Midnight Oil

Following Ryan’s experiences at Barcamp San Diego, I’ve decided to attend and (hopefully) present at Barcamp Atlanta. If I get the chance, I will be doing a presentation on custom Google Maps using S3. I will center on Ruby on Rails, of course, but most of the idea is language agnostic.

I’m hoping to use BarCamp as an opportunity to network with other Atlanta area entrepreneurs and hackers. I’ve got a lot of ideas and the skills to execute them, but I’m looking for people that are better than me in the marketing department. If you’re the kind of person who can sell water to a fish, then look me up at BarCamp!

Here’s a picture of me, looking as I probably will at the conference (lost and confused). Please don’t be shy, just come up and introduce yourself.

First, let me make something clear. I don’t design in Microsoft Word nor Adobe PDF (and I’m sure I’m not alone), so how come I can only find templates for business cards in these formats? Unable to find a “good” quality template for the 8871^TM Matte White Ink Jet Clean Edge 2″ x 3 1/2″ Business Cards I have made the basic template available here. I hope you find it useful.

 Avery Business Card Template for Adobe Illustrator

This template should work with the following Avery Business Card Templates:

Avery Business Card 25371
Avery Business Card 27870 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 27871 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 27881 Matte Coated
Avery Business Card 27882 Matte Coated
Avery Business Card 28371 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 28373 Glossy Photo Quality Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 28877 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 3612
Avery Business Card 5371
Avery Business Card 5372
Avery Business Card 5376
Avery Business Card 5377
Avery Business Card 5870
Avery Business Card 5871
Avery Business Card 5872
Avery Business Card 5873
Avery Business Card 5876
Avery Business Card 5878
Avery Business Card 5881 Color Laser
Avery Business Card 5882 Print to the Edge Color Laser
Avery Business Card 5911
Avery Business Card 8271 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8272 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8371 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8372 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8373 Glossy Photo Quality
Avery Business Card 8374 Magnetic Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8376 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8377 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8471 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8476 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8571 Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8870 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8871 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8872 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8873 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8874 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8876 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8877 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8878 Clean Edge Ink Jet
Avery Business Card 8879 Clean Edge Ink Jet

The correct use of singular vs plural nouns is something the Rails community is very familiar with. Your ‘User’ object resides in the “users” table. A User has_many ‘blogs’ while a Blog belongs_to a single ‘user’ You all know this already.

So with this much attention being paid to number in the back-end code, it’s pretty sloppy to disregard it in the views. “You have 1 friends” or “Last update: 1 weeks ago” just looks bad. Sure, we could write the code to fix it fairly easily, but we have better (ie. more fun) things to work on, right?

Luckily, Rails’s text helpers ride to the rescue once again. The pluralize method does exactly what we’re talking about. Simply give it a number and a singular spelling, and it will use either the singular or plural form based on the number. If it guesses the wrong plural form (ie. ‘mouse’ vs ‘mice’), you can explicitly supply the plural version.

If you have a single blog, it will say “You currently own 1 blog.” For n > 1, it will say “You currently own n blogs.”

Simple and sweet, nothing more to say

When I heard that Capistrano 2 was being released without support for deploying subversion tags, I was a little miffed. I thought it was a major oversight with Capistrano 1, and I was hoping they would rectify it.

After a little hacking, though, I realized there was really no reason to be angry at Capistrano for this oversight. All I needed to do was write a tiny bit of code in the deployment recipe and I was good to go.

The main drawback to this approach is that the directory created on the production server is named with the timestamp of the deployment, rather than the tag name, which would be ideal. However, with the small amount of searching I did, I was unable to find a way to change this naming scheme. I have a hunch it might break the rollback functionality and is probably not worth the trouble.

Note 1: Part of my tagging for release process is to create a ‘latest’ tag in the tags directory that points to the latest tag (duh!) So, the code above asks which tag to deploy, but will deploy ‘latest’ by default if there is no input from the user. This is not strictly necessary for the tagging, but makes the deployment slightly easier (ie. just hit enter when prompted for a tag).

Note 2: This scheme should work with both cap 1 and cap 2, but I only tested it on cap 2.