Lori's Blog

I call this the 'silly random shot of me giving a presentation' look.

I just moved 3 of my projects off gitorious.org to github.com.

• merb-pagination
• dm-is-paginated
• dm-is-slugged

My reasoning to do so has nothing to do with gitorious. I quite like the site / service. But unfortunatly, nobody really seems to use it. So in an effort to help people find my projects, I've concluded that moving was the thing to do.

Sorry gitorious, you will be missed. :-/

Just wanted to let everyone know that my MerbConf 2008 - Merb and Sequel presentation slides are now available.

The source to my slides can also be found on Github: http://github.com/lholden/merbcamp2008_presentation/tree/master

Small plug, my presentation was built using Presentation Builder, which makes it easy to work with source code in presentations.

Oh, and before I forget. YPC is sending me to RubyConf 2008 in Orlando Florida this year. Its been a few years since the last RubyConf I've been to, so this should be very exciting.

I am looking forward to both the presentations, and getting to meet up with everyone again.

If anyone wants to share a cab ride from the airport to the hotel with me, that would be great. Forget the exact arival time, but I should be arriving the day before the conference starts.

This year I will be giving a presentation at MerbCamp in San Deigo on using Sequel with Merb.

I can't wait to meet everyone, and I'm looking forward to this conference.

Hopefully I can get a chance to port my blog to the most recent changes in merb before the conference. (Including of course, my fixes for merb-helpers.)

Some time after the conference, I will be posting my slideshow online for everyone to see. As a side note, I wrote a small presentation tool to build my slides in. You can find it here: http://github.com/lholden/presentation-builder/tree/master.

Once Merb 1.0 is released, I will also be posting the source for my blog.

See you at the conference!

At YPC we have a default route that reads something like this:

map.connect '*path', :controller => 'exception', :action => 'issue_404'

Which basically means... we do not have a default route that connects unknown url's to controllers/actions.

Recently however, we needed some way to automatically handle routing to controllers that are, in effect, dynamically added. So we have URL's that look like this:

http://yellowpages.com/blah/things/controller/action

The first thing we thought to try was:

map.namespace(:blah) do |tool|
  tool.namespace(:things) do |thing|
    thing.connect '/:controller/:action'
  end
end

Makes sense right? To our surprise, rails would prefix /blah/things to ALL routes now... wha?

The next thing we did was trying to just remove the slash... thing.connect ':controller/:action'.

Which was the right track... our other url's are working properly again, but url's for /blah/things/:controller/:action just don't work.

I had assumed we where just running into a bug with the rails router code, but it looks like the namespace support in rails just has no concept of defaults in namespaces.

Enter my patch to add default routes to namespaces in rails.

You can find my rails fork at github along with a patch against Rails v2.1.1 at the rails lighthouse.

With this change, you can add default routes to namespaces:

map.namespace(:blah) do |tool|
  tool.namespace(:things) do |thing|
    thing.connect ':controller/:action'
  end
end

Wasn't able to get it into the rails 2.2 release as its entering a code freeze, but hopefully it will make 2.3.

You may have noticed a few changes to my website.

First of which, it's actually responsive now! This is thanks to my finally moving the blog off dreamhost and onto my slicehost account.

Second, the blog looks a little nicer now. (Or at least I think...)

What you may not have noticed is the fact that the codebase has undergone a decent reworking. I've ported the whole thing to Merb and Sequel, and am quite happy with the results.

I will be posting the source to the rewrite soon.

I have recently started getting into a web framework for ruby called Merb.

Merb is an MVC framework that is ORM-agnostic, JavaScript library agnostic, and template language agnostic, preferring plugins that add in support for a particular feature rather than trying to produce a monolithic library with everything in the core. In fact, this is a guiding principle of the project, which has led to third-party support for the ActiveRecord, DataMapper, and Sequel ORMs.

In addition, it means that the core code in Merb is kept simple and well organised. This has multiple benefits. It means it’s faster for one thing. It’s also easier to understand, maintain and extend.

I have to admit, after using it for a bit... I really do love its design. While it is a little harder to get started out of the box (partially due to Merb's pre 1.0 release nature)... I am finding it to be very fast and flexible.

As Merb does not come with ay sort of ORM, I have also been working with DataMapper, which shares many ideas with Merb.

Without further ado, I would like to announce two new gems:

• dm-is-paginated - Adds a paginated finder to DataMapper
• merb-pagination - A helper for displaying pagination links

Combined, the two gems provide a full stack package for adding pagination to merb/datamapper applications. Neither component is tied to the other, and can be used in combination with other projects.

NOTE This post was typed while pretty messed up from surgery... so its a bit silly.

This was my first ever surgery, and I had no idea that when you get surgery they want you to remove all metal before the operation when they plan to be using a cauterizing device.

I had taken most of my jewelry out before heading to the hospital, with just the helix and the industrial jewelry left in my ears. Just before the surgery they spent a good amount of time trying to convince me that I needed to remove both bits of jewelry though.

I really did not want to remove my jewelry. Especially the bar for the industrial as it was new and honestly... I am not sure if either of the piercings would even still be open by the time the surgery was finished. Thankfully however, I finally managed to convince them to just tape the piercings instead of having them taken out.

During the surgery, my surgeon found that not only did my gallbladder have stones as he expected, but I also had stones all through my common bile duct too. He also found that apparently my common bile duct was very scared, and said that I've had this stuff going on now for years.

Because of all this, my surgery ended up taking longer then expected. My doctor had to flush out my common bile duct to try and remove all of the stones. He said that he tried to get everything, but I might have stone fragments left... and because of this I may end up having more episodes while they are being cleared out of my system.

I did pretty good both before and after the surgery I think. Wasn't too freaked out going in. When I woke up after the surgery however, I was confused as heck. I had no idea where I was, and when I tried to sit up my body wouldn't let me. I started to freak out as I could not remember that I just had a bunch of holes put through my tummy muscles.

After a few moments I had finally managed to get my barring. The nurse came in and I was wheeled into my normal room again. The nurse gave me some pop and gram crackers to eat before giving me a dose of vicodin to help with the pain. Eventually she said we where ready to check out, so Mom helped me to get dressed and someone wheeled me out of the hospital.

Today I am friggin sore and I am having a real hard time getting around and such. I am really truly glad that my mom flew out from California and is here taking care of me. I am really not sure I could have possibly gotten though all of this on my own.

So it seems I have gallstones. I found out one night after supper from being in such excruciating pain that I had to go to the hospital.

Aren't I too young for gallstones?

Ah well... so thursday morning I get to have my gallbladder taken out. This would be my first ever surgery, so I can honestly say I am a bit nervous about the ordeal.