The menu looks great, but is a bit tedious to construct. In fact, its downright onerous for the railszers used as we are to select_tag and options_for_select.

Ruby to the rescue!

The rails-jquery-dropdown helper generates the drop-down HTML markup, places menu items and values and optionally sub-menus using a passed-in Array, and wires up the Javascript behavior using jQuery.

Get it from GitHub:
http://github.com/dkeskar/rails-jquery-dropdown

News about newspapers is either increasingly dire, or dramatic. The list of defunct newspaper continues to grow. Online, a news mogul mulls withdrawing news content from the Google index. Sitting face-to-face and talking with thoughtful people with real stories from the trenches quickly brings into focus the salient issues.

Here are some of the key points from the discussion.

1. Newspapers have historically been highly lucrative for their owners, providing greater than 25% margins. This is a for-profit business which is protected by constitutional amendments, and has enjoyed special dispensation such as preferred postal carrier rates and legal protections.
2. Printing presses have modernized, computerized and become efficient, yet they are costly to operate. Home delivery of printed news (in its American form) involves a large distribution organization.
3. Yet, print ads are highly lucrative. A full page spread in a metro newspapers such as The Oregonian may cost upwards of $12,000. Assuming a daily circulation of 300,000, that’s the equivalent of $40 CPM. For comparison, online ad payouts are generally a small fraction even at $5, and typically just fractions of a dollar.
4. Newspapers are thus faced with the Innovators’ Dilemma. Their product offering with current technology is highly lucrative, enjoys wide margins, and faces certain decline. Yet, their organizational structure and DNA cannot embrace the cheapness of blogs and technology mediated aggregators.
5. Newspapers are vested in their identity around investigative journalism, political coverage and social issues. Sadly, unlike financial and business news (Reuters, WSJ) or trade news, a paying market for such news content is non-existent.
6. Newspapers and news staff are proud of their objectivity. Perversely, the audience for and profits in non-objective formats for political coverage (Rush, Lars, Glenn et al) are much higher.

With challenges like these, it was refreshing to see Peter’s upbeat outlook about the future. Combining technology with editorial expertise, pioneering new content domains such as hyper-local coverage and securing a funding model for investigative journalism, Peter is confident that newspapers will thrive in the emerging Internet and device-centric world.

Steve provided great insights about the art and craft of news reporting as well as some of the radical innovation underway. Steve is of course acting on the future, with Nozzl Media close to releasing a real-time mobile distribution and monetization engine for publishers.

Thanks and all the best to Peter and Steve.

This is typically true of “has_and_belongs_to_many” associations which end up mirroring some kind of “membership” between the joined models. For example, a library system might track borrowing of books by patrons, with extra attributes for return dates and accrued fines.

The Django guys have a handy example about musicians and bands with extra attributes such as the membership role and date of joining. In my case, I needed to track sharing status of Photos across Photosets.

AirDB now has support for such join table attributes. Its a bit of a hack, in the interests of time, code size and abstraction concessions. The new things, which make it all possible include:

1. An optional argument to Migrator.joinTable()
2. DB.execute(sql) to allow tweaking an existing join table.
3. Associator methods: setAttr, findAllByAttr, countByAttr, getAttrVal.

Here are some actual code excerpts (in the Photoset model)

   // The new migration directive
   function(my:Migrator):void {
      var statusCol:Array = ['status', DB.Field.VarChar, {
         limit: 4, 'default': Photo.ShareStatus.None}
      ];
      DB.execute(
         "ALTER TABLE photos_photosets ADD COLUMN " +
         DB.fieldMap(statusCol)
      )
   }

Setting the sharing status for a particular photo in this photoset

   public function photoSent(photo:Photo):void {
      this.photos.setAttr({status: Photo.ShareStatus.Sent}, photo);
   }

If no target is specified, the specified attributes are set for all associated photos in this photoset.

    this.photos.setAttr({status: Photo.ShareStatus.Sent});

Count the number of photos based on some attribute.

   var xfrCond:String = "status = '" + Photo.ShareStatus.Sent;
   this.photos.countByAttr(xfrCond);

Ideally, and with some coding leisure, this would be best done as a new has_many_through association. If you know of ActionScript language mechanisms to ease the implementation, I would be interested in hearing about them.

Meanwhile, we have functional join tables attributes.

Within a few months of my discovery, jQuery had fixed cross-browser issues, and actually made it the choice for ensuring cross-browser support.

Here are some of the things that led me to consistently choose jQuery over Prototype, even if it meant eschewing the Rails/Prototype coupling and doing things the hard way.

• CSS-style and RegExp selectors.
• Light-weight – smaller file size, faster download, quicker load.
• Plays nice with others - jQuery.noConflict();
• Many powerful mechanisms for traversing and manipulating the DOM.
• Queue up onload logic from multiple places with jQuery(document).ready()
• Convenient call chaining  - jQuery(‘#thing’).doThis().that().more();
• Extensibility and lots of plugins.
• Excellent, fine-grained AJAX support.

With such features, it is no surprise that the jQuery has evolved into a thriving, distributed ecosystem providing innumerable plugins and UI and effects frameworks on top such as jqueryUI.

Thanks to all the contributors who make it happen.

jQuery("#resig,plugin.writers,.contributors").thanks();

All too often, names and labels end up defining, more than just denoting something. Perhaps Shakespeare was being ironic when he gave the quote about roses for Juliet to say, who then suffers so famously. Most programmers would agree that it is better to have meaningful variable names. Why then, should we not give careful considerations to how we describe ourselves?

Without further ado, here are some of the terms, and their general connotations.

1. Programmer. Quaint, archaic but retro-chic. Persists in usage despite mechanistic connotations, commonly  with linguistic prefix and sometimes with desirable attributes (e.g. pragmatic).
2. Coder. Probable insult. Most likely used sarcastically and/or for self-denigration. Bonus points for poetic amalgamations with the rodent or primate family.
3. Engineer. Putting code blocks together to meet specified tolerances and performance criteria. An Organization Man, probably, who develops mission-critical platforms.
4. Developer. Bland, but with a hint of creation and coordination. Probably a more evolved specimen than a mere Programmer and more ambitious than an Engineer?
5. Computer Scientist. A theoretical bent of mind, and mastery of algorithms. True sighting in the field are rare, but rumored to create whole new paradigms and fields of work for others to toil in.
6. Hacker. Notions of brilliance and mental ability coupled with enthusiasm for software and systems, mostly in pulling off the unachievable. An insider’s badge, since the mainstream media persists in conflating hackers and criminals.

Less common, but more fanciful are the Software Artists, Masters, Wizards and Programmer-At-Arms.

So, how do you describe yourselves? PHP Programmer, Code Monkey, Application Developer, Senior Software Engineer or Kernel Hacker? Or perhaps you prefer being a Rockstar Programmer, Ninja Developer or Software Samurai?

Iron Man Mark I, II, III and IV

As a kid, I was not a big Iron Man fan. I did like the movie, and I had always liked the way they picked that old song for the movie theme. (What’s your FlixIQ on that?)

But to me, the poster clearly showed product evolution in action. You only have so much time, limited resources, and few friends. You build what you can build to break out. As long as you survive, you can make improvements. But you have to keep testing and making refinements, before you get that super-cool and powerful product. It worked for Tony Stark, and it is a good visual for product evolution.

If you have not yet clicked to see for yourselves, here is some wordiness.

FlixIQ lets you cue a video clue to create and share quizzes. We are talking video clues here, which means movies, music, sports, or anything where images flickering 24 times a second (a.k.a flix) trigger some memory or mental connection.

So, show off your total recall by answering those questions. If that’s too easy for you, stump others by finding a telling scene, and create tough challenges for others.

Verdomme, dat is kicken.

Alas, I was ill-equipped, lacking git. I had heard several people evangelize git, hold training sessions and in general rhapsodize about it. All the cool kids were using it. For several time and efficiency reasons, I had put off switching to git. Meanwhile, I was dealing with the practical annoyances, since many of my svn:externals were deserting to git repositories, forcing me to download tarballs.

So that day, with some help from some of the friendly Calagator folks, I got myself git. From there it was a short step to using github, and short time before I switched multiple client and project repositories to git.

As a result, my coding workflow has improved tremendously.

Sometimes, we need a nudge to stop putting things off and start doing something that improves our lives. And community meet-ups such as RCC, BarCamp, and OSBridge, are great at connecting and catalyzing people to do just that.

Thanks to all the great folks who infuse Portland with this community spirit.