I18n and “undefined method each for false:FalseClass”
Jul 27th
I’ve never really had much need for Rails’ i18n support, but a new project is going to be using it extensively. I was a bit thrown by an error that started to be thrown after I created the relevant locale files, and took a while to track it down (possibly because I was also upgrading to the Rails 3 RC at the same time).
It turns out Rails really doesn’t like empty locale files. Adding a couple of translations into my empty files solved everything.
Seemed worth sharing as it took me a while to track down comparable experiences online.
Week 146
Jul 11th
As I write I am sitting on the floor of my sister’s hotel room in Paris as she and Kari watch the World Cup Final and my daughter sleeps in the next room. Which is to say–despite my officemates thinking I was inventing the plan simply to hurry some suppliers–I’m actually on holiday.
That means the past week was a hectic and scattered one as I made sure as much as possible was wrapped up before my departure. For the most part that worked though one significant project was left in a very uncertain state as the client went on a holiday of his own without informing me. Thankfully 48 hours after leaving the office it is actually taking a little effort to recall the details (which are of course all documented for me on my return).
The coming week promises a lot of reading, a lot of walking, maybe some cycling and no work. I may post a few links or notes here, but otherwise I will be back in a couple of weeks.
Week 145
Jul 3rd
This is the first week in several (probably since I last wrote some weeknotes) that it seems conceivable I might get to the end of the week’s list of tasks. It’s also the first week in several where I’ve been able to spend some time working at the weekend. These two things are related, and are a clear reminder that there are too many projects in play at the moment.
Thankfully, this week has seen a couple of those projects signed off. One temporarily (the client are testing our changes, another round of work begins very soon), but one permanently. The latter will be my first Wordpress 3 deployment and involved digging into some fairly arcane parts of how WP manages URLs. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to do everything I needed within plugins, rather than having to resort to hacking away at the core.
The coming week will see continued effort to get things signed off as I’m actually going on a proper holiday the following week. There are some Greenbelt things to wrap up (hopefully including funding for another newspaper this year), a project that needs to be ready for my client to demo to their client while I’m away, and some contracts to pin down so I know what I’m working on when I get back. And a bit more work on an internal project that I’m rather enjoying but am not quite ready to discuss…
Inline Attachments for ActionMailer
Jun 14th
The changes to ActionMailer coming in Rails 3 are already a huge improvement, and I hadn’t expected to see much more development before version 3 lands, but it’s great to see this change making it far easier to support inline attachments.
Behind the curtains of Zeitgeist
Jun 14th
I’m a little late getting to it, but Dan Catt’s writeup of “the [Guardian] Open Platform, APIs and Google App Engine” is well worth a read.
Dan explained some of the architecture to me over lunch during The Story a few months back and I was impressed by the way they’ve embraced a plurality of tools to build apps, and devised a caching infrastructure that will ensure their frontend is robust even if something doesn’t quite work out in an experimental piece of the system.