I ticked the wrong box

I had a very confusing situation today with a multipart form that was for uploading a picture to a new web service I’m working on.

In Safari the form upload worked.  Even in Internet Explorer 6 the form upload worked (after I fixed the dodgy MIME-type that IE passes through for JPG images - image/pjpeg for those interested).

The form I was trying to submit had the multipart attribute set correctly, and also had some javascript to disable the file selection, form submission button, and show a spinner to indicate that something is happening, and they don’t try and submit the file twice if they’re sending in a large image.

My submit tag orginally looked like this (Ruby on Rails)

<%= submit_tag 'Upload Photo', :class => "formbutton", :id => "submit-button", :onClick => "$('upload-form').submit();Form.disable('upload-form');Effect.toggle('footnote', 'appear', {duration: 0});Effect.toggle('spinner', 'appear', {duration: 0});" %>

I was very confused as it did work in those other browsers, but not in Firefox.

The key to fixing this was to add return false; to the end of the javascript statement…

<%= submit_tag 'Upload Photo', :class => "formbutton", :id => "submit-button", :onClick => "$('upload-form').submit();Form.disable('upload-form');Effect.toggle('footnote', 'appear', {duration: 0});Effect.toggle('spinner', 'appear', {duration: 0});return false;" %>

What I find particularly confusing about this is that everything I read on the “return false;” statement leads me to believe that this form should not be submitted - however - return true does not work (500 Internal Server Error returned).  But what the hey - it works.

I wanted to have a mnenonic password generator for a little application that I’m writing in ruby, and couldn’t find one out there. So, I rolled my own. Actually, it’s a knock-off of a Python one I found, but that doesn’t really matter.

Do with this what you will. Hope it’s useful to someone.

def generateMnemonicPassword(letters=8, digits=4)
consonants = "bdfghklmnprstvwz"
vowels = "aeiou"
password = ""
(1 .. letters).each do |i|
range = i%2 == 1 ? consonants : vowels
password = password + range[rand(range.length), 1]
end
(1 .. digits).each do |i|
password = password + rand(10).to_s
end
password
end

It outputs fun and pronounceable passwords such as tepelopu8058, vonobuba6145 and kipowetu0270.

Enjoy!

Righto, I’ve been putting it off long enough. Got the GiST has been running on rails 1.1.6 almost since it has been launched, and I’d like to take advantage on some of that RESTful 2.0 goodness. So, I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade it.

I’ve got a couple of issues though. I currently use (shhhh, I’m about to say a dirty word) Engines to handle my user logins and roles… They don’t work with much past rails 1.1.6. I also don’t have good admin screens on the application, and whenever I need to do maintenance (which is very rare) I need to go and edit the database directly

So, there are a number of things that I want to do to the app.

1. Upgrade to Rails 2.0.2
2. Convert my user login goodies to use acts_as_authenticated
3. Get another way to handle roles
4. Implement Streamlined for admin screens
5. Write some tests - I’ve was a bit slack when I initially wrote Got the GiST
6. Refactor my code - this goes without saying - some of it is a bit shabby

The main issue I have is that I’m not sure what order I want to do this in. The issue that I have is there are a number of dependencies. For example, old-style Engines doesn’t work past 1.1.6 - and I have my complete login and role system built around that. streamlined don’t appear to work with Rails 1.1.x. acts_as_authenticated requires a simple bit of script hackery to work with 1.1.6, so that might be able to come early…

I think what I’m going to do is drop Engines ASAP. That’s the main cause of my pain. I need to recreate with acts_as_authenticated essentially the same methods for authentication as login_engine currently has, as well as find a (perhaps temporary) solution to my roles issues. Then I’ll set about writing tests. Next step I think could be to upgrade to 1.2.6, and then implement streamlined. I think I’ll then be ready for a migration to Rails 2.0.

Unless someone else has a much better suggestion!

scRUBYt - Hot, New Ruby Web-Scraping Toolkit Released

Peter Cooper over at rubyinside.com has recently blogged about scRUBYt - a new ruby based web scraping toolkit.

It looks super-powerful.

Basically, you define an extractor, which can pull HTML (even including posting form data, such as product searches), click on links, pull content from the page and create XML with it.

What I particularly like about this is now this gives developers the ability to very simply include content from sites that aren’t mashup-friendly (ie, REST or SOAP APIs). I mean, it was of course possible before, but this just seems so much easier. No-ones content is safe!

I just had my most pleasant experience with Singletons ever. I had a little problem I was trying to solve in ruby, and I contacted a friend of mine who is quite a good developer. He suggested I should be looking at global variables, to static (class) variables, or singletons. I gave globals a go, and they didn’t give me the love I expected, so I said “bye bye” to them - probably never to be used again. I next tried Singletons.

Ruby defines a Singleton module. This is mixin’d with your code thusly:

class Lonely
include Singleton
end

Easy peasy.

That, creates a singleton of Lonely for you. The include modifies the signatures of the new and allocate Class methods (Lonely.new and Lonely.allocate) to be private, and creates (or modifies) some other methods to provide some loveliness (gory details to be found at http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/singleton/rdoc/index.html).

Basically, then all you need to do is call the instance method of the class you have created.

m = Lonely.instance

And then you can use m as you like. You can create more

m = Lonely.instance
n = Lonely.instance

And m and n refer to the same instance. Nice Singleton. No need for me to check out class variables. I think my Singleton will be more portable. BTW - Don’t try to .new your class - you’ll get a NoMethodError thrown as the new method has been made private by the mixin.

Ruby rocks.

I just installed the VerseLogic wordpress OpenID plugin. This means that you guys (if you have an OpenID already) don’t have to explicitly register on my site to comment. You can just log in with your OpenID, and an account will be created here for you. No more passwords!

You can get a free OpenID at http://myopenid.com/

To find out more about OpenID, check it all out here.