Warning: depending on your specific case, this might not be work-safe.

I love old selotape!

Someone proclaims her love for the most unsuspected item to think of in a night out (I love old selotape), someone else believes her (I believe you!), and someone else gets worried about the spelling of selotape (Is that spelt correctly?).

This one made me think a lot, not only because selotape is wrongly spelt (I think the right one is cellotape although wikipedia’s cellotape also says sellotape is how it is known in UK), but because I tried to guess if that had a hidden message. Maybe wrapping people with old cellotape is the new sexual trend and we still don’t know!!

Fuck like you’re being filmed

Although being painted in a shy, pale purple, now that’s a message! This one motivated a couple of replies in the following picture:

No. I don’t fuck I make love / And I make love like I’m being filmed

First reply -No. I don’t fuck I make love- is written with that kind of plastic paint that you used when you were a child. Then someone comes with an alternative and solomonic solution: And I make love like I’m being filmed. You can’t argue against that one! So maybe that’s why there are no follow-up’s to the topic.

I wouldn’t want to take me home

Another one which made think. Why not? Is she so drunk she doesn’t want to take herself home, or she doesn’t believe she is the right person to go home with – and has just discovered it in the bath, right now!?

Stop bitching, start a revolution

Here we go with more strong messages. Probably she felt annoyed with so many trivial topics. Also I believe there’s always a couple of this style of messages at every bath you go… something like Fuck the system, Viva la revolución, Hasta la victoria siempre, etc. So she wasn’t that innovative at the end.

War 4 peace is like fuckin 4 virginity

And yes there are always mentions to war, peace, etc. But this one goes further and merges war, peace, fuck and virginity. What a bunch of controversial questions.

Alabama 3, I love you!!

I presume this has some meaning. Which only the one which wrote the text can understand, because I particularly can’t! Is there any movie called Alabama 3? and if there is, how come I haven’t heard of Alabama and Alabama 2? Maybe it is a music group… yes… I just googled it: Alabama 3 is an english music group. As we say in Spain, you never end a day without learning something.

I like cocks but I think I would also like cunts. What should I do?

She’s undecided. But she should have left a telephone number or e-mail address; these issues shouldn’t be discussed publicly. Maybe that’s why nobody replied.

I love Jerry

She’s got a clear mind. This is pure love, definitely. Innocence at its best.

Suck my tits / and lick my clit / eat my shit / and suck his duck

Modern poetry (or kind of…)

Baths are literature places, isn’t it?

I can’t agree more with her!

This will give me the opportunity to test lots of extra functionalities of the framework, such as the famous integrated javascript effects, ajax, etc, as I want to improve my old gallery script, not simply redo it as it was in php.
So first thing I did was to make sure that I had a working updated version of ruby and rails. The best tutorial I have found which worked perfectly for me is this one: Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger, by Hivelogic. (Although I simply used it to update Ruby and Rails, but didn’t build Lighttpd or Mysql).

With that I could be able to follow the recent tutorials and techniques, specially because I wanted to learn how to use a Login Generator, and there was something in the version of Ruby that I had which prevented me to install it (some lib error was thrown each time).

So my app has two parts, a public and an admin one (which was quite easy to anticipate). Once I managed to create the basic structure of controllers and models for the admin, I added the login functionality, as I don’t want everybody to get into my app and modify pictures in there.

I used the Acts As Authenticated plugin, although I couldn’t manage to get all the functionality that I expected so I took a look at the code of the Sudoku On Rails v5 tutorial at SobreRailes (sorry, spanish only!) and completed it with the missing functionality (basically, it was the activation stuff which was not generated, don’t know why). It was sweet and smooth. If I had had to write it manually I would have spent at least three days.

Then I wanted to have support for uploading images. At all, this is about pictures! So after some researching I found a little plugin called FileColumn which allows to get picture uploads working quite quickly, including resizing and automatic deletion if the associated record gets deleted (no more orphan files in the filesystem because of a poor integration between the models and their associated data! hooray!). But for the resizing stuff and thumbnails generation, I needed to have RMagick installed in my system, which I didn’t have. So I found a nice tutorial in the RMagick site, which explained how to compile and install RMagick and GraphicsMagick on mac os x, as well as all the libraries on which they depend, as RMagick is like a bridge between ruby and GraphicsMagick. This step took me a bit of time, specially the step of compiling ghostscript, but as I followed the instructions exactly as specified, I had everything working at the end and I could generate thumbnails and a resized version when uploading images. (Also I was also reading one of the supercool books about the tube that mr.doob gave me for my birthday so time flew fastly! :D )
If I had had to do this in php even using the best helpers that I could, I would have spent at least one week.

Then I prepared a draft version of the public interface. Now I can navigate between pictures and albums, using thumbnails and the big images as well, it shows the descriptions for the album or picture, where available. The code is so simple and beatiful that I could get it tattooed. Or maybe do a t-shirt with it, see an example for getting the data of one album:

No more embedded SQL in the middle of the code, no need for manually loading classes which abstract the DB information for the rest of the php code and try to provide a way of artificial modelling of the data, no need to spend time reinventing the wheel!! :D

As I specified in the models that one album has pictures (has_many : pictures), and that each picture belongs to one album (belongs_to :album), RoR is intelligent enough to deduct things from the database and save me that precious time (as it sees an album_id column in a picture row… it obviously is pointing to an album row!).

Unfortunately by the moment the front end is extremely basic, it’s pure html with little css applied to it. In the next iteration I will do tasks such as find out how to redefine part of the behaviour of the FileColumn to make it update the associated images too if I upload another image when editing a picture, beautify the front end, and maybe start with those nice ajax capabilities which are supposedly quite easy to use with RoR. It will also be nice to learn how to do the fantastic unit tests with the support that this framework provides, so all in all this promises to be very exciting.

Conclussion: I absolutely love Ruby on Rails.

Stay tuned for a next release – as I already got a port for installing it on my host, it can be whenever I get a decent working version!.

UPDATE: As some people want to take a look (miguev ;) ) I have uploaded the relevant code of the current version. It just has the important things i.e. the models definition, etc. If you want to have a working application you will need to create it first with the usual rails name_of_your_app, configure the database, etc, and then use this code where appropiate. It won’t work by itself :P This is just for showing how things are linked between them: cl1ck version 0.1