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Friday, March 23, 2012

Learning Start

I flew from Bangalore to Berlin on the 1st of March, the day my Visa starts. The weather was cold and gloomy. But I met some Mallus on the way and had some socializing. I asked them about the eating habits, where I could save money and stuff.

It took me 17 hours to reach Tegel, Berlin. After that I took a cab and went to the work place. A great bunch of people greeted me and gave me the laptop and other stuff. I stayed with John for some days before he left for his vacation. John even got me a sim that I have on my phone now !

I managed to get some paper works done. I have got my insurance and Burgeramt as of now. I am waiting for the Work Visa approval, apartment for rent, bank account etc ..

Anna took me to a small bar where they played music and the people who came in sand and played instruments. A bunch of people did a lot of YoYo tricks as well ...

Something like this one

Im at Gregory's apartment for now and am looking out for a place to stay before Reshma comes.\

Rails Dev is going great too ... I learned a lot of stuff too ...

Some of them are

Rspec
Rvm
guard
simplecov
factorygirl
pow and powder
gem based coding and development
databasecleaner
forgery
airbrake
relic
scalarium
activeadmin
devise
vagrant
markdown

Most of them I knew before and understood more ....

Exciting times !!!!

Sunday, January 15, 2012

FB Likes

I have been trying to get the Facebook Like to appear on an application. It was getting somewhat stressful because the Like would just not take the whole URL, but would take the base URL.

I started using the XFBML first because the way to integrate it is so nice.

Add

<html xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">

as the namespace and then use

<fb:like href="http://google.com/" send="false" layout="button_count" width="450" show_faces="false"></fb:like>

Easy enough. The application used a lot of Ajax and therefore the these likes need some refreshing. To do this I used the Javascript method available

fb.xfbml.parse()

Function and it started working. But the likes were happening only for the base URL and not the href in the fb:like. This is when I saw the statement in the documentation which said 'The XFBML version defaults to the current page.' if href is used.

urghh

I went on to use the iframe way so that I could get likes for the particular URL. It seems its important that the url end with '/' and only then Facebook identifies the absolute URL.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Image Cropping With Rails 3

I was looking at some options for the Image Cropping functionality with Rails 3 and got many great solutions on the net. This Rails Cast is the best place to start if you have the images stored as local. If you have it as s3 storage there are some changes you need to make.

My main haml file has these contents -


#cropperpopup.lpopup.x

%a.ccloser

  %p.large
    Image Cropper

.cropper
    = image_tag @user.avatar.url(:medium), :id => :cropbox
= form_for @user, :html => {:class => 'edit_user_two'} do |f|
    - for attrbt in [:crop_x, :crop_y, :crop_w, :crop_h]
      = f.text_field attrbt, :id => attrbt, :class => :coordinate

    = f.submit 'Crop'

When on calls the popup, one should call the code for the Jcrop method

$('img#cropbox').Jcrop({
onChange: update_crop,
onSelect: update_crop,
setSelect: [0, 0, 168, 202],

  aspectRatio: (168/202) });

My aspect ratio setting is with respect to the configurations I did for the has_attached_file :avatar.

The thing you will have to do specifically for s3 is in the avatar_geometry method.


  def cropping?

!crop_x.blank? && !crop_y.blank? && !crop_w.blank? && !crop_h.blank?

end

def avatar_geometry(style = :medium)
@geometry ||= {}
path = (avatar.options[:storage]==:s3) ? avatar.url(style).split(' ').join('%20') : avatar.path(style)
@geometry[style] ||= Paperclip::Geometry.from_file(path)

end

Inside the model.

I'm having issues with the cropper processor and its not cropping fine. Will have to fix that. This is the Cropper

module Paperclip
class Cropper < Thumbnail
    def transformation_command
     if crop_command
       r = super
       if r.class == Array
         r = r.join(' ')
       end
       crop_command + r.sub(/ -crop \S+/, '').sub(/-resize \S+/, '')
     else
       super
     end
   end
   def crop_command
     target = @attachment.instance
     if target.cropping?
       "-resize \"168x202\" -crop #{target.crop_w}x#{target.crop_h}+#{target.crop_x}+#{target.crop_y} "
     end
    end
end

end

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Orientation changes for iPad - Secha & PhoneGap

I was working on a mobile application developed for iPhone. The application was built using Sencha Touch and PhoneGap. Its great what these guys have done to bridge the gap between Objective C and HTML/JavaScript/CSS. The application now wants to be run on iPad.

The orientation was something that caused a problem here. The call back for the orientation, onorientationchange, was not being called for some reason. I went through most of the content in the web which described the problem. Solutions were limited.

I tried putting window.onorientationchange, added event listeners for orientation and even added Objective C code ! Did not work ...

Thats when onWindowResize came into picture. The code started working. But just once. You change orientation and that works just once. The code goes something like :


 var or = function(){

    // alert( Ext.getOrientation());
    var width = (Ext.getOrientation()=="landscape") ? window.innerWidth-1 : window.innerWidth;
    panel.setOrientation( Ext.getOrientation() , width , window.innerHeight );
    panel.el.parent().setSize(width, window.innerHeight);
    // return 0;
    panel.doComponentLayout();
}

Ext.EventManager.onWindowResize(or);

The alert function caused a lot of issues for me. Firstly it creates an exception on the Objective C side. Signal Exception of some kind which says arguments are expected of a different kind. The setOrientation call is necessary for the panel to know the orientation. This did not update the width and height of the panel for some odd reason. So I did it manually by calling the setSize and to make sure I called the doComponentLayout.

Well, the code works now. This is for reference for all those people who have not still got the answers for this question.

Kudos !