So, for this really simple reason I decided to start writing quick-tips about coding which will hopefully help keeping your code clean and easy to understand. Here’s the first one.

Use reasonable and self-explanatory variable names

Think about how much time you often spend on figuring out what a variable is used for or what it is supposed to be. There are some bad examples:

# a lot of code before...
 
$b = SomeObject::getByID(12);
$na = "Cutting Edge";
$nu = 12;
$c = array('Audi', 'BMW', 'Mercedes', 'Aston Martin');
 
# a lot of code after...

Could you explain what those variables are meant to be? You will probably need to find the answer for that some other part of your code. A better way is to indicate the types and use self-explanatory variable names:

# a lot of code before...
 
$oBox = SomeObject::getByID(12);
$sName = "Cutting Edge";
$iNumber = 12;
$aCars = array('Audi', 'BMW', 'Mercedes', 'Aston Martin');
 
# a lot of code after...

In this example, the first characters indicate the data types of each variable (”o” means that the variable in subject is an object, “s” stands for strings, “i” indicates integers and so on. Pretty straight-forward.)

You may ask why this is a big deal. I tell you:

• Easier to understand,
• You know what to expect from a variable,
• Others will understand the structure of your code a lot faster,
• Also, it will be even easier for you too to maintain if you need to get back to your own code after a while.

So guys, please remember: Keep your code clean and sensible.

XCode using the ECLM Color theme

I started to port our original TextMate theme to XCode. This is a quick screenshot of it, download will be available soon.

We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).

.. as it was written yesterday on Techcrunch.

On the other hand, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby On Rails) wrote a post on Loud Thinking (his personal Blog) about the scaling opportunities of the framework.

Well, I am about to dig deeper into this very exciting question and share my experiences.

UPDATE: Just got noticed by Arnold Funken on Twitter:

When I was trying to move an element in the DOM (actually update) with an other element’s innerHTML including a flash object, the movie (.swf) forgot to load. Right clicking on the flash file you can see the following message, greyed out:

“Movie not loaded”

This is an example snippet of the code:

<div id="video">
	<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="184" height="140" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="bgcolor" value="999999" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="src" value="/videos/15.swf" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="184" height="140" src="/videos/15.swf" allownetworking="all" allowscriptaccess="always" quality="high" bgcolor="999999"></embed></object></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$("otherElement").update($("video").innerHTML);
</script>

Using IE7, Prototype 1.5 and Flash Player 9 on Windows XP.

This problem does not seem to occur in normal browsers (like Safari or Firefox), they load the movie file perfectly. I thought it would be good to share with others, maybe you guys know a workaround, or I can warn others before they will have to face the same problem.

But on the other side, this causes issues for Prototype-based websites, there is a conflict between the native and the Prototype methods, which both have the same name.

For example if you are accessing a bunch of elements like this:

$('foo').getElementsByClassName("bar").each(Element.hide);

It will not behave like it did before. Hmm. You do not need to scream and shout now, until the Prototype team comes out with a solution you can still use this syntax:

$$("#foo .bar").each(Element.hide);

Easy, huh? So be aware that your sites may be broken for Safari users and replace the affected lines with the workaround mentioned above.

Update details can be found here.

The workaround for this is to add the MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE listener to the stage and watch the event.target in the handler function and toggle the custom cursor using that, so you can specify that Flash shouldn`t do the toggling (= keep the custom cursor on) when the mouse goes over it.

So it isn`t necessarily a Flash Player bug, because this behavior makes sense (the mouse updates much more frequently than the .swf), but well annoying to figure out anyway.

One of its main benefits is that it separates the different data structures, functions, variables, comments, etc. So it is easier to look up your code.

So, if you like it, it can be found here.

Copyright: This theme was originally improved from the one what we can see in Ryan Bates’ Railscasts.

The fix for it is quite random as well, you have to ADD a “\n” (=new line) at the end of your text and whooops, the phantom line is gone.

LoadError (Expected xy file to define ...)

Of course this is a useless error message which means Rails couldn’t find a controller file which has been still at its proper path of course. What to do now? If you need a more detailed error log, there is a solution to force Rails to log errors in deeper detail, just set your caching classes to true in your environment.rb file:

config.cache_classes = true

After restarting the webserver, and reloading the page, I could get a proper and useful error message, Rails pointed that the error is in RMagick gems. Take a quick look on the new error message in the log:

RuntimeError (This version of RMagick was created to run with ImageMagick 6.3.3
but ImageMagick 6.3.6 is installed on this system. You should either
1) Configure and build RMagick for ImageMagick 6.3.6, or
2) download ImageMagick 6.3.3 from file:///usr/local/share/doc/ImageMagick-6.3.3/index.html and install it.
):

Now this is something what you can use to start debugging. After reinstalling RMagick, the problem has been solved, and the site was up and online again. Just do the following 3 easy steps:

gem uninstall rmagick
gem install rmagick
apachectl restart

Done, hoorraaay!