RWVHP

AccessibleFormBuilder has just been pushed out the door.

UPDATE This is the example ;)

  <% a_form_for :user, :url => users_path, :legend => "Login Details" do |f| %>
    <%= f.text_field :login, :label => "Username", :note => "This is visible to other users", :required => true %>
    <%= f.password_field :password, :label => "Password", :required => true %>
    <%= f.password_field :password_confirmation, :label => "Confirm Password", :required => true %>
    <%= f.separator "Personal Details" %>
    <%= f.text_field :firstname, :label => "First name", :required => true %>
    <%= f.text_field :lastname, :label => "Last name", :required => true %>
    <%= f.text_field :email, :label => "E-Mail", :required => true %>
    <%= f.separator "Location Details" %>
    <%= f.text_field :address, :label => "Location", :note => "(eg. New York, 90210, SE1 3SR)", :required => true %>
    <%= f.submit "Sign up" %>
  <% end %>

UPDATE Added HTML output

<form action="/users" class="aFrm" method="post"><div style="margin:0;padding:0"><input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="e39d055ff60d1b5388fcf9864ffd1fa568160b9a" /></div><fieldset><legend>Login Details</legend><ol>
  <li><label for="user_login">Username:</label><input id="user_login" name="user[login]" size="30" type="text" /><span class="requiredField">*</span><em> This is visible to other users</em></li>
  <li><label for="user_password">Password:</label><input id="user_password" name="user[password]" size="30" type="password" /><span class="requiredField">*</span></li>

  <li><label for="user_password_confirmation">Confirm Password:</label><input id="user_password_confirmation" name="user[password_confirmation]" size="30" type="password" /><span class="requiredField">*</span></li>
      </ol>
  </fieldset>
  <fieldset><legend>Personal Details</legend>
    <ol>

  <li><label for="user_firstname">First name:</label><input id="user_firstname" name="user[firstname]" size="30" type="text" /><span class="requiredField">*</span></li>

  <li><label for="user_lastname">Last name:</label><input id="user_lastname" name="user[lastname]" size="30" type="text" /><span class="requiredField">*</span></li>
  <li><label for="user_email">E-Mail:</label><input id="user_email" name="user[email]" size="30" type="text" /><span class="requiredField">*</span></li>
      </ol>
  </fieldset>
  <fieldset><legend>Location Details</legend>
    <ol>

  <li><label for="user_address">Location:</label><input id="user_address" name="user[address]" size="30" type="text" /><span class="requiredField">*</span><em> (eg. New York, 90210, SE1 3SR)</em></li>
  <li><input name="commit" type="submit" value="Sign up" /></li>
</ol></fieldset></form>

Install with

git clone git://github.com/shift/accessible_form_builder.git vendor/plugins/accessible_form_builder

The Mephisto team has recently released 0.8 on the way to one point-oh adding

• Switched to will_paginate.
• Switched from acts_as_attachment to attachment_fu
• Custom routes
• Typo and Wordpress converters updates.
• XML-RPC interface moved out into a plugin.
• Multi-site admin interface (shameless plug as I wrote the initial patch).

Along with more, checkout the change log from git

git clone git://activereload.net/mephisto.git mephisto
cd mephisto; less CHANGELOG

Happy Blogging.

I like gadgets, probably too much, I also like integrating everything with everything else, so on rolls HA or Home Automation.

I’ve already had a X10 setup for a while that allows me to control lights, I’ve integrated this with Asterisk (with help from Adhearsion) which allows me to control lights from any phone, I also hooked Asterisk up with Amarok.

Well today I ordered some 1-Wire hardware to play with, I didn’t fancy running more cables for the 1-Wire setup and found HA7Net which is a Ethernet to 1-Wire gateway basically, the only problem with it seems to be you need to scrape the embedded web server as it doesn’t provide any kind of web service. I also ordered a 1-Wire temperature sensor to mess around with, and help me make a Ruby gem for the HA7Net.

I’ll try and get around to documenting what hardware I’ve got setup, as I can never remember what’s where and providing what (from VoIP phones, NAS, embedded machines, servers, consoles to a Nabaztag).

Mojo is now in a public beta, if your reading this there is a 99% probability that your in the Ruby world so if you want to get started wreaking havoc at work making all of the phones ring you can

gem install mojo

Congrats to the guys at Mojo for a great job.

The following is just to claim the blog on its new URL with Technorati by linking to my Technorati Profile

I got bored of the old domain name, so I figured I’d get a vanity domain for my blog, vanity you say, how does RWVHP.COM have anything to do with my name. Well Vincent.com is already registered, VincentPalmer.com is also already registered so I thought, I know I’ll get a small(ish) domain name that means something to me in some way, So I picked my initials R(obert) W(illiam) V(incent) H(anley) P(almer). Yes, yes, I know, my father didn’t know when to stop with the names.

How onto the host part, the old blog was hosted on a server I was sysadmin of, but the company that was running it recently decided to shut it doors so I was in need of a new host so this blog is hosted on its very own slice at slicehost, nice to see theres currently no waiting list, I hit order and this slice was being built, very impressive.

So on with the party, what have I been upto recently

• Work
• Accepted into the Mojo alpha
• Work
• Authored a gem for mojo
• Work

Avahi/Zeroconf or Rendezvous as your Mac would know it, can be used in published DNS records (unicast) as well as the normal LAN type setup (multicast), its already a standard why don’t we use this for discovering RESTful resources?

All this would require would be a service type registered eg. rest.tcp and a flag in the TXT record naming your resources eg. “resources=/users /articles /articles/comments”.

I brought this up (quite randomly) during a talk at my local Ruby Group (ncl.rb).

Gimme your feedback?

UPDATE Forgot to add from the initial post use the :resource/new to get an empty object (to_xml or whatever)

An example of discovering unicast Zeroconf services is

shift@carbon:~# avahi-browse -a -d 0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a Lennart’s Blog                                _http-rss._tcp       0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a tango                                         SSH Remote Terminal  0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a dt115                                         SSH Remote Terminal  0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a ring2                                         SSH Remote Terminal  0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a PulseAudio Web Site                           Web Site             0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a Avahi Web Site                                Web Site             0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a Lennart's Blog                                Web Site             0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a Lennart's Photos                              Web Site             0pointer.de
+  n/a  n/a Lennart's Homepage                            Web Site             0pointer.de

This isn’t so much a blog post as somewhere convenient to put some information for ncl.rb.

My Apache 2.2 + modproxybalancer virtualhost config

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName yourapp.com
  DocumentRoot /home/web/yourapp.com/current/public/
  <Directory "/home/web/yourapp.com/current/public">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  # Configure the cluster member proxy
  <Proxy balancer://your_app_cluster>
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3000
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3001
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3002
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3003
  </Proxy>
  RewriteEngine On
  # If there is a maintenence.html file in your
  # public dir all requests will get rerouted to
  # this file.  This is for use with capistrano
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f
  RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
  RewriteRule ^.*$ /maintenance.html [L]

  # Rewrite index to check for static index.html
  RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]

  # Rewrite to check for Rails cached pages with .html extentions
  RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]

  # All dynamic requests get sent to the cluster
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://your_app_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

  # Deflate for clients that support it.
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

  # Error and access logs.
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache/app_error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache/app_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Now if you take the above example it’ll send all requests to your pack of mongrels, but say you want to have more then one application running on your domain (say beast).

You’ll need to create another proxy balancer

  <Proxy balancer://your_second_app_cluster>
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3004
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3005
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3006
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3007
  </Proxy>

And then add the RewriteRule for it

RewriteRule ^/forums/(.*)$ balancer://your_second_app_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

Now anything going to / that isn’t /forums/.* will goto yourappcluster and anything with /forums/.* will goto yoursecondapp_cluster

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName yourapp.com
  DocumentRoot /home/web/yourapp.com/current/public/
  <Directory "/home/web/yourapp.com/current/public">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  # Configure the cluster member proxy
  <Proxy balancer://your_app_cluster>
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3000
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3001
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3002
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3003
  </Proxy>
  <Proxy balancer://your_second_app_cluster>
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3004
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3005
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3006
    BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3007
  </Proxy>

  RewriteEngine On
  # If there is a maintenence.html file in your
  # public dir all requests will get rerouted to
  # this file.  This is for use with capistrano
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f
  RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
  RewriteRule ^.*$ /maintenance.html [L]

  # Rewrite index to check for static index.html
  RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]

  # Rewrite to check for Rails cached pages with .html extentions
  RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]

  # All dynamic requests get sent to the cluster
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^/forums/(.*)$ balancer://your_second_app_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://your_app_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

  # Deflate for clients that support it.
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

  # Error and access logs.
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache/app_error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache/app_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

yourappcluster mongrel_cluster.yml

---
port: "3000" 
environment: production
address: 127.0.0.1
pid_file: log/mongrel.pid
servers: 4

yoursecondappcluster mongrelcluster.yml

---
port: "3004" 
environment: production
address: 127.0.0.1
pid_file: log/mongrel.pid
servers: 4

Hope that made sense, as its off the top of the head apart from the base apache 2.2 vhost config

UPDATE If your running a Rails app under a path remember to set

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = '/path'

In your environment.rb or your links will be wrong

The if statement, sometimes you don’t want to type

if user.password == user.username
    # do something
  end

Sometimes you might just want to simply check that the value set isn’t nil

user.password ||= 'default_password'

Thats the same as writing

if user.password == nil
  user.password = 'default_password'
end

A slight variation of that would be

user.password = params[:password] || 'default_password'

Which would be the same as

if params[:password] != nil
  user.password = params[:password]
else
  user.password = 'default_password'
end

Theres probably more ways of doing things like this that I haven’t came across yet, if you know of others leave a comment.