Category: Notes (Page 46 of 49)

Notes on programming-related problems that I’ve encountered while working on various projects.

Handling Currency in Rails

May 22, 2011 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m working on a small application in which currency – specifically USD – will be stored in a MySQL database.

Because Rails supports a variety of number formats, it’s not completely obvious which is the best to use when storing monetary values.

Using a decimal with a certain level of precision seems to be the most scalable option.

Rails 3 and Devise: Could Not Find Generator devise:install

May 18, 2011 / Tom / 0 Comments

Devise is my preferred gem for introducing user authentication into a Rails project. In Rails 3, it’s easy to install but if you attempt to run the devise:install generator, you may receive this message:


Could not find generator devise:install

Image Flickering with a jQuery Overlay

May 11, 2011 / Tom / 0 Comments

In a recent project, I was attempting to dynamically display an overlay on top of an image that contained the image’s alternative text. The overlay was to display whenever the mouse hovered over said image and hide once the mouse blurred on the image.

Unfortunately, my first attempt at this resulted in a lot of flickering.

Essential, Non-Essential, & 1.0

May 10, 2011 / Tom / 0 Comments

When you build an app always look out for the non-essential features. Make sure they don’t make it into your v1.0. They slow down your release, they dilute your focus, they require resources that pull you away from perfecting the core of your app, and they open the door to more bugs at launch.

(via Signal versus Noise)

respond_to with Conditionals in Rails

May 2, 2011 / Tom / 0 Comments

Accessing a controller asynchronously usually requires writing a respond_to block in the corresponding action but I recently had the need to return a specific value in the same action based on the query string parameters.

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