Besides that, I’ve been preparing myself for Ko Dan Ja Shim Sa, which is an 8 day test to become a 4th dan in Soo Bahk Do.  I’m also testing for my Sa Bom which denotes a “master-level instructor”.  The dates are set for August 14-22 which is in less than two weeks!

So those two items have made blogging really hard to do lately.  My wife on the other hand has started her own blog about our family.  She’s done a really nice job.  I hope everyone will check it out and make a few comments (she loves comments).  http://familiacorrales.blogspot.com.

What really stood out for me was the presentation on Rails 2.1 which was made available over the weekend.  Rails 2.1 has a lot of great new features including better caching, gem dependencies, and time zone support.  One new addition that really struck my attention was versioned migrations.  A time stamp will now be at the beginning of the migration filename.  Having version control to my migrations will save me a lot of headaches.

Now you can do this:

script/generate migration one
      create  db/migrate/20080402122512_one.rb

The number at the end is a time stamp.  You can then retrack your steps by typing:

rake db:migrate:up VERSION=20080402122512

One other cool addition is the modification to ActiveRecord.  Say you wanted to find all your blog posts.  The command would be Post.find(:all).  With Rails 2.1, we’ll be able to simply write Post.all and Post.first.  Seems pretty intuitive.

I know it’ll probably take a little bit of work to upgrade my applications, but you gotta hand it to the Rails Team.  Version 2.1 is awesome!

Ricki Brown
Control Specialist
Willingboro PDC
Ext. 2045
JURY DUTY SCAM:

This has been verified by the FBI (their link is also included below).

Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book.

It is spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced.
The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant.

Give out any of this information and bingo, your identity was just stolen.
The fraud has been reported so far in 11 states, including New York , Oklahoma , Florida , Illinois , Texas and Colorado .

This (swindle) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system.
The FBI and the Federal Court System have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Snopes site: says this is real fraud.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp<http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp>;

FBI site: warns about the fraud.

So if you are upgrading to Rails 2.0 and you get some errors, such as a 500 Error, be sure to check how you are handling sessions. Regardless, you’ll need to add the following code into your environments.rb file (don’t forget to restart your server):

config.action_controller.session = { 
  :session_key => ‘_my_app_session‘, 
  :secret      => ‘hashed_key_of_at_least_30_characters‘ 
}

If you want to read the documentation, here’s the link: http://caboo.se/doc/classes/CGI/Session/CookieStore.html .

For a really good discussion on Sessions and RAILS, go here.

@category = Category.find(params[:id], :include => [:sub_categories])

This will find the category with id = params[:id] and will eager load all of the related sub categories. This way we only need to run one query, rather than two. We could also do this

@category = Category.find(params[:id], :include => [:sub_categories, {:sub_categories => :products }])

Now we are going down another level and retrieving all products related to each sub_category. Unfortunately, there is no way to go travel further into your data model with the :includes symbol. If anyone has a good approach, I’m all ears.

The problem I’ve run into is that my Category model has has_many :sub_categories, :order => ‘rank asc’. When I include :sub_categories, Active Record does not recognize my ordering. This caused me quite a few headaches until I came across this in the docs:

” Since the eager loading pulls from multiple tables, you‘ll have to disambiguate any column references in both conditions and orders. So :order => “posts.id DESC” will work while :order => “id DESC” will not. Because eager loading generates the SELECT statement too, the :select option is ignored.” Here’s the link:

So the best approach would be @category = Category.find(params[:id], :include => [:sub_categories, {:sub_categories => :products}], :order => “categories.rank, sub_categories.rank”)

This will order your categories and sub categories. Hopefully someone finds this useful. If you have come up with a better approach, please let me know.