After the NES came the 286, then the Playstation 1. At some point between Commander Keen and Ridge Racer, I decided I wanted to design my own games. I didn’t to much programming though. Around the age of 10 I started writing .bat scripts… which never did anything useful. I hacked (mostly unsuccessfully) on ZZT.

When I was 13 I created an awesome Star Trek fan site on GeoCities giving me my first taste of HTML. Taking that to what I thought was the next step, I learned VRML… which turned out to be a step towards nowhere.

No, I didn’t do any real programming until college. Here I learned C, Java, ML, Prolog, Lisp, and Icon. Along with learning what real programming was, I learned that programming games is hard. I came to the realization sometime around my senior year that being a game developer would be awesome, but probably wasn’t in the cards for me. A dream job that I might have someday.

Towards the end of my college career, I started doing web development as a research assistant using JSPs and Servlets. This turned into somewhat of an expertise for me, and ended up landing me my first job out of college.

Still using Java at the time, I was introduced to Ruby and Rails by an outside consultant. This consultant was brought in to explore the possibility of using Rails on a new project. But like so many other companies at the time, using Rails (which at the time was new and unproven in the eyes of enterprise businesses) was too high of a risk. They went with the tried and true Java approach.

I didn’t take the Java approach. I left the company shortly after and joined a startup where I got paid to do Rails full time. I had drank the Rails kool aid. I was mainly hooked on how quickly you could implement ideas. I could come up with an idea in the morning, and have a working web app by the afternoon. I could gather requirements and show off working code the same day. I loved it.

At some point, I looked back and realized that game development wasn’t for me. Rapid development of games doesn’t exist the same way it does in web development. I’ve been a happy web developer ever since.

First I generate a rails app:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ rails foo

Then I add restful authentication, using the command listed in the install documentation:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd foo/
lappy:foo bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ git clone git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git restful_authentication
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/vendor/plugins/restful_authentication/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 1741, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (590/590), done.
remote: Total 1741 (delta 1010), reused 1641 (delta 957)
Receiving objects: 100% (1741/1741), 733.93 KiB | 831 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1010/1010), done.

Then I add everything to git:

lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd ../..
lappy:foo bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/foo/.git/
lappy:foo bsmith$ git add .
lappy:foo bsmith$ git commit -m ‘init’
[master (root-commit) f63c7ea] init
43 files changed, 8462 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 README
create mode 100644 Rakefile
…[followed by lots more output]

Then I pushed it to github:

lappy:foo bsmith$ git remote add github git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
lappy:foo bsmith$ git push github master
Counting objects: 64, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
Writing objects: 100% (64/64), 79.32 KiB, done.
Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
* [new branch] master -> master

Next, I take a look at the vendor directory that got committed go github:

From screen shots

I assume that the little folder icon with an arrow means that the restful authentication code is being hosted elsewhere… as a submodule maybe? The folder is not clickable, so I can’t see what’s inside… if there’s anything!

So my next step is to pull the project, say for a deployment on another system:

lappy:tmp bsmith$ mkdir bar
lappy:tmp bsmith$ cd bar/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/bsmith/tmp/bar/.git/
lappy:bar bsmith$ git pull git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test.git
remote: Counting objects: 64, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (56/56), done.
remote: Total 64 (delta 10), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (64/64), done.
From git://github.com/benjaminleesmith/submodule_test
* branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

Then… I go searching for restful auth in this latest pull…

lappy:bar bsmith$ cd vendor/plugins/
lappy:plugins bsmith$ ls
restful_authentication
lappy:plugins bsmith$ cd restful_authentication/
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$ ls
lappy:restful_authentication bsmith$

Yikes! The directory is there, but the contents are missing! I don’t know if this is a problem with the way I added restful auth to my local git repo, or if this is an issue with github. I noticed this when a production deployment was failing saying “uninitialized constant User::Authentication (NameError)” as if restful auth was no where to be found.

It seems less than intuitive to say the least. If anyone knows what’s going on here, leave me a comment please! Otherwise, my fix was to clone restful auth, then remove its git directory. This allowed me to push to github exactly what my local copy contained.

ANYWAYS… during the first few hours of being excited about Google Wave, I decided to write a “Gadget” which would embed a Flickr user’s latest images into a Wave. It was super easy to write. Gadgets are basically JavaScript and HTML wrapped in some XML. So whipping up a Rails app that fetched Flickr images via the Flickr API and rendered some HTML to display them was cake. I deployed the Rails app/Gadget to heroku… check it out here: http://flickr-wave.heroku.com/

There seems to be some bugs, for some reason after embedding the Gadget and reloading the wave SOMETIMES it won’t load the Gadget. I don’t know why… and I probably won’t worry about fixing it unless I start getting excited about Google Wave again. Ohh well, check out the source here: http://github.com/benjaminleesmith/Flickr-Wave

So how do you get Blackbird working in your Rails app? By following these easy steps:

1. Download the Blackbird zip file.
2. Extract contents of zip file.
3. Copy blackbird.css into public/stylesheets
4. Copy blackbird.js into public/javascripts
5. Copy blackbird_panel.png and blackbird_icon.png to public/images
6. Edit blackbird.css, modify urls to blackbird_panel.png and blackbird_icon.png to contain “/images/” in their path; “url(blackbird_panel.png)” should become “url(/images/blackbird_panel.png)”
7. Include the blackbird Javascript and CSS files in your layout: <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'blackbird' %> and <%= javascript_include_tag 'blackbird' %>
8. Add a button to open the Blackbird console: <input type=”button” onclick=”javascript:log.toggle();” value=”show log”/>
9. ???
10. Profit!
11. Check out the Blackbird website to learn more about using Blackbird.

<%=compute_public_path('file-name-without-extention','parent-dir','extension')%>

So if you’re trying to link to a file public/static_files/foo.html just do:

<%=compute_public_path('foo','static_files','html')%>

Both jQuery and prototype define “$” as an alias in the global namespace. When you try to use the “$” shortcut and both libraries are included, the browser complains. Lucky jQuery gives you a way to override “$” and let prototype use it thus resolving the conflict:

 <html>
 <head>
   <script src="prototype.js"></script>
   <script src="jquery.js"></script>
   <script>
     jQuery.noConflict();
   </script>
 </head>
 <body>
 </html>

After calling jQuery.noConflict(), you can still use jQuery “$” functionality, but you have to call it using “jQuery(‘foo’)” instead of “$(‘foo’)”.

Now that jQuery and prototype can coexists peacefully, how does ThickBox work? Well… out of the box it doesn’t. ThickBox uses the “$” syntax, but expects to use jQuery’s implementation of it. So to get ThickBox to work, you need to replace all instances of “$” with “jQuery” in thickbox.js. Now ThickBox should be using jQuery exclusively, jQuery and prototype won’t conflict over “$”, and everything should work fine and dandy. Note: I’ve only tried this using ThickBox 2.1.1, jQuery 1.1.1, and prototype 1.5.0, but it should work on the latest and greatest versions.

“Code Camp is a free, one-day event put on by the local Phoenix community to help promote software development in general. There is no right or wrong language, platform, or technology. If a topic relates in any way to the code that causes a machine to produce a desired result, it’s welcome here.”

The previous code camp was ok, but the sessions were too jammed together. There was no time to meet people and just talk. Everyone kept running from session to session trying to keep up. Some of the sessions were good, while others were a waste of my time.

I’ll be attending again, hopefully they’ve tweaked the schedule enough so it’s no so jam-packed. There aren’t any sessions that are must-attends for me, so I’ll mostly be there to hang out and support the community. If nothing else, at least it’s a free lunch.

Edit: Apparently lunch isn’t free.

Unforunately I forgot to get the RedCloth gem. So when I updated my project source from SVN the project broke output in development.log. I eventually figured out that I was missing the gem. So I downloaded the gem, then moved the whole RedCloth folder into the vendor/plugins directory of the rails project.

The lack of error messages pointing me to the “require ‘RedCloth’” was annoying to say the least. Maybe the require statement should be moved someplace else? Someplace after the logger has been initialized maybe? I wonder if other error/issues in enviroment.rb will make WEBrick die out too. Maybe you can start WEBrick with some advanced debugging for these kinds of situations? Hmm, I guess I should do a little research…