Barnesian

Shortly after sitting down to try and learn Ember.js, I learned that Ember has a “Getting Started Problem.” Everything in the docs seems reasonable, but when you go to make a real world application with a real web server, you realize there are a lot of gaps. Each individual component is well documented, but gluing them together proved to be an exercise in frustration. There are not very many examples of best practices within the context of a real application, instead of a single page to-do app.

Testing is important in any software project. The faster the code is tested and the shorter the feedback cycle, the better. Here’s how to set up Guard and Guard::MiniTest to provide notifications for the fastest feedback loop possible. Anytime a file watched by Guard is saved it will run the test suite and pop up a notification. I’m using Fedora with Gnome 3 for the notifications bit, so the details might vary if you’re using something else like Ubuntu with Unity.

For the uninitiated, Varying Vagrant Vagrants is a project that builds a virtual machine running WordPress by using Vagrant. It configures a virtual machine with Nginx and serves up a few different versions of WordPress. Unrelatedly, Microsoft provides virtual machines] for testing various versions of Internet Explorer.

Here is a quick hack that could be useful depending upon the context. :root is a pseudo selector that selects the root element on the page. That’s almost always the element. That’s not what’s interesting though. The :root pseudo selector is only supported in IE9 and up, which means you can use it to target browsers less than IE9. Do note that, it only targets less than IE9, so you can’t target IE7 or IE6 specifically. As an example here is a square div that is green in IE9 and up, but is red in IE8 and lower. Test it out with the IE developer tools by changing the browser’s rendering engine.

Setting up a foreign key relationship in Rails is easy, however, the form for the relationship proved to be a bit tricky. Ideally, you want the foreign key to be selected if it’s set in the show view and you want it to save in the new and edit views. Here is how to make that happen.