The definition of forms for editing inline-content is now separated from the Code that deals with Ajax and editing state. This makes it very easy to extend REST in Place with your own Editors.

I also decided to keep the jQuery backwards compatibility for a bit longer.

Check out the changes at http://github.com/janv/rest_in_place.git

Per default, Rails seems to only work with the gems listed in its Gemfile, which means that it starts using webrick. I wanted it to use mongrel, like Rails 2 does and added gem "mongrel" to my gemfile which resulted in rails server just freezing. The cuplrit was some of the weirdest piece of code I’ve ever seen, mongrel’s Mongrel::Gems.require function:

An infinite loop with the only way out being an exception that never got thrown!

This madness was called from mongrel.rb:

Removing these two lines solved the issue. That would have meant patching my gems however, and that smells like something you should not do. The final solution was simple and posted in the comments of the Rails 3 Beta announcement by Juanma Cervera. I just needed to add 3 more lines to my Gemfile:

In November I got some pull requests for REST in Place which I didn’t get to really have a look at until last week. I haven’t really touched REST in Place in ages and wasn’t really aware that it was that popular. It has 72 followers and 11 forks on github and who knows how many other people are just silently using it! So, I merged in the contributions and dealt with some issues in the tracker and thought about how to go on.

REST in Place originally was a mere proof of concept and one of my first projects in JavaScript and jQuery. I have since written a lot more complicated applications and even a diploma thesis on JavaScript and the old code just isn’t up to my standards anymore. Additionally I have received several pull requests for textarea support which all couldn’t be merged because they were just copypasted and modified a little from the input-tag version. The only solution was a complete rewrite and that’s what I did. While the plugin still works the same way, the code is properly split up and more modular now. This enables easy extension and maintenance from now on and hopefully quicker development from me and better patches from all users.

This new development has some drawbacks too, unfortunately. This massive improvement will only go to the jQuery version of REST in Place. Since I don’t know much about Prototype or mootools, I can’t support both versions anymore. If someone is willing to work with me on this, I’ll happily accept their contributions but I can’t do this on my own. If anyone is willing to do so, please reply in the comments, so we can work out a plan. I want to keep all three versions as similar as possible, this means the Prototype and mootools versions should follow the same object-oriented structure as the jQuery version.

One last thing: I will support jQuery < 1.4 until 1.4.1 comes out. 1.4 introduced some very nice changes which I’d like to make use of but since 1.4 seems a little buggy still, I’ll continue to support the older versions for a little while.

To be able to quickly enter umlauts on the US keyboard, I’ve been using the USGerman layout found here. In Snow Leopard, this layout bundle causes a horrible bug in the keychain, essentially preventing you from doing anything that requires your password.

To work around that, I created a new layout bundle from scratch using Ukelele. It works just as well and doesn’t crash the keychain.

You can find it on my github page: http://github.com/janv/usgerman/

Berlin always fascinates me. I’ve wanted to live and work there since I was a child.
My parents got to know each other and still have friends in Moabit.
Because of that I’ve been visiting the city almost every year of my life.
This year was the first time I brought my D90 and D40 with me.

The city has a different vibe, depending on the season and the places you see.
These three images capture how the city felt last week.

With Nextgen I want to present my photos in a way different from flickr. This also marks the beginning of broadening this weblog’s topics. I won’t restrict it to programming and software development any longer. My interests are much more diverse, so why not present all these ideas here. The 12€ Camera Strap post was the first into the topic of photography and it certainly won’t be the last, since this has become one of my most important hobbies over the last year.

9elements, who are totally awesome btw., released an impressive HTML5 Canvas demo yesterday:

HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.

Take a look at http://9elements.com/io/?p=153

Two products are build after this principle: the R-Strap and the Sun Sniper. Both have two big disadvantages though.

First, they attach to the tripod mount of your camera using a special screw. The tripod mount is not build for stress like this! Having the camera dangle and bounce from a strap attached there might very well destroy it. Further, the screw can come loose if the camera twists around. Both products take measures against this, but a certain risk remains. Second, both straps are pretty expensive at around 50€

In this post I’ll give instructions on how to build such a strap by yourself with material for 12€. This strap not only works similarly to its 50€ brothers but is of very high quality as well and can be trusted with heavy equipment.

This is what my strap looks like (click the images to enlarge):

A list of the parts I used:

• Two carabiners stripped from a camera bag (the black plastic things sliding on the strap), free!
• A aluminum munkees carabiner from an outdoor store, 2€
• 20mm black strap from the same store, 1€ per meter
• Various plastic parts, like the fastener, the snap-lock and the two buckles, also from the store, 3€
• Tatonka shoulder pad, same store, 6€
• 2cm key ring, 50 cent

The most difficult part was to find a carabiner that slides on the strap, that I’m also comfortable with attaching a heavy camera to. The plastic ones from an old camera bag looked sturdy enough. They were a little hard to handle though, so I added the aluminum munkees carabiner that is very easy to open and allows me to quickly attach and remove the camera from the strap.

You might wonder why I have two sliding carabiners on the strap (one stays hidden inside the shoulder pad). Well, as you can see in the next picture, I designed my strap so that you can open it, slide the carabiners to the open ends and attach them to the camera again, in the way regular camera straps are used. If you think you don’t need this, you can omit some parts to make the connection inside the shoulder pad simpler.

The big, shiny metal carabiner on the upper right is a replacement for the one from the camera bag. I stripped it from a dog leash (for big dogs!, 7€ at Fressnapf). Should I ever carry a 70-200/2.8, I’ll use that one, but for my current, lightweight equipment I prefer the plastic parts because they’re easier to open and weigh less.

The last image shows how the strap is attached to my D90. I don’t trust the tripod mount and finding a matching screw is difficult as well. A simpler and better way to attach the camera to the strap is to use the dedicated strap eyes on the camera body. To be able to attach the carabiner and to make the system a bit more flexible, I added a simple key ring that remains on the camera.

Update:

I got back to the hardware store and bought some 25mm strap. The result is much sturdier and cleaner that the previous version, but lacks the ability to attach the camera in an old-fashioned way.

Ende 2007 habe ich bei 9elements einen Crashkurs zu Ruby on Rails gegeben. Da mich inzwischen schon mehrere Leute gefragt haben ob ich die Folien nicht mal rausgeben möchte, tue ich das jetzt. Die Folien sind absichtlich so gestaltet, dass sie auch ausserhalb des Vortrags als Nachschlagewerk für Ruby dienen können. Der Rails-Teil ist ein wenig arg knapp gehalten und kann vor allem einen groben Überblick in den Aufbau des Frameworks geben.

Ruby & Rails Extremcrashkurs (PDF-Link) v1.0 27.03.09