brite fisher

Learnings for Week 20 2010

* If, for whatever reason, your Win XP install doesn't show Remote Desktop in the start menu running 'mstsc' will start it up. * Until "recently":http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty/commit/179ef878808686b7f286174404023b1e1616f5f9 you couldn't access the raw response from HTTParty. This can be confusing but most of the data can be found using proxied methods on the HTTParty::Response (code, headers, body, message). * Two very cool gems for simplifying html forms in rails: "simple_form":http://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form and "formtastic":http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic. I'm using simple_form in a project right now and loving it. * "rr":http://github.com/btakita/rr seems to have a problem with mocked class methods sticking around between test calls. "Issue opened":http://github.com/btakita/rr/issues#issue/35. * Rails 3 respond_with helps clean up controllers by packaging up the standard respond_to cases for html, json, xml etc into one method. It's also very extendable ("responders gem":http://github.com/plataformatec/responders has some nice ones). * Getting "devise":http://github.com/plataformatec/devise to authenticate by email or login is less trickier than it seems. "Matt Tanase":http://www.howradical.com/getting-devise-to-accept-a-username-or-email has a nice little post on how to do it. The key is remembering to change your initializer to have 'config.authorization_keys :login' in it.