If I have written about it, then I have a better understanding and longer memory. Like the collection_select method which I drawn a illustration and post about it sometimes ago, it stuck in my memory till now.

This idea is not really new, you learn by teaching, or at least write or blog about it. All that help to clarify your thought.

And so, to help me internalized the reason behind attr_accessor, I quickly googled and read thru this from stackoverflow, yet, am gonna write about it as a process of internalization. Ha.

You keep writing attr_accessor, one day you totally forgot why we did attr_accessor at the first place. Why attr_accessor?

class Human
  def name=(str)
    @name = str
  end
 
  def name
    @name
  end
end

You do that to assign variable to a value, then call the value. This is common repetitive task. Programming is all about eliminating repetitive tasks. So you can do this in ruby

class Human
  attr_reader :name
  attr_writer :name
end

where attr_reader replace name method part, and attr_writer replace the name=(str) method. Still, often attr_writer and attr_reader often come in pair, why not just do it in one step.

class Human
  attr_accessor :name
end

I created a diagram hopefully could better illustrate this in one glance.

Evolution of attr_accessor

That is it. Already felt that now this tie deeper into my memory.

A marathon, not short sprint.
Image from stock.xchng, author cienpies.net.

I wish by now I have something positive to write as a fitting part 2 to the post wrote last year, you know, happy ending or something like that. The sad fact is, after numerous try, despite seemingly getting closer each time; I am still here one year later, still looking every possible ways to work with rails or web development work, full-time, oh, actually even part-time (So ping me if you have any web development works, especially ruby or ruby on rails stuff)

I have Interviewed for 4-5 opportunities, learned a lot, and got to meet some local startup people, developers, etc *but* none of that lead to anything, so far.

My first ever rails freelance gig was developing a simple web apps for a client. It was cancelled like 3 weeks into development. The client decided to look for a local developer instead. He said it is not my problem just that he preferred to work with a developer from local. One year down the road, the site is still not up. I guess the client decided not to pursue with his idea anymore.

Then another freelance gig come knocking, I was required to sign a NDA even. I was so thrilled with the opportunity, their idea is cool, it is like another facebook in the making. The core teams were working on the main features, and I was told that I would involve real soon. Now it is almost a year later, nothing happen still, haven’t heard any news from the team, their site haven’t changed for months. Not sure if they still working on the project.

Finally a local startup opening for Rails, not freelance gig but a chance of full-time employment, wow! So off I go for interview, we overcome the usual stumbling block by cutting down my salary (of course, not before serious discussion with the stakeholder – my wife, always grateful for her understanding), I offer to work with them for a few weekends in advance, so both sides can see if we are a fit. Think you can guess the outcome by now. 2 weekends down, and I got a sorry message, it is not something to do with me, but their internal decision. That is what I’ve been told at least. They did offer to pay up for my time, though I rejected.

There are one or two more freelance opportunities in between, that didn’t materialized. The common theme here is, “It is not your problem really”. The project just got cancelled, or stagnant, or fading out, or because of some internal decision I was not hired. But I refuse to buy the “It is not your problem” statement. There is no benefit in believing it is just plain bad luck, there is no benefit in believing it is just some internal decision to not hire. That is like admit defeat and say, okay, there is nothing I can do with it now. I can only work on things that I can control, which is *me*. I haven’t made myself so good, that there is no excuse at all not to hire me, of course that is my problem.

Stay positive, working on my own projects, writing even more codes, reading even more codes. Keep doing all that. This is a marathon, not short sprint. Even if no one take a chance on me, the effort I put in will lead me to somewhere.

I have to believe in that, cause there aren’t any other options anyway. Ha.

A quick search around internet, sure enough it is stackoverflow come with an answer top in the list. It turn out that only images in the commit and pushed to heroku are kept, example logo or icon used in the apps. Uploaded images will be removed with each push to heroku, clearly images uploaded via paperclip fall into the latter category.

Solution is to use a 3rd party storage, like Amazon Simple Storage Service. Of course, aws is free to start with as well, a free account includes 5Gb storage, 20k Get requests, 2k put request, yada yada, another great thing for stingy developer, hurray!

So I have install railsinstaller, and Devkit come installed with it. And I have things running pretty normal, till lately I try to create a new rails apps, doing a bundle install lead to error saying

Gem files will remain installed in C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/lib/ruby/gems/1.9 .1/gems/json-1.7.6 for inspection. 
Results logged to C:/RailsInstaller/Ruby1.9.3/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/json-1.7. 6/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out An error occured while installing json (1.7.6), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that gem install json -v '1.7.6' succeeds before bundling.

I tried to reinstall railsinstaller, and manually install Devkit. No working. Then tried to uninstall railsinstaller, and have ruby installer manually, then Devkit, make sure Devkit path is under ruby root, still the problem persist. Finally I found the solution in stackoverflow, from a link in treehouse’s blog . The thing is Devkit doesn’t work with Autorun interfaces, so if you have previously have this setup, in my case it was the I setup for syntax highlighting in command prompt, then you will have to remove it.

Just type this into command prompt

REG QUERY "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor"
REG QUERY "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor"

Should get something like below

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
    CompletionChar        REG_DWORD    0x9
    DefaultColor          REG_DWORD    0x0
    EnableExtensions      REG_DWORD    0x1
    PathCompletionChar    REG_DWORD    0x9

These columns actually stand for Key, Type and Value. If there is a Key named AutoRun, then this could be the root cause of the problem. In my case, I think the Autorun key was set when I setup ansicon.
Run this to remove it,

REG DELETE "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor" /v AutoRun

Close command prompt, and bundle install again in a new command prompt session, things should work.

rake db:create:all
rake db:migrate
rake db:seed

I will just do this, which is a shortcut for rake db:create; rake db:schema:load, and rake db:seed

rake db:setup

And it work!

Precompile Assets,

rake assets:precompile

lead to an error saying “Segmentation fault while running ‘rake assets procompile’”. A suggestion in stackoverflow saying that the rootcause might be execjs, change to therubyracer gem should solve the problem. Even though there is no execjs gem dependency in the gemfile, I still add in therubyracer gem, bundle install again, now rake assets:precompile just work, and I have futnotes running locally. Now off to get the test done

git clone https://github.com/Futnotes/dev_test-2.git devtest

Mixtures of errors doing bundle install though
First it is capybara

Using capybara (1.1.2) 
Installing capybara-webkit (0.12.1) with native extensions 
Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

According to these sources thoughtbot and stackoverflow qt need to be installed first, before install capybara.
To install qt, you must link to libpng, simply link to linpng will fail due to permission,

Error: Could not symlink file: /usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.5.13/lib/pkgconfig/libpng15.pc
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig is not writable. You should change its permissions.

To fix that

sudo chown -R kahfei /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

then only follow by command below

brew update
brew link libpng
brew install qt

bundle install still fail though

An error occurred while installing rmagick (2.13.1), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install rmagick -v '2.13.1'` succeeds before bundling.

It seems that lot of people having this same problem. Some of the suggestion work for some people, but none of it fixed my problem. Apparently this is a rmagick bug, as it does not support the newer version of ImageMagick. rmagick has not been updated for two years, so if there is an option, change to other gem to work with image, like minimagick

After hours of scouring the internet, and trying a few different approaches, using the magick-installer to install ImageMagick, then

bundle install

work again. No actually I lie,  bundle install yield another error

ERROR: While executing gem … (ArgumentError) marshal data too short

There are suggestions to remove ~./gem folder altogether and reinstall all the gem. But in my case, bundle install work on other rails apps, just not this one. So I clone again the repo to a new folder, now bundle install work!

Now creating development, testing and production environment. I already have postgresql installed locally, so I will use postgresql, my database.yml looks something like this

development:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: futnotes_development
pool: 5
username: kahfei
password: 
test:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: futnotes_test
pool: 5
username: kahfei
password: 
 
production:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: futnotes_production
pool: 5
username: kahfei
password:

now to create them

rake db:create:all

All three database created

rake db:migrate

with a long list of errors, it start with something like this

PG::Error: ERROR:  column "position" does not exist
LINE 1: ...RE "competitions"."name" = 'Premiership' ORDER BY position, ...

require 'something'

Seems like Ruby 1.9 remove current directory from load path as I read from Stackoverflow

To make it work you could

require './something'

or use require_relative,

require_relative 'something'

The thing is,

load 'something.rb'

still work. So does that mean load and require have different load path?

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Love this…

Regular expressions are extremely powerful, but they are not the correct solution for every problem. You should learn enough about them to know when they are appropriate, when they will solve your problems, and when they will cause more problems than they solve.

But it is easy to fall into the trap of using regex for everything.
I need to find the last string from a path, where

path = "d:/some/directory-with dash-and space"

So here is how I try to get the last string in a path, with regex

path.match(/\w*$/)

trying to capture any word characters at the end of the string with \w*$, but only captured the last word “space”, not good.

path.match(/(\s|\w)*$/)[0]

to match either whitespace (\s) or word characters (\w) at the end of the string, the result is “and space”, dashed is not captured, not good.

path.match(/[^\/]*$/)

[^\/] to take in everything except “/”, result is “directory-with dash-and space”, it works!

Only later I found out there is a really simple way to do this

File.basename(path)

will actually give you “directory-with dash-and space”. Plus, it will ignore ending slash if there is any.
Duh!