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You could use SQL’s random function (RAND() or RANDOM() depending on database engine) - but this isn’t database agnostic, so isn’t really very quick. Instead you can use @nzkoz’s suggested method: Widget.first(:offset => Widget.count) …. the count() method is fast, and the first() method will limit it to the first result in the SQL as well.
I’ve been working on an image processor class for work, and recently ran into this issue. I thought I would post it up here as normally I need to be quite desperate before I start trawling through email mirrors - hopefully somebody comes across this post first. If you use ImageMagick (in particular, in conjunction with MiniMagick), then you may...
I’ve just added a nice unobtrusive scroll to top feature to my blog, and learnt an interesting tip in the process I thought I would share, originating from one of the many problems Twitter has had with it’s jQuery fanciness. The scroll to top stuff isn’t overly complicated - just detect when the user has scrolled x pixels down the...
I can tell that this title alone will irritate a lot of developers out there. It irritated me as well, until I figured out that sometimes, doing things the ‘wrong’ way is the best/only way. But let me get on with things. Every now and then, you will come across a scenario where you need to access something in the...
Just a quick tip I’ve come across while browsing through the comments on a Railscast_I’ve_been_watching. It looks like the I18n gems that get automatically installed with Rails 3 have a teensy bug. When storing a translation to the backend (be it YAML, Redis, whatever), there is an :escape option that can be passed to enable (or prevent) the key from...
Spree Hosted Gateway is my second ‘big’ extension - one of the ones that isn’t just adding one or two bits of nice functionality, but actually and end-to-end solution to add something that I think would be useful to a broad range of Spree developers (My first was spree-import-products, see my post on it here). Spree (for those of you...
Recently I’ve had to deal with a strange problem with rake tasks being run using Cron, a UNIX tool for running commands on a scheduled basis. The problem was basically the server being slowly strangled of resources across a forty to fifty minute time period, as each time the rake task was run it would leave an entire bash process...
OK,_So_I_Was_Wrong So I was just flipping through my archives of blog posts, when I found this_one my first ever post to Tumblr, where I vowed to stop posting enormously long essays on silly ideas I have to change the world. Oops. Sorry everyone!
Following an insanely interesting presentation by Steve Souders at Webstock, I began thinking about ways to simplify (i.e. automate) certain processes to optimize performance of sites. Something that immediately jumped out at me from early on in Steve’s workshop (So early, I was able to start coding in the halfway break), was that inline images were an ideal candidate for...
While working at 3Months as a developer, I am also completing a Bachelor of Business Information Systems at Victoria University. One of the things that rolls around twice a year and always causes students headaches is the signups system - it’s one of the bragging points of the School of Information Management at Victoria, as it was build as a project...