Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 488)

Barcelona.pm

After Tim and Joel, I am honoured to have been elected as president of Barcelona.pm.

MacBook Stolen

Precisely after the votation I realized my backpack had disappeared! There was my MacBook inside. Fortunately my private data is safe at Google, and Time Machine will prevent any data loss, so in the end it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I leave the serial here in case someone does a web search: 4H62911WVMN.

19 Mar 2008 (updated 19 Mar 2008 at 20:19 UTC) »

doc-rails

Patches in Rails Trac need +1s to get the verified status and eventually be committed. Fine small doc patches sometimes just don't bring enough attention and they don't get applied.

Rails committer Pratik Naik has setup a git repository aimed at easing contributions to the docs. I think this is going to be very good. If you are qualified and have a github account you can get committer rights, just follow the instructions in the announcement.

1 Mar 2008 (updated 1 Mar 2008 at 01:46 UTC) »

Picture

Me and my little daughter on the Segway coming from her school.

1000 km in the Segway

I've already done 1000 km in my Segway i2, in about four months and a half.

So far I've used and enjoyed the Segway even more than I expected. It's become my default mean of transportation in the city.

It amazes me as much as it did when I first tried it. Next step is to actually levitate, haha.

3 Feb 2008 (updated 3 Feb 2008 at 14:02 UTC) »

Contributions to Rails

My humble contributions to Rails are small bits and pieces here and there, but well they made 2nd in the past Rails Hackfest. That means a book for free from the entire O'Reilly catalogue. I'll order the forthcoming The Ruby Programming Language.

Perl classes are over

Yet another semester done at the UB. Time to relax!

Pilates

Since I've finished the classes I've got some spare time in my spare time :-), and I've decided to start doing some Pilates, I like what I've heard about it. I've scheduled a class per week with reformer by now, in a small group of three people.

Powered Paragliding

I spend most weekends in a town of the seaside near Barcelona, and frequently you see people in paramotors pass following the coast. There's a little voice in me that says that experience has to be amazing, and enriching since it is so different to anything I do regularly.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to talk with one of those guys. He kindly responded to all my questions and recommended an instructor. My impression is that they do not quite see themselves as paragliders with a motor, they see powered paragliders (PPG) as the smallest aircarfts on earth. The propeller helps you getting airbone and going up, and the wing does the rest. If the motor quits you become an ordinary paraglider.

Point is, you don't need to get into a van, go up to a risky amphitheater high in some mountain, wait if you have luck with the wind direction and speed range (or else you practice parawaiting), and run into the void, ready to abort if wing inflation goes wrong. And being a beginner you need to add the sensory overload I've read you feel. Depending on the conditions, if you succeed you are done in the ground after say 10 minutes (although you can be there for much more time if there are thermals and you know to soar with them).

Nah, I don't like that. That's why I have never been interested in practicing parachuting either, it is very expensive, you need an aircraft, and the fall just lasts some minutes.

But with a PPG you just need some pasture or whatever flat stretch of ground with enough space to run a bit and fly. That guy I talked to left the car near the beach, got airbone, flew for a couple of hours, came back to the origin point, and gently landed in a few meters. With a PPG you can fly in two days what you can fly in two months with a paraglider, and with much much less risk for a beginner. When he finished he unmounted the PPG and packed it into the trunk of his car.

Well, I don't know whether I'll actually take any class in the future, but I am reading Running into the Sky, which describes the experience of a guy in the process of learning this stuff, and I am completely hooked!

Rails

Small ultra tiny little minimal contributions to Rails: #10648, #10610, #10594, #10511, #10434.

31 Dec 2007 (updated 31 Dec 2007 at 15:31 UTC) »

Field picker filter by Mark Dominus

A little jewel for your shell-fu by Mark Dominus. Adding an option for the field separator is left as an exercise.

Rails has been tagged 2.0.2 tonight, I contributed a few tests for this one.

13 Dec 2007 (updated 13 Dec 2007 at 11:05 UTC) »

ncm good analogies, I agree with them.

10 Dec 2007 (updated 10 Dec 2007 at 21:45 UTC) »

Tip for new session-based cookies in Rails 2.0

Rails 2.0 comes with cookie-based sessions, that's the storage by default. If you upgrade an application you may want to change the session storage to this one, but with a mere storage configuration change the already existing cookies would raise a CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie the first time a user comes back to the site.

The reason is values in old cookies do not have the format of the new ones. You had a session ID before, and now you have the session keys and values encoded in Base64, a couple of hyphens, and a checksum. When the cookie arrives the store tries to validate the contents against the hash, there's a mismatch, and the exception is raised. Since a new cookie is set subsequent requests will work just fine.

To avoid this first failed request, just rename the cookie in environment.rb. The old one will be ignored. Sessions will be lost, but in a session you just store a user_id and eventually a flash message, don't you?

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