http://www.sciwerks.com/blog Software for scientists, by scientists Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:02:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been deeply heads down while working for a startup for the last year and a half. That stint is winding up so I will have a bit more time to be doing some blogging. I've been doing a fair amount of work with Lowpro lately, so expect to see ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2008/10/23/coming-out-of-the-woodwork/ As a follow up to my previous article about using auto_completes to ensure unique filenames, I've put together a bit of code that does essentially the same thing except that it checks a password field to ensure that it meets certain criteria. [code lang="ruby"] # view file # model file def User < ActiveRecord::Base ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2007/01/31/how-to-use-an-auto_complete-to-validate-passwords/ I've always found it a PITA to administer html files for rubyforge projects, mostly because it requires a lot of command line work to move things around. Today I started using a new trick. Google has recently released MacFUSE. The neat thing here is that you can ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2007/01/25/using-macfuse-with-rubyforge/ For now, subversion access to my plugins has been disabled. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly and these will become available again. For now, if you need access, send me an email and I will send you a zip file of the plugin you require. Thanks, Kevin http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2007/01/19/subversion-repositories-unavailable/ If you use Firefox, you can use this little trick. go to Rails Google co-op right click on the search box. select 'Add keyword for this search' fill out the resulting form and add a keyword like 'rails' move focus to the address bar (CMD-L on a Mac) Type 'rails sciwerks' on the address bar You can ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2007/01/05/a-quick-tip-for-searching-for-rails-related-information/ It's been a busy month, lots of year end deadlines, lots of boxes to unpack from my recent move. I finally got around to doing a few things for myself. One of those things was to purchase a second monitor. In this case it was a Westinghouse ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2006/12/20/new-toys/ I recently found myself trying to use an auto_complete field to allow the user to select an object from a list of possible objects. That's all fine and dandy, but I wanted to exclude certain values depending on which object I was editing. There are at least two ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2006/11/21/passing-extra-data-with-an-auto_complete/ This is Part 1 of a series describing how to make better forms for Rails. The standard rails approach to handling form validation errors is to spit out a long list of all validation errors in a box at the top of the form. The problem with this approach is ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2006/11/05/live-forms-part-1-putting-the-errors-in-the-right-place/ Pete Forde at Unspace has written an interesting article describing a method for implementing 'pageless' data display in Rails. This approach is very interesting from a user interface standpoint, as it removes unnecessary user interactions (i.e., 'next' or 'previous' buttons) with the display page. It does introduce it's ... http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2006/10/31/unspace-endless-pageless-no-more-next-page/ Here's a brief interview I did about user interface design at a recent conference in North Carolina. Yes, that is really me. http://www.sciwerks.com/blog/2006/10/29/my-first-youtube-interview-w00t/