Rouxbe
Wow I was visiting with a client today who is in video production and I was so amazed at this website that I have to share it.
Rouxbe is a recipe website with a whole new approach. Instead of plain old text based recipes, they provide very high quality video instructions from a professional chef. It’s like having the best little bits of food network on-demand and easy enough to bring into your kitchen on your laptop.
Best of all it’s free for life for founding members who pay $99. If you’re not convinced yet, they have a $6.50 per month deal, or even a month trial. Also, they donate 15% of member fees to feeding the hungry in developing nations.
The video quality is amazing and after watching a few previews you’ll be hungry. If you are a foodie like me this site is for you.
Check them out Rouxbe.
FreeBSD and Me
I just spent a bunch of time trying to get OpenSUSE 10.2 installed on a server in my office to handle dns, ldap authentication, and some other minor stuff. Well after a number of crashes and subsequent jiggering I got it up an running only to have it mysteriously crash later that night during an ssh session. Hmm, after I reboot the file system is damaged, and I am pissed. So I install FreeBSD 6.2 on the machine, and both the machine and I are happy. Me and BSD go way back, and I am reminded every time I try to install Linux why I love BSD. I spent a number of years using OpenBSD, both in the military and after. I really love OpenBSD but FreeBSD’s ports tree is more up to date and the developer community is larger, which is what got me to switch in the end. Linux too has a large developer community and lots of up to date software, but the fragmented distros, user community, and crappy package systems keep me coming back to BSD.
Anyhow it’s nothing against Linux or OpenSUSE, I actually think OpenSUSE has a lot of potential. It’s just amazing to me that the same issues continue to plague Linux more than 10 year after I picked up my first copy of Redhat.
Rails Automatic Scoping ala Userstamp
I am working on an app to keep track of my customer base, projects, tasks, communications with customers, and some other functionality that you might find in CRM & Project Management apps. So I have a simple interface with a select box of all customers which I have placed in the header. Selecting a customer there acts as a global filter meaning it should do the following:
- Limit the results I get in my lists of projects, contact reports, people, and tasks so that I can focus on one customer at a time.
- I would also like to be able to leave that variable empty so that if I need to look at complete lists I can.
- One last thing, it should do this without adding tons of code all over the place and without brute force.
Userstamp Method
The Userstamp plugin gives us a good example of setting a current_user variable using the application controller and a session variable.
cattr_accessor :current_user
end
The following code allows our models to refer to the User model because the session variable cannot be accessed from within models.
before_filter do |c|
User.current_user = User.find(c.session[:user].id) unless c.session[:user].nil?
end
end
Well, in my case I am not working with a User but a Customer. So we’ll take what we’ve learned then apply it. Since my method is a cheap and easy ripoff of Userstamp I’ll name my method Trampstamp (because it’s cheap and easy).
Trampstamp Method
In my method the first thing that needs to be setup is the model to receive the current_customer. I’ll set that up in my Customer class.
cattr_accessor :current_customer
has_many :people
has_many :projects
...
Now I need a way to store that value.
def filter
if params[:customer_id]
session[:customer] = Customer.find(params[:customer_id])
else
session[:customer] = nil
end
redirect_to :back
end
...
And a way to retrieve the session value and set the current customer.
before_filter do |c|
Customer.current_customer = c.session[:customer] unless c.session[:customer].nil?
end
...
And finally a way to limit my search results without having to add conditions all over the application.
belongs_to :customer
def self.find(*args)
unless Customer.current_customer.nil?
self.with_scope(:find => { :conditions => [‘customer_id = ?’, Customer.current_customer.id] }) { super }
else
super
end
end
end
Result – Judo Style automatic scoping
When I have a current_customer set,Project.find(:all)will yield the following query:
SELECT * FROM projects WHERE (customer_id = 1)
When no current_customer is set, it is business as usual. I suppose it would be really easy to add another method to automatically add :customer_id to project.create, and others. Maybe I’ll release that as a plugin so it’s even DRYer than this.
Here is the complete contact report list with no customer set.
This is the same list with the customer set.
