29 Jun 06 Jim Baen, 1943 - 2006

Jim Baen of science fiction publisher Baen Books passed away yesterday after having a serious stroke over a week ago. Jim, your work to bring us great books that entertained and uplifted us will not be forgotten.

[tags]science fiction, publishing[/tags]

Filed in Opinions with 0 Comments

27 Jun 06 Outsourcing and H1-B Visas: Which is Worse?

The Pandora’s Box that is outsourcing has been opened and the suffering of lost jobs, lower wages and potential security issues has been released. Just as with Pandora these ills cannot be recontained in their original box, however Hope still remains.

Outsourcing is an inevitable side effect of a global society. Just as we do not want to pay thirty dollars for a pound of apples, we do not want to pay more for our computers, bank accounts, and other goods and services. Apples are picked by immigrant labor. They may have what appears to be valid documentation, but for the most part they are not. They get these jobs because no one else wants them and they will take minimal pay. Likewise we are seeing a similar move in technology.

Filed in Opinions, Politics and Law with 0 Comments

26 Jun 06 Keeping Fixtures DRY in Trees

So I am working on a Rails project that revolves around an acts_as_tree using single table inheritence (STI). I got tired REALLY quickly with figuring out what id to use for each parent_id field. I figured that in the spirit of Don’t Repeat Yourself I would come up with a DRY way to specify the parents that did not require reapplying the id’s to the fixtures when I change things.

Since the YAML fixtures in ruby are parsed through eRb first, I thought I would give this a try. I made a file called thing_data.yml with my fixtures like so:


root:
  name: root item
  parent_id:
first_branch:
  name: a branch
  parent_id: root
second_branch:
  name: another branch
  parent_id: root
a_leaf:
  name: a leaf on the wind
  parent_id: first_branch

Notice the utter lack of ids. Now with a little eRb magic we put the following in the yaml file you plan to load as your fixture. Lets call it thing.yml:


<%

id_key = 1

data = YAML.load_file(
  File.expand_path(
    File.dirname( __FILE__ ) + '/test/fixtures/thing_data.yml'
  )
)

@final = Hash.new
data.each {|key, value|

  record = Hash.new

  record.update( value )
  record['id'] = id_key
  record[ 'created_at' ] = Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
  record[ 'updated_at' ] = Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

  @final[ key ] = record

  id_key = id_key.next
}  

thing_ids = Hash.new

@final.each { |key, value|
  thing_ids[ key ] = value[ 'id' ]
}

@final.each { |key, value|
  value[ 'parent_id' ] = thing_ids[ value[ 'parent_id' ] ]
}
%>
<%= @final.to_yaml %>

To test, run erb thing.yml and see your output. No more hand coding of ids and hoping you didn’t put something in the wrong place!

[tags]ruby, rails, dry, fixtures, testing[/tags]