If you display timestamps in ActionMailer, you must set the Time.zone option within the ActionMailer class. Otherwise, the default settings of the database are taken (Time zone: UTC)

Rails provides nice helper methods to work with time zones. A useful method is in_time_zone(). It presents a time in any time zone.
>> t = Time.now
>> t.in_time_zone('Bern')=> Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:47:00 +0200

Several rake task helps you to find out the possible zones:
rake time:zones:all
rake time:zones:local
rake time:zones:us

Scientists discover algorithm to create colors

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

colors.simplificator.com is online!


Unbelievable, isn’t it.Until now you had to rely on services offering a limited amount of color palettes.
But thanks to an international team of scientists we can now have gazillions of color combinations for you. Just visit colors.simplificator.com and hit refresh until you find a palette you like.
And no need to hurry we have tons of colors in stock. 

New Gem Released

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

New ? Ah… not really. Would be fond to say that TLS support for ActionMailer is new. Anyway we packed up the code which is floating around on the web to add TLS support to pre Ruby 1.9 projects. Just for convenience. Find it on github.

New RubyGem released

Monday, August 25th, 2008

I’m happy to work for a company which lets me play around with things that are not directly related to contracts and paid projects. So last friday a played around with ActiveRecords and validations. Whenever possible i add not-null constraints as well as limits to my DB schema.
Why not re-use this information to create validation code ? Enter arext (ActiveRecord Extension…what a great name) validations. Have a look at it at github or the (pretty thin) README