The NATO phonetic alphabet javascript is available on github. Feel free to do whatever you want to do with it.

Certainly the rake 0.8.3 is not compatible with the Rails 1.2.3. If you try rake db:migrate, it fails with error: undefined method `last' for {:prepare=>:environment}:Hash.

To invoke the older rake use rake _0.7.3_ db:migrate. Obviously rake version 0.7.3 must be installed.

Older rake on remote

To invoke older rake in the remote server on your capistrano task, such as cap deploy:migrate, set which rake to use in the deploy.rb using set :rake, "rake _0.7.3_".

Even the column stored in ‘latin1′ is converted to ‘utf8′. This takes a considerable hit on the performance, I also have a suspicion that MySQL does not cache results when it is forced to do the conversion.

How to avoid

1. Store data in correct encoding as it needs.

2. By telling MySQL to not convert the results by initaliazing rails with…

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute('SET CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS = NULL')

Lets do this using an example. For this purpose we have a table called news. This used to have default encoding as latin1, so the column title varchar(255) and content text were storing values in latin1.

To change the values from latin1 to utf8 for the two string columns:

Step 1: set the original default encoding to the columns:

alter table news
       modify title varchar(255) character set 'latin1',
       modify content text character set 'latin1';

Step 2: now change the column type to binary types:

alter table news
       modify title varbinary(255),
       modify content varbinary(65536);

Step 3: now convert to utf8:

alter table news
        modify title varchar(255) character set 'utf8',
        modify content text character set 'utf8';

This is it, you should be all converted from latin1 to utf8. Also remember to pass the original attributes of the those columns again when using modify column.

I was long struggling with the problem of migrating some data from a legacy DB to a Rails application. The original character set was in latin1 and the data were all messed up. Further it does not copy exactly when I try to copy via rails to the new model. I finally have a solution that is uglier than the problem.

Source latin1/non-utf database

The source database should be dumped into a file with this…

mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset -u -p dbname > source.sql

Next, replace latin1 in the dumped sql with utf8 using…

sed 's/latin1/utf8/g' dumpfile.sql > source_utf8.sql

Perhaps you can re-create the database again in a different computer, that way you do not lose the original source database or create another database using…

  CREATE DATABASE dbname_utf8 CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Now dump the data into the new temporary database that we use to migrate from

  mysql -uUSER dbname_utf8 < source_utf8.sql

Copying to the destination

Now the madness, I call it madness because it only works if I precisely did it this way. I kind of understand the reason but not 100% sure.

As an example, in the source database dbname_utf8 you have a table that we will map to a model say OldNews and we have a News model for the rails app and we want to copy the data across. The steps that worked for me are...

• Create or alter the new table in the rails app, in this case it will be news with utf8 charset columns.
• Set utf8 as encoding for source (dbname_utf8) and destination databases in your config/database.yml
• Do not use any Iconv stuff, it made a bigger mess of my data
• Make a method that will help you to migrate the data across from OldNews to the News
• Now alter the database.yml to whatever the original default encoding was for the new database or remove the utf8 encoding.

Thats it, the above worked for me after a lots of trial and error. Hope it works for others in similar position.

AppleScript tools

Anyway, I am a beginner of AppleScript and I found these tools quite useful:

• Editor: AppleScript Editor sucks, TextMate wins.
• Dictionary: To view the exposed APIs appscript tools’ ASDictionary comes handy, which does a decent job of listing all the Objects and Methods in HTML can also show them in Ruby, Python, AppleScript and ObjectiveC terminologies.
• Language Translator If you appreciated Ruby instead of AppleScript or Python or Objective C for that matter, using ASTranslator may help. Very handy when your google search returned snippets of AppleScript and you are scripting in Ruby.
• GUI Elements: Of course the above mentioned UIElementInspector when you have no idea what is the hierarchy of a particular element.

Is there any other tool that I should know?

  named_scope :available, lambda{
    {
      :conditions=>["products.is_available = 1 and products.available_at <= ?", Time.now.to_s(:db)]
    }
  }

MySQL has a facility to cache the results of queries and respond quickly when asked again. To make use of it, the query should be constant. In the above, the Time.now changing every second, you end up asking MySQL with different query every second. In reality, many listings can work without being too sensitive to time. You can publish at midnight without doing much harm. A simple change to Date.today.at_midnight or even the immediate hour can result in great performance of your queries:

  named_scope :available, lambda{
    {
      :conditions=>["products.is_available = 1 and products.available_at <= ?", Date.today.at_midnight.to_s(:db)]
    }
  }

• More on MySQL Query Caching.
• Also worth taking a note of Time.zone

The quick fix is to remove the BOM, if your editor does not allow you to do so, a quick google search on removing UTF8 BOM can get you some script to remove BOM.

require 'active_support'
Dependencies.load_paths << "#{File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'lib')}"

Say you have a file lib/answer.rb which defines class Answer; end;. This will be required when you first use Answer constant in your code.