Web Development and Life
- This site is in serious need of some help
Yeah, it has been a while. Been busy with my company, my racing, and other life changing events so my personal blog has suffered a bit. Hopefully, you will see some changes here soon including a new layout and maybe even a new CMS.
Hmmm, yeah maybe.
- Homer Simpson finds out what voting is really like.
Well, the election is coming up soon and without a doubt there will be voting machine problems. I just hope it does not get as bad as Homer Simpson had to deal with…
- TankEngine plugin released for iPhone development
Pathfinder Development has released TankEngine out into the wild, giving iPhone developers a great new tool for app development.
TankEngine is a plugin for developing web applications optimized for the iPhone look and feel. It is based on earlier work using iUI, but has a brand-new JavaScript ending based on jQuery, and is a more flexible tool than iUI.
Looks interesting and while I am nowhere near the point of doing any type of iPhone development, hopefully this will spawn a few more great iPhone apps out there. Give it a look.
- Ruby on Rails Cheatsheets
Thanks to Dizzy, we now some excellent Ruby on Rails cheatsheets to keep by the desk for quick reference.
I use the Migrations cheatsheet and the Form Helpers cheatsheet quite a bit, maybe you will find them interesting as well.
- Ruby on Rails desktop background
I was looking for some cool new desktop backgrounds and couldn’t really find anything new out there that had to do with Ruby on Rails, so I designed one last night.The Ruby logo is obviously from Ruby-Lang.org and the vectors are items that I created for other previous work.
Nothing too fancy, just something that I threw together to give my Macbook a little fresher look. I figured I might as well release it out there for anyone that might like it and want to use it. Feel free to download it and use it if you want to.
I have in the three most common screen sizes that I know of, so hopefully one of these will work just fine for you.
- Site Launch: Fans25.com
We recently launched a new project at YourMark.com that caters to the college football fanatics out there.The site is called Fans25.com, and certainly delivers that college football atmosphere that is so strong in the South!
The site features a thriving discussion forum, a well-written blog highlighting the latest college football news, a user-generated “Fans Top 25″ poll, and a weekly Pick ‘Em contest where users pick the winners of 15 of the week’s top games.
You can also see team standings by conference, get other links to college football resources, and upload you favorite fan photos! If you are a college football fan, be sure to check out the site and create a free membership.
- Rails community finally gets much needed documentation upgrade
Without a doubt, one of the biggest complaints I hear about the Rails community is the lack of up-to-date documentation out there for the Rails 2.x projects and code.
It looks like that is finally changing….
It appears as though there has been quite a nice amount of work going on over at http://guides.rails.info. Some new and up-to-date guides have been posted detailing some really good Ruby on Rails info.
When I first started using and learning Rails, there was some really good docs and tutorials out there to help me along the way. With the release of Rails 2.x though, the documentation quickly fell behind and it really left new adopters with a sour taste in their mouths.
Hopefully this is the start of taking care of that problem and we will see the documentation and tutorials catch up to the current Rails core version
- REVIEW: XBox 360 Wireless Steering Wheel
Over the weekend, I finally broke down and purchased the wireless steering wheel and pedals for the XBox 360.
If you have tried playing any of the current racing games for the 360 with the standard controller, then you will understand how frustrating it is to do it without the steering wheel, so if you play a lot of racing/car games then the steering wheel is a must-purchase.
I bought the steering wheel in order to play NASCAR ‘09, Forza Motorsport, and GRID and I am sure glad that I did!
My Review
First of all, the steering wheel combo itself is built pretty well and is really a nice combo compared to others that I have owned in the past for the PC. The wheel itself feels really good and it has all of the standard controller buttons in the center. It also features a locking system to lock it down to your desk, table, or other surface that you will be using the wheel on. The locking system is pretty simple to use and keeps the wheel secured tightly to whatever surface you are using.
The pedals are really nice as well and they hook to the wheel via a standard RJ11 cable. To get power to the wheel you can either run it off of batteries (which disables the force feedback) or you can hook it into regular wall power. Running it off of batteries makes it super portable, but I imagine that the batteries will likely drain quickly if using the wheel for any significant amount of time. The batteries are located behind a little “trap door” on the right hand side of the wheel base. It uses 2 AA batteries for power.
The set comes with a software install disk that you will need to install prior to using the wheel. Once that is completed, you can sync the wheel to the console just like you do any other controller and you are ready to go.
My Complaints
Yep, as with all things, nothing is perfect, but in this case, there is not much to complain about. My only complaint with the wheel is that it is a little sloppy in the actual feel of the wheel. It almost feels to “loose” when playing with it sometimes. Force feedback helps with this some
Overall
Overall, the wireless steering wheel for the XBox 360 is pretty awesome. It does come with a $99.00 price tag, but for what you get and the ease of use on many of the popular racing games for the 360, it is well worth the money I think.
- Acts_as_slugable plugin and why you need it
If you are building a social Rails application, or any other Rails application that needs to have a URL slug, rather than the typical users/admin/232 type of URL scheme, then the acts_as_slugable plugin is going to be a perfect fit.
In my current Rails project, I want the users to be have their own “storefront” per se. Using acts_as_slugable, I can now have my URL scheme go from
http://www.example.com/users/145
to something like this
http://www.example.com/users/cory-perry
Much better for SEO, linking, and just overall a better URL in general.
Acts_as_slugable generates the URL slug based on a specific field that you specify, making it fairly easy to create URL slugs customized to your specific app needs. This is an extremely helpful plugin!
To install this plugin into your Rails app, execute this code from your command line:
./script/plugin install http://code.dunae.ca/acts_as_slugable
- Bort - A base Rails application
Wow, I can think of many times that this would have come in handy!
Thanks to the wonderful subscription feature in Delicious, I found out about Bort, a base Rails application to use as a starting point for creating new Ruby on Rails applications.
Bort features some pretty helpful stuff out of the box, including RESTful_Authentication, RSpec, and some standard routing and application files that are going to be standard on most any Rails application.
This project looks pretty promising and I am looking forward to using it and seeing how well it works out. Give Bort a try, it may just help you speed up development time as well.
