Learnings for Week 20 2010

• If, for whatever reason, your Win XP install doesn’t show Remote Desktop in the start menu running ‘mstsc’ will start it up.
• Until recently you couldn’t access the raw response from HTTParty. This can be confusing but most of the data can be found using proxied methods on the HTTParty::Response (code, headers, body, message).
• Two very cool gems for simplifying html forms in rails: simple_form and formtastic. I’m using simple_form in a project right now and loving it.
• rr seems to have a problem with mocked class methods sticking around between test calls. Issue opened.
• Rails 3 respond_with helps clean up controllers by packaging up the standard respond_to cases for html, json, xml etc into one method. It’s also very extendable (responders gem has some nice ones).
• Getting devise to authenticate by email or login is less trickier than it seems. Matt Tanase has a nice little post on how to do it. The key is remembering to change your initializer to have ‘config.authorization_keys :login’ in it.