Philosophy, technology, and the future of work

This tutorial teaches you to create a plugin for D3 using D3’s new 4.0 module pattern. Although the word plugin suggests extending core functionality, this pattern is used internally by D3 to organize the code into modules.... Read full article at the publisher's site: http://ift.tt/1Sg8TPx  read more >

Recently we've been presenting articles about development environments for Linux, Windows, Mac and the Cloud. In this article, Shaumik looks at moving from one to another. Last year, I got myself a Macbook Air for two reasons: a powerful terminal and popular graphics software.... Read full article at the publisher's site: http://ift.tt/1T4jYUu  read more >

There’s no way to design without color – even a strictly black-and-white site has multiple options for hue, contrast, and balance. With the lingering presence of flat design (now flat 2.0), color holds even more prominence in web design today.... Read full article at the publisher's site: http://ift.tt/1NNlp56  read more >

I was getting this error with Rails 2.2 when using ActionMailer. NoMethodError (undefined method `finder' for #ActionView::Base:0x34146fc) It stems from a line in engines/lib/engines/rails_extensions/action_mailer.rb This is some problem between Rails 2.2 and Engines. Reinstalling engines didn't seem to help. Simply put, you need to go here and apply this patch: http://github.com/lazyatom/engines/commit/499ce3b0480d8fa9375203f5efcadb8cf6ea9efe This took me hours to figure out. I don't know why there isn't any more help on this problem.  read more >

After slogging through connecting Rails and Sugar via SOAP, I was tired and frustrated. The API is slow, and doing anything meaningful took a long time (ok, it took 30 seconds, but that seems slow to me; aren't computers supposed to be fast?!). So, I came up with an alternative approach. I know that Active Record (or whatever it's called) in Rails is really just a fancy wrapper for the database. So, I created a second database connection, directly to the Sugar database! You just have to setup new models and controllers in Rails. But, that's not too hard. See this solution... read more >

I have long wanted to make sure my CRM system (SugarCRM) and my project management system synchonized certain data, mainly company names. I hate having to sync stuff like that manually. So, I've been working on integrating the data using a SOAP client on the Rails side. It took all day to get this working. I don't know why this took forever to find out, or why there aren't many good references on the Web. (Maybe I'm just dense!) I had to patch together a bunch of code, re-code some PHP examples, and do quite a bit of experimenting, to get this all working. Here is a list of some of the sites...... read more >

This is another one that should have been obvious. But, I was getting it wrong. Maybe it had something to do with upgrading to Rails 1.2.6. Anyway, I was getting an error with a custom action. I was sending a form to "projects/do_something". But, I kept getting the error of "Can't find project with ID=do_something". This was happening because Rails thought it was supposed to be looking in the route for the show action. But, checking the routes file, I could see that I had defined my custom route. What, what was up? It turns out, the custom route has to come before the standard "map.resources...... read more >

I don't know why this took a while to figure out, but it did. If you are using the stock Rails in_place_editor_field, you know it looks like this in the controller: in_place_edit_for :user, :name And like this in the view: <%= in_place_editor_field :user, :name %> This works fine so long as you're rendering from the users controller. But, what if this view is a partial inside a different controller's view? In that case, what gets called is not "/users/set_user_name" but "/othercontroller/set_user_name". And, of course, it fails because there is no method (dynamic or otherwise) like that...... read more >