My blog (i.e., this blog) suddenly stopped working today, so I went to the logs to figure out why. The logs provided:

ActionView::TemplateError (undefined method `first' for nil:NilClass) on line #9
  of vendor/plugins/flickr_sidebar/views/content.rhtml:
[... lots and lots of stuff ...]

Ah, OK. I haven't gotten Typo current since I decided to roll my own (which I'm still doing...), so it serves me right if some bug is biting me. Off to look at the Flickr sidebar, and this chestnut is what's choking things:

def image
    description.scan( /(http:\/\/(static|photos).*?\.jpg)/ ).first.first
end

Gah! Using a regular expression to capture a link to an image out of escaped HTML markup passed in the RSS feed... Not something I would recommend. Flickr changed their URLs so that the regular expression no longer matched, and the error was caused by scan returning nil. It's easy enough to fix by adding some namespaces:

@@NS = {"media" => "http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" }

And then, a couple of tweaks to extract the thumbnail from the appropriate extension element:

picture.thumbnail = XPath.match(elem, "media:thumbnail/@url",
  namespaces=@@NS).to_s

And we're back in business.

Following on the heels of my last post, I’d like to announce the Ruby Underground. It’s simply a selective aggregator of Ruby blogger content. There’s already plenty of sources for generic ruby content. Tons of 20-something youngsters (yes, I’m old) are out there talking about Ruby on Rails and such.

The Ruby Underground tries to address a slightly different audience. Thus far, all contributors to the underground are either current or former Java hackers. They’ve been around the block a time or two and feel squeamish watching all the SQL that ActiveRecord throws. Yet, they have an affinity to the beauty of Ruby.

While “enterprisey” is typically a derisive term, I think the Ruby community could use some “enterpriseyness” to help bring it, um, to the enterprise.

Anyhow, the Ruby Underground, as noted, is just an aggregator. If you already read Bob, Brian, Dion, Kurt, Lance, Martin, Paul and Simon, it probably has nothing to offer you. On the other hand, you’ll miss out when other bloggers are invited to be contributors.

I've been really feeling the pain of trying to hire a good developer lately.

We've been posting Craigslist ads, and we feel that we have all of the right keywords in place (Rails, Agile, Cheminformatics, Data Mining, Java, etc), and a bunch of cool challenging problems to work on, but we're not getting back much as far as quality responses go.

Maybe the job market really is that hot right now. Everyone I know seems to have multiple offers on their plate. Still, we're refusing to lower our standards, but we are starting to feel the drag of just not having enough people to get everything done. Anyone out there with any suggestions (or better yet, resumes of good people)? Email or comment if you've got them.

The Rails convention for naming foreign key fields is to use the singular name of the table with a suffix of _id.

In the past few days a number of people using the Foreign Key Migrations plugin together with ActiveRecord session store have discovered that the exception to the rule is session_id in the sessions table. In this case, session_id is not a recursive relationship but an unfortunately named field.

The solution is to update the migration script and add :references => nil to the line that adds the session_id. The plugin will then ignore the column and not attempt to generate a database foreign key constraint.

With the pending release of Rails 1.2, I've taken the opportunity to begin updating the plugins to take advantage of various 1.2 features such as alias_method_chain and to remove where possible, work-arounds for bugs that have been fixed. So, as of today, the trunk will only run against Rails 1.2.

For those not lucky or perhaps not foolish enough to start using the latest and greatest that Rails has to offer, you can find all the Rails 1.1.6 compatible versions of the plugins at:

svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/redhillonrails/tags/release-1.1.6/vendor/plugins

Enjoy!