munitic.com.hr blog

Moved to webfaction

As of today my blog is now hosted on webfaction. I did this because I recently bought an apartment and now I don’t have enough finances for a 38$ 512MB VPS :(. But I hope this is just temporary.

Still webfaction is an excellent shared hosting. You get a shell account and the control panel is awesome. Django, Rails, WordPress, Trac, Subversion, Zope, Plone, TurboGears setups are just a few clicks away for just 9.5$ a month.

Enjoy!

Posted in Other, 0 Comments

Windsor container

At work I’ve been looking at Windsor container and I must say it is a excellent peace of software. I don’t know how was I able to do my work properly without it thus far. I’m now preparing a series of 2 or 3 posts on my company blog site explaining how to use it and what are the benefits of using it.

I absolutely suggest to every .NET programmers out there to look at Windsor. It will save you time & money. Windsor helps you solve your object dependencies. If for example object A depends on object B (B is passed to A through the constructor) Windsor if properly configured can resolve that dependency when asking him to give you and instance of object A.

You can also configure him to give you a specific implementation of an interface. Then you can develop a different implementation of that interface (if your client asks) and replace the old implementation with the new one without ever recompiling the application. You just change the configuration to point to the new implementation.

There is a lot more to Windsor than this and because of that I invite you to read about it on the Windsor site.

Enjoy!

Posted in .NET, 0 Comments

Refactored comment management

I’ve finally got some time to work on my blog application. I always wanted to remove duplicate code for comment management from the post controller and photo controller. So today I sat down and extracted common code form both controllers and “CommentController” was born.

Here is the code if you are curious.

class CommentController < ApplicationController
    include Akismet

    def add_comment
        if request.post?
           params[:comment][:ip_address] = request.remote_ip
           comment = Comment.new(params[:comment])
           commentable_type = find_commentable_type(
                                  comment.commentable_type, 
                                  comment.commentable_id)
           if comment.valid?
             params[:comment][:is_spam] = 
                      comment_is_spam?(comment)
             commentable_type.comments.create(params[:comment])
           end
        end

        count = comment.errors.count
        unless count == 0
         flash[:errors] = comment.errors.full_messages.join('|')
        end

        redirect_to_commentable_type(commentable_type)
    end

    def delete_comment
        if request.post?
            comment = Comment.find(params[:id])
            comment.destroy
        end
        redirect_to_commentable_type(
               find_commentable_type(comment.commentable_type,
                            params[:commentable_id].to_i))
    end

    def comment_report_spam
        comment = Comment.find(params[:id])
        comment.is_spam = true
        comment.save
        submit_spam(:comment_author => comment.author_name,
                    :comment_content => comment.comment,
                    :user_ip => comment.ip_address,
                    :user_agent => request.user_agent,
                    :referer => request.env['HTTP_REFERER'])

        redirect_to_commentable_type(
              find_commentable_type(comment.commentable_type,
                                    comment.commentable_id))
    end

   protected
   def comment_is_spam?(comment)
     is_spam?(:comment_author => comment.author_name,
              :comment_content => comment.comment,
              :user_ip => comment.ip_address,
              :user_agent => request.user_agent,
              :referrer => request.env['HTTP_REFERER'])
   end

    private
    def find_commentable_type(commentable_type, commentable_id)
        case commentable_type
        when Post.class_name
            result = Post.find(commentable_id)
        when Photo.class_name
            result = Photo.find(commentable_id)
        else
            throw "Wrong commentable type" 
        end
        result
    end

    def redirect_to_commentable_type(commentable_type)
        case commentable_type.class.class_name
        when Post.class_name
            redirect_to article_comments_url(commentable_type)
        when Photo.class_name
            redirect_to :action => "show_comments", 
                        :controller => "photo", 
                        :id => commentable_type
        else
            throw "Wrong commentable type" 
        end
    end

    def article_comments_url(post)
        "#{article_url(:year => post.created_on.year,
                       :month => post.created_on.month, 
                       :day => post.created_on.day,
                       :permalink => post.permalink)
        }#comment_form" 
    end 
end
 

Posted in Rails, 0 Comments

Life & Erlang

This past month or two I was preoccupied with collecting necessary documents to raise a loan at the bank to buy a flat. I’m planning to go live with my girlfriend/future wife in a small town called Solin near Split (Croatia). So all my free time was spent collecting those documents . I only need to get one more document and then I’m going to the bank for that loan.

I haven’t had much time to program anything in my free time. I am reading “Programming Erlang” very slowly though, half a chapter every 3 to 5 days. I must say I’m enjoying it, and I already have some ideas about projects. One idea would be to develop a ejabberd module which integrates with trac. The integration would mean a developer could add, edit, list tickets, attach files to tickets and comment on tickets using his or hers IM client.

To enable this integration the IM client would need to know how to use it so I’m planning to write a pidgin plugin also. For now ejabberd and trac will need to live on the same machine because I intend to write a simple port program in python using trac API.

If you have any useful comments please do comment :)

Enjoy!

Posted in Other,Erlang, 0 Comments

Book: Programming Erlang

I’ve started reading the Programming Erlang book by Joe Armstrong. I’ve learned about the existence of Erlang about a year or two ago when I was looking into learning a functional language.

I tried Haskell, Ocaml and Erlang (I didn’t tried Lisp purely on aesthetics issues – i don’t like too many parenthesis :) ). After a while with those languages i choose Erlang as my functional language to learn. Haskell learning curve was too steep, and in Ocaml i didn’t like the syntax.

So when the beta of the Erlang book was announced I bought it. And now after I have some spare time I started reading it. The book is really easy to read. Joe did a fantastic job of explaining Erlang in simple words. I recommend to all of you who have a desire to learn a functional language to give Erlang a try.

P.S. The reasons for choosing Erlang are totally subjective and by no mean am I saying that either Haskell or Ocaml are bad languages. I’m just saying that I liked Erlang more. The same goes for Lisp.

Enjoy!

Posted in Erlang, 2 Comments