MustModify Blog: All Posts for

HTML5 GeoLocation Accuracy

July 15, 2010
I spent some time looking in to HTML5 features this morning. The first one on the list is GeoLocation. This demo gave a position within a block of my house: http://html5demos.com/geo Interestingly, when I went to visit the page again, it located me within feet of my previous house, more than 500 miles away. According to the Chrome...


validates_uniqueness_of results in " undefined method `text?' for nil:NilClass "

July 07, 2010
I had the following model: --- ruby class Visit < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :visit_type belongs_to :patient validates_presence_of :visit_type validates_presence_of :patient validates_presence_of :date validates_uniqueness_of :visit_type end --- I changed :visit_type to :visit_type_id and it went away.


Web Dev Tools - Color Scheme Designer

July 05, 2010
"Color Scheme Designer":http://colorschemedesigner.com colorschemedesigner.com As any of my clients will tell you, my design skill falls somewhere between "enh" and "meh." Fortunately, someone smarter than me has found some math that can help. I use this tool to find colors that match the existing colors. Once I've found a set of colors that...


MySQL says " Incorrect column specifier for column 'x' "

June 28, 2010
My rails app uses a database of dubious origin, so I wasn't shocked when I had issues. Because I imported the database from sql, I first noticed the issue when running tests. Tests start with rake db:test:clone which starts by regenerating db/schema.rb using rake db:schema:dump My db/schema.rb then contained columns like...


users and profiles

June 28, 2010
I find myself, yet again^n, considering users and profiles. Say you have the following models: - User - Doctor - Patient Of course, the concept of user is not the same as the concept of a person. User might be more accurately called Login, since it could be a bot or a guest login used by 100 various anonymous people. your views have access...


Why Ruby Complains about Nested Parentheses

June 28, 2010
Every time a dev asks me why Ruby doesn't like nested arguments without parens, I draw a blank, but I swear that it's an issue. Here's an example of the issue: --- ruby =link_to h @person.philosophy, @person.philosophy --- it seems really obvious right now. I'm not sure why I can't think of that when it's clinch time. Anyway, this can be the...


changing an agile ticket with user story and acceptance criteria from a traditional ticket

June 18, 2010
This is a real-life example of a ticket write by a client that I converted into an "agile" user story with acceptance criteria, provided for those who want to find out whether there would be value for them in transitioning and those who want to understand the differences between them. --- Title: Users can create a category from the Add Item...


dd_roundies fails for AJAX with IE8

June 14, 2010
Rounding things in IE8 is one of the biggest farses ever. After some research, I'm using dd_roundies. I won't explain how it works, because you don't deserve that kind of suffering. It seems to work for rounding objects in IE before the page is set to the "ready" state, but it's failing for me in ajax requests (and in fact any javascript that...