I was looking for an easy way to force every request in a functional test in Rails to use a set of parameters by default, regardless of being specified explicitly. This is, every time I write: it "should get index" do get :index end Rails should actually do: it "should get index" do get :index, [...]

Pacific Endeavor is a humanitarian communication workshop, organized by the US Pacific Command, which brings together military representatives from all SE Asia, NGOs and industry leaders. Its main goal is to improve the multi-national communications in HA/DR situations, based on the premise that communication is the foundation to a successful response. This workshop if part [...]

For those of you not familiar with it, Nuntium is an open-source tool we developed together with InSTEDD for easily building applications that rely on SMS for communication. Even though several other kinds of channels are supported, such as email or twitter, text messaging has been one of its most important features. A common scenario [...]

Let's face it: as a developer, I'm lazy. I just want to write just enough code. What is more, I want to reuse it whenever possible. I want it to be abstract. If I'm asked to implement a view which needs a sortable grid, one of those whose rows you can sort by any column by [...]

After a long time, I have finally finished my thesis to get the MSc in Computer Science degree, from FCEN UBA. It has been almost a year since I started working in the thesis in the context of Manas Research, and before that I had been working on it for over another year within the [...]

Don't make me think is a great book about usability and interaction design written by Steve Krug. One of the best things about it is that Steve has used the very same principles he preaches at in his book in the design of its reading experience. The book goes straight to the point, focuses on [...]

One of our Rails applications has to consume an RSS. Nothing fancy here, we simply wanted to extract some fields from each item and store them in the PostgreSQL DB (app was hosted on heroku). Simply slicing the string seemed to work at first: summary = entry.summary[0...255] But soon we started obtaining PGError (incomplete multibyte [...]

This week we've updated nuntium to version 2.8, yay! Aside from some minor bug fixes, nuntium now implements an exponential backoff strategy when a message delivery fails. Previously, it worked like this: A message failed to be delivered. If the cause was the message itself (for example it contains invalid data), it was discarded. If [...]

I'm currently in the process of upgrading an application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Fortunately, it's not the first time someone does so, and there's plenty of resources throughout the web that will help you to work it out. In particular, I chose to follow the steps demonstrated by Ryan Bates in an outstanding [...]

Two weeks ago, Friday, was the last day in our old office. The mood was pretty nice since the new office has direct sun light and is much more comfortable, and also because every Friday, in a round-robin fashion, each one of us brings some delicious for dessert. It was my turn. I'm not much [...]