Entries Tagged 'Development' ↓

So recently I had the challenge of creating a ‘has_many through’ relationship across two databases.

“Why would you do this?” you may ask. Well quite simply I am in a team building a new data management system to sit on top of a legacy system with its legacy database. All the new code is new, shiny and streamlined and the old code is… well… crap but we have to keep both systems running concurrently so we have various tables in the legacy database we need to access from the new system. As it happens we need to access the legacy users table in a ‘has_many through’ from the new ‘orders’ table.
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As anyone who’s ever made an e-commerce system knows, money is everything. No, really if you don’t get your financial sums right then you can’t hope to build a successful online business (and may find yourself creating potential legal issues with the tax man).

So here’s a rundown of the top tips I can give for making your financial calculations that bit easier.

1. Always Work in Minor Units

I can’t stress enough how much this helps in terms of accuracy, rounding and speed. Working in major units may look better to you as you don’t have to reformat the numbers to display them but I hope I can make the case here for minor units.

a. Integer arithmetic is much much faster than floating point arithmetic.

Remember that even a single decimal place makes a number a float as far as your computer is concerned and all the processor overheads that go along with them suddenly arrive. I know it’s not a lot slower but in a complex financial system it all adds up believe me.

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When you get successful, you may find that you move from someone else looking after your hosting, to running a complete rack (or racks) yourself. Standing with that shiny new rack towering over you, there seems so much space and flexibility, and anything not quite right now can be fixed later, right?

Correcting a bad installation will be extremely difficult, disruptive, or just impossible to do once you are up and running. Follow these tips in planning your rack before the first piece of equipment goes in and you will save not only time later, but you will be thanking me when the sh*t hits the fan.

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Having just made the jump from Windows PC to Mac, I thought it might be helpful to share some of my findings from the other side.

Screenshots

A basic one, but well worth mentioning - as well as the usual screen shot familiar to windows users, there’s also the option to select a portion of the screen with your mouse cursor. To capture a portion of the screen, just press cmd+shift+4. You’ll get a crosshair that you can drag and click with to select a rectangle. This is then saved as a file. To save to the clipboard, just use ctrl+shift+cmd+4.

Remote viewer

Something slightly less well known about Leopard is that it has a good VNC client built in.

• Go to finder, press cmd+k and you’ll get the connect to server window.
• Type in vnc:// followed by the ip address of the desktop you’re trying to connect to, then press connect.
• I use this when we’re testing something in Browsercam, as it’s much better than the Java VNC client they provide.

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