Adventures in HttpContext

I found myself confronted with a MongoDb data modeling problem. I have your vanilla User model which has many Items. The exact nature of an Item is irrelevant, but let us say a User can have lots of Items. I struggled with trying to figure out how to model this data in a flexible way while still leveraging the documented-orientated nature of MongoDb. The answer may seem obvious to some but it is interesting to weigh the options available.

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I had a heck of a time getting fixtures working with Mongoid when it came to a required embeds_many property.  No matter what I did, I kept getting an error: “Access to the collection for XXX is not allowed since it is an embedded document, please access a collection from the root document.”

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In my never ending love/hate relationship with Ruby, Rails and my Mac I’ve finally gotten Ruby 1.9 up and running with Rails 2.3 and MySql 64 bit.  All on Snow Leopard.  There was an even a little detour with Readline.  If you’ve scoured other posts about Snow Leopard, Ruby, Rails and Mysql and ended up here I feel your pain.  I hope this helps you on your way. Most of this info is from other places which I’ve explained in a little (just a little) but more depth. Read More

So, I’m working on a Rails App and I want to use OpenID (and only OpenID) for authentication.  I was going to use Restful_Authentication with the open_id_authentication extension, but then I saw Ryan Bates’ Railscast on AuthLogic.  Authlogic has an OpenID extention which looked perfect for my needs, and Authlogic seemed like a great gem for authentication.  My goal was simple: I wanted to support, and only support, authentication via OpenID.  None of this username/password/salt stuff.

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As I wrote recently in a previous post, I’ve been playing around with Rails.   I wanted to touch on how I got up and running learning and digging into Rails. Read More