More »

Migrate all tables to utf-8

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
If you’re like me, you maintain a mix of both old and new Rails apps. If you’re even more like me, you have no Rails apps that store Latin1 data any...

The ActiveRecord that would not save

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
I have just seriously spent four hours debugging the most inane bug, this year, so far. In an ActiveRecord before_create method, I was setting a boolean...

Dutch national TV: Z@ppelin feliciteert!

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
Quite a few weeks ago I completed an application to submit your birthday boy or girl for Z@ppelin. It features birthday cake recipes, on-the-fly PDF generation...

Teh ultimate email regexp

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
Validating e-mail addresses can be a pain. Most of the time you want some syntax checking, just to prevent the most horrible abuse. But more often than...

Cross-browser HTML5 audio tag

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
HTML5, the next version of the language of the web, is a wonderful thing. It’s a real step forward in terms of semantics and making browsers more powerful...

HTML5 on a major national website

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
Yesterday I promised to blog about my work with HTML5 and a major .nl website. The website in question is radio1.nl and early this morning I relaunched...

Transmit your production database

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
I wrote a small Ruby on Rails plugin that transmits the production database. It works either way: from the server to your local computer or from your computer...

First International Longest Tweet Contest

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
How many data can you put in a Tweet? Well, 140 characters. Think again. By using encoding software, like ZIP, you can put a whole lot more into one little...

I heart Rack Middleware

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
This Scaling Rails episode led me to the Rack Contrib project on GitHub. This project contains some pretty neat middleware that can be a huge time-saver...

Rails on Google App Engine

almost 2 years ago by joost on Space Babies.
Google has just announced Java support for their App Engine. So what? Ruby on Rails on teh Google is what! Yes, sir, you too can deploy your Rails application...