Where is the ChicagoDevHouse?

I just ran across this group called “SuperHappyDevHouse“. It is a Bay Area get-together for geeks to collaborate and code all night long. I would prefer a group that meets every night in a coffee shop and code away. I don’t expect everybody to show up every night, but it would be nice to always have someone to code next to.

Controllers and layouts

Every controller has its corresponding layout with the same name. To have a consistent look in an application, every controller should use the same layout. To do this, in the controller you can set the layout by using the following line:

layout "<global_layout>"

ElementNode.setAttribute(name, value)

I have to make an html table sortable by any column. I found the following javascript library that does the trick: “sorttable: make all your tables sortable“

There is one problem: my table has alternating colors for the rows. After the sort, some adjacent rows have the same color.

Solution: After the sort, set the color to alternating colors.

var sortedRows = document.getElementsByTagName(“tr”);
for (var i=0; i<sortedRows.length; i++) {
    if (i%2) { sortedRows[i].setAttribute(“bgcolor”, “white”); }
    else { sortedRows[i].setAttribute(“bgcolor”, “silver”); }
}

Cheaper than Netflix

In between browsing the web, learning ruby and ruby on rails, I need to keep myself entertained. I borrowed a number of items from Alexander’s huge DVD collection. I wrote down the list so that I would not forget: http://www.beenote.com/user/odie/tag/show/101

Generate a model then a scaffold

To start a rails project, I would suggest generating a model, then generating a scaffold.

% ruby script/generate model
– creates a migration file; edit the migration file to create the db table for your model
– % rake migrate
—- to create the db table using the migration file

% ruby script/generate scaffold
– creates the layout and the scaffold stylesheet