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The phones are going faster than they are coming, only one store in each of these states are listed as having one type of the models: Florida, New Hampshire, California and Michigan. So if you take into account that some store list phones that didn’t work out of the box as available, the Apples Stores may well be out of stock today.

Data from: Apple.com and visualized by hasiphone.com

As part of the iPhone 3G mania I checked out Apple iPhone 3G availability website and that’s how I found where to buy my iPhone in Denver. I was however also wondering how many Apple store still had the iPhone in the US, so I wrote http://hasiphone.com that provides an overview of the availability of the iPhone 3G in the US based on the data provided by Apple website.

On the server an AIR application checks once a day the new availability data, crunches it up and saves it a a serialized datastructure to a ByteArray. The Hasiphone Flex application reads this data and visualizes it. Well, I spend 4 hours (which I didn’t really have before my vacations) on it, so their may be some glitches here and there. Leave comment on this blog if you find any issues.

Also a note of caution on the data. Like Apple’s site mentions it’s updated only once a day in the evening. One of the sales guy also mentioned to me that any iPhone that has an issue and cannot be sold but still is in stock may appear as available, thus their are stores that don’t have any 3G to sell but still show up on the list.

Since they announced the iPhone 3G I am pretty convinced that there isn’t much new over my current iPhone. Camera is still 2Mega pixels, the plastic case is not so nice, gps is cool, but I have one in my car, 16Gb over 8 could be useful, form factor changed slightly so it may not fit in my car cradle. So it’s basically the same phone with slightly faster internet. But I’m such a sucker when it comes to gadgets and I was just reading this article on How to replace an original iPhone with an iPhone 3G. Now if only my wife didn’t want my current iPhone, I wouldn’t have to buy the new one :-)

From the command line:

gem install passenger
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

The Apache 2 module was successfully installed.

Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
RailsSpawnServer /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/bin/passenger-spawn-server
RailsRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Hey…where is the configuration. Google told me to read this blog entry: http://www.fuzzylizard.com/archives/2008/05/29/947/

So copy these three lines and add them to the end of this file: /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

$ sudo mate /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Start and stop Apache go the to the System Preferences|Sharing and select the Web Sharing service:

Then the install script gives you the following instructions.

Deploying a Ruby on Rails application: an example

Suppose you have a Ruby on Rails application in /somewhere. Add a virtual host
to your Apache configuration file, and set its DocumentRoot to
/somewhere/public, like this:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName www.yourhost.com
      DocumentRoot /somewhere/public
   </VirtualHost>

And that's it! You may also want to check the Users Guide for security and
optimization tips and other useful information:

  /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/doc/Users guide.html

Enjoy Passenger, a product of Phusion (www.phusion.nl) :-)
http://www.modrails.com/ 

Now where is “my” apache configuration file? And more important where is yours? On the command line do

$ ls /etc/apache2/users/

And I see daniel.conf, so let’s edit that one. I am developing one Rails app in this folder: /Users/daniel/SvnProjects/for/stockportfolio/rails. So let’s define this application in that conf file:

$ sudo mate /etc/apache2/users/daniel.conf

<Directory "/Users/daniel/SvnProjects/for/stockportfolio/rails/">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName dev.stockportfolio.com
   DocumentRoot /Users/daniel/SvnProjects/for/stockportfolio/rails/public
</VirtualHost>

Note the /public at the end of the folder in the DocumentRoot. Now I am adding dev.stockportfolio.com in my /etc/hosts file. So just add the following line

127.0.0.1  dev.stockportfolio.com

Now go back to the system preference sharing tab and restart the web service. Now you have your application running … in production mode. Just point your browser to dev.stockportfolio.com.

Enjoy Daniel!

We are onto the 3rd day of the training, and the guys are still kicking. We are now onto Asynchronous processing. That’s good as I needed to catch up on what’s out there. I didn’t know about Starling. A light-weight queue server, might be a better solution than the heavier BackgroundRb based on the scenario you need to address. Any of you using Starling? Chad now goes into creating a plugin…ReviewableFu! Now onto debugging. And Caching.
Thanks guys awesome training, you covered tons of good material. Again, really worthwhile if you want to go to the next level with Rails.

Custom Form Builder

Use a custom form builder to clean up your html.erb files.

class LabelFormBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
  helpers = field_helpers +
            %w{date_select datetime_select time_select} +
            %w{collection_select select country_select time_zone_select} -
            %w{hidden_field label fields_for} # Don't decorate these

  helpers.each do |name|
    define_method(name) do |field, *args|
      options = args.last.is_a?(Hash) ? args.pop : {}
      label = label(field, options[:label], :class => options[:label_clas])
      @template.content_tag(:p, label +'<br/>' + super)  #wrap with a paragraph 
    end
  end
end

Then you can remove all the <p> and label tags from you form.

<h1>Editing user</h1>

<% form_for(@user, :builder => LabelFormBuilder) do |f| %>
  <%= f.error_messages %>
    <%= f.text_field :name %>
    <%= f.text_field :address %>
    <%= f.text_area :comment %>
    <%= f.check_box :check %>
    <%= f.submit "Update" %>
<% end %>

<%= link_to 'Show', @user %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', users_path %>

Add this to your application initializer to have all form use this form builder

ActionView::Base.default_form_builder = LabelFormBuilder

<% form_for(@user, :builder => LabelFormBuilder) do |f| %>

<% form_for(@user) do |f| %>

Now the same form with no custom builder was looking like this before.

<h1>Editing user</h1>

<% form_for(@user) do |f| %>
  <%= f.error_messages %>

  <p>
    <%= f.label :name %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :name %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label :address %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :address %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label :comment %><br />
    <%= f.text_area :comment %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label :check %><br />
    <%= f.check_box :check %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.submit "Update" %>
  </p>
<% end %>

<%= link_to 'Show', @user %> |
<%= link_to 'Back', users_path %>

Chad is giving a very nice presentation walking us through meta programming step by step. You can see the code examples we are creating during his talk, but just looking at the code will note give the whole picture.

We are just starting Day 2. Mike Clark and Chad Fowler are giving the training and are really good at it. They are 24 people taking the training, most not from Denver, and one from Mexico. Right now attendees are not awake and Mike and Chad are trying to wake us up. Yesterday we covered routes, looked at the Rails and Mongrel source code, looked at a RESTful application, covered ActiveResource, and checked ActiveRecord Associations. It’s nice to be able to sit back and take time to play with all these goodies without having to deliver code. It’s a nice refresher for me. Next step will be meta programming.

Here are some notes from the ActiveRecord Associations part of the training:

Join Model: has_many :through

Polymorphic Associations: has_many :address, :as => :addressable

Custom Finders:

class User 
has_many :visits do
     def recent(limiit - 5)
          find(:all, :order => 'created_at DESC', :limit => 5)
     end
end

Active Record Scoping:

with_scope # protected now

before_filter :find_account

Scoped Relationships:

@event.registations.find(params[:id])
@user.events.find_by_id(params[:id])
@event.registations.find(:all, :conditions => "pre_register is true")

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
     has_many :registrations
     has_many :pre_registrations,
                     :class_name => "Registration",
                     :conditions => "pre_register is true"
end

@event.pre_registrations

Named Scope:

class Coupon < ActiveRecord::Base
     named_scope :limit_not_exceeded,   :conditions => "use_count < max_uses"
     named_scope :usable_in_store,        :conditions => "external_only is false"
end

Coupon.limit_not_exceeded
Coupon.usable_in_store
Coupon.limit_not_exceeded.usable_in_store

Dynamic Named Scope:

class Coupon < ActiveRecord::Base
     named_scope :not_expired,  lambda { {  :conditions => ['expires_at > ?', Time.now] } }
     named_scope :used_at_most,   lambda { |uses| {  :conditions => ['use_count <=  ?', uses] } }
end

Coupon.not_expired
Coupon.used_at_most(30)
Coupon.not_expired.used_at_most(10)

The guys over at Rails Envy somehow managed to present (and create) the Ruby Heroes Awards at RailsConf…funny as usual. Check out this video extracts from the talk.

UPDATE: what I didn’t mention for this video and what remi realized is that I was sitting way back in the room and took only sections of the video and it’s quite ruff and shaky.