Often your application will want to track who created and updated your data.
On a previous rails 2 project I used a plugin called userstamp which worked well, but until recently it did not support rails 3+

I didn’t find any other gems out there at the time, so I put together the clerk gem,
you can install it as a gem in your rails 3+ applications by adding gem ‘clerk’ to your Gemfile, see the README on github for details

NOTE: the current version relies on your database tables having columns named created_by_id and updated_by_id and the gem does not support any custom configuration.

• https://github.com/house9/clerk
• http://rubygems.org/gems/clerk 

Using psql from the command line you can terminate all connections to a database
Comes in handy when you want to do things like restore your staging or development database

Run sql statements from the command line, use the -c flag


create a random value


crazy updates using regexp_matches

This is the current git workflow we are using at work, your mileage may vary:




Resources

• http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/git 
• http://yanpritzker.com/gitbook.html#Keeping+a+topic+branch+in+sync+with+its+parent 
• http://yanpritzker.com/gitbook.html#One+branch+per+bug 
• http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/02/02/push-and-delete-branches.html 
• http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html 
• http://sleeplessgeek.blogspot.com/2011/03/using-git-cherry-pick.html 

Very useful

$(“SELECTOR”).data(“events”);


All bound event handlers are stored in the elements data context under the events key
This can be very useful when debugging with tools like FireBug

$(“form”).submit(function () { alert(‘submit form’); });
$(“form”).data(“events”);
> Object { submit=[1] }


Resources

• http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1727-Viewing-jQuery-DOM-Event-Bindings-With-FireBug.htm 

Use the information_schema catalog - http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/information-schema.html

Get table and columns from the public schema




This can be useful, maybe you want to auto generate some text that creates foreign keys based on a naming convention - for instance let’s say we have a ruby/rails method called make_fk_unless_exists




The ‘code’ column would render something like

make_fk_unless_exists :projects, :milestone_id, :milestones
make_fk_unless_exists :tasks, :project_id, :projects
…

The content for this post is all from a gist, hopefully someone finds it useful




Resources

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2778074/recognize-routes-in-rails-console-session

– seconds / 60 = minutes / 60 = hours / 24 = days
select (((EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM INTERVAL ’2 years’) / 60) / 60) / 24)::integer as number_of_days 

good resource - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952493/how-do-i-convert-an-interval-into-a-number-of-hours-with-postgres

Recently I had to convert some functionality from an old MS Access system to a Ruby on Rails application. The Access system generated a report that included a barcode; they were using a barcode font installed on the machine running access. I figured generating the barcode server side in the web app was going to be much nicer than installing barcode fonts on the client browsers. And since this is Ruby, I figured…

There must be a gem for that 

Sure enough, the barby gem. It allows you to output your barcode as png, gif, svg, pdf, etc…

In my case I generated png barcodes and included image references to those in my view files.

Sample code




There is no pixel setting, it uses some other type of unit to determine size; using the xdim, margin and height options you can tweak the size, but I found that it was not very precise - for my use case it was good enough.

The generated barcode does not include the value, it is just the image which can be scanned using a barcode scanner, but it would be nice if there was an option to include the value below that. This is somewhat trivial to add in your view using html.

Overall I was really pleased with this gem!

Resources

• http://toretore.eu/barby/
• https://github.com/toretore/barby
• http://barby.rubyforge.org/rdoc/
• http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-barby

Check it out here - http://snfallaccess.nbcsports.com/