Using the alt attribute and the figcaption element in HTML
While both the alt attribute and the figcaption element provide a way to describe images, the way we write for them is different:
- alt descriptions should be functional
 - figcaption descriptions should be editorial or illustrative
 
Rails developers: Have better context in Git diffs
Git diffs show the surrounding contexts for diff hunks. It does so by applying regular expressions to find the beginning of a context. When it comes to Ruby, however, it will not find method heads and travel up to the class definition:
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ class TicketPdf # <=== Actually expected here: the method definition
     ApplicationController.render(
       "tickets/index.html.haml",
       layout: "tickets",
-      assigns: { tickets: tickets }
+      assigns: { tickets: tickets, event_name: event_name }
     )
   end
 end
```...
Ruby: A short summary of available hooks in Cucumber
Here is a short summary of Cucumber hooks in Ruby taken from https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-ruby. Note that the BeforeStep is currently not existing in the Ruby implementation of Cucumber.
Before hooks run before the first step of each scenario.
Before do |scenario|
  ...
end
After hooks run after the last step of each scenario, even when the step result is failed, undefined, pending or skipped.
...
How to downgrade Google Chrome in Ubuntu
If you're experiencing problems with your Google Chrome installation after an update, it might help downgrading Chrome to check if the problem disappears. Keep in mind though that running outdated software, especially web browsers, is in most cases not a good idea. Please verify periodically if you still need to run the old version or if an even more recently updated version fixes the problems introduced in your version.
Here's how to get old versions of Chrome for your Ubuntu installation:
First, go to [UbuntuUpdates](https://www.ubuntuup...
What's so hard about PDF text extraction? 
There is a common view that extracting text from a PDF document should not be too difficult. After all, the text is right there in front of our eyes and humans consume PDF content all the time with great success. Why would it be difficult to automatically extract the text data?
Turns out, much how working with human names is difficult due to numerous edge cases and incorrect assumptions, working with PDFs is difficult due to the extreme flexibility given by the PDF format.
Simple form examples with bootstrap
Good reference how to build bootstrap forms with simple_form.
RubyMine: Restore main menu in Ubuntu
After a recent Ubuntu update I didn't see the main menu bar of the RubyMine IDE (File | Edit | View | ...) anymore.
This could be solved by changing a RubyMine registry entry:
- Search "registry" within the "Actions" search
- press 
ctrl + alt + n> click onActions> typeregistry> click onRegistry... 
 - press 
 - Scroll down to 
linux.native.menuand disable the checkbox 
After rebooting RubyMine, you'll have gotten the menu bar back.
How to cycle through grep results with vim
grep is the go-to CLI tool to accomplish tasks like filtering large files for arbitrary keywords. When additional context is needed for search results, you might find yourself adding flags like -B5 -A10 to your query. Now, every search result covers 16 lines of your bash.
There is another way: You can easily pipe your search results to the VIM editor and cycle through them.
Example: Searching for local occurrences of "User"
vim -q <(grep -Hn -r "User" .)
# vim -q starts vim in the "quickfix" mode. See ":help quickfix"
# grep...
Vortrag: Content Security Policy: Eine Einführung
Grundidee
CSP hat zum Ziel einen Browser-seitigen Mechanismus zu schaffen um einige Angriffe auf Webseiten zu verhindern, hauptsächlich XSS-Angriffe.
Einschub: Was ist XSS?
XSS = Cross Site Scripting. Passiert wenn ein User ungefiltertes HTML in die Webseite einfügen kann.
<div class="comment">
  Danke für den interessanten Beitrag! <script>alert('you have been hacked')</script>
</div>
Rails löst das Problem weitgehend, aber
- Programmierfehler weiter möglich
 - manchmal Sicherheitslücken in Gems oder Rails
 
Lösungsid...
Automatically validating dependency licenses with License Finder
"Open-source software (OSS) is great. Anyone can use virtually any open-source code in their projects."
Well, it depends. Licenses can make things difficult, especially when you are developing closed-source software. Since some OSS licenses even require the employing application to be open-sourced as well (looking at you, GPL), you cannot use such software in a closed-source project.
To be sure on this, we have developed a project-level integration of Pivotal's excellent [license_finder](https:/...
How to prevent Nokogiri from fixing invalid HTML
Nokogiri is great. It will even fix invalid HTML for you, like a browser would (e.g. move block elements out of parents which are specified to not allow them).
>> Nokogiri::HTML.fragment("<h1><p>foo</p><span>bar</span></h1>").to_s
=> "<h1></h1><p>foo</p><span>bar</span>"
While this is mostly useful, browsers are actually fine with a bit of badly formatted HTML. And you don't want to be the one to blame when the SEO folks complain about an empty <h1>.
To avoid said behavior, use Nokogiri::XML instead of Nokogiri::HTML whe...
The HTML5 video element
# Basic HTML example
<video poster="preview_image.png" controls>
  <source src="or_here.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source src="alternative_if_browser_cant_pay_first_source.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <track src="optional_subtitles.vtt" kind="subtitles" srclang="de" label="Deutsch" default>
</video>
# Javascript API (notable methods and properties)
video = document.querySelector('video')
video.play()
video.pause()
video.load() // Reset to the beginning and select the best available source
video.currentSrc // The selected source
video.c...
HTTP Client in RubyMine
RubyMine has a HTTP Client that can be useful to test web APIs.
Just create a .http scratch file an write your request in it.
The request can then be executed with the "Run all requests in File" button above the file.
Some alternatives:
The format for request is like this:
Method Request-URI HTTP-Version
Header-field: Heade...
How to use Active Job to decouple your background processing from a gem
In a web application you sometimes have tasks that can not be processed during a request but need to go to the background.
There are several gems that help to you do that, like Sidekiq or Resque.
With newer Rails you can also use ActiveJob as interface for a background processing library. See here for a list of supported queueing adapters.
For ...
Howto: Select2 with AJAX
Select2 comes with AJAX support built in, using jQuery's AJAX methods.
...
For remote data sources only, Select2 does not create a new element until the item has been selected for the first time. This is done for performance reasons. Once an has been created, it will remain in the DOM even if the selection is later changed.
If you have a huge collection of records for your select2 input, you can populate it via AJAX in order to not pollute your HTML with lots of <option> elements.
All you have to do is to provide...
The JavaScript Object Model: Prototypes and properties
Speaker today is Henning Koch, Head of Development at makandra.
This talk will be in German with English slides.
Introduction
As web developers we work with JavaScript every day, even when our backend code uses another language. While we've become quite adept with JavaScript at a basic level, I think many of us lack a deep understanding of the JavaScript object model and its capabilities.
Some of the questions we will answer in this talk:
- How does the 
newkeyword construct an object? - What is the differen...
 
Test-Driven Development with integration and unit tests: a pragmatic approach
Test-Driven Development (TDD) in its most dogmatic form (red-green-refactor in micro-iterations) can be tedious. It does not have to be this way! This guide shows a pragmatic approach with integration and unit tests, that works in practice and improves on productivity.
Advantages
- No added effort: tests need to be written anyway.
 - Test heads serve as todo lists. You'll always know what is finished and what is left to do.
 - Big tasks are broken down into smaller tasks that can be processed one by one.
 - You will not forget a test.
 - You...
 
How to use Simplecov to find untested code in a Rails project with RSpec and Cucumber
Simplecov is a code coverage tool. This helps you to find out which parts of your application are not tested.
Integrating this in a rails project with rspec, cucumber and parallel_tests is easy.
- 
Add it to your Gemfile and bundle
group :test do gem 'simplecov', require: false end - 
Add a
.simplecovfile in your project root:SimpleCov.start 'rails' do # any custom configs like groups and filters can be here at a central place enable_cov... 
Bundler in deploy mode shares gems between patch-level Ruby versions
A recent patch level Ruby update caused troubles to some of us as applications started to complain about incompatible gem versions. I'll try to explain how the faulty state most likely is achieved and how to fix it.
Theory
When you deploy a new Ruby version with capistrano-opscomplete, it will take care of a few things:
- The new Ruby version is installed
 - The Bundler version stated in the Gemfil...
 
Always disable autocomplete for date pickers
When we write a form with date fields, we often use graphical data picker like Rome to get a consistent calendar popup on all browsers.
When you integrate a date picker popup, remember to also set autocomplete="off" on the text input that opens the calendar on click. Otherwise the autocomplete suggestions will cover the calendar box and make it unusable:
If you are using a tool like Unpoly you might want to set autocomplete="off" i...
Cucumber's table diffing does not play nice with Spreewald's `patiently do`
Turns out, Cucumber::MultilineArgument::DataTable#diff! caches some stuff. Code of the following form will not work as intended:
Then('some table should look like') do |expected_table|
  patiently do
    actual_table = calculate_actual_table
    expected_table.diff!(actual_table) # not actually patient, will keep failing if it failed the first time
  end
end
Instead, simply use
expected_table.dup.diff!(actual_table)
Devise: How to allow only HTTP Basic Auth and disable the HTML sign-in form
By default, Devise redirects to a sign-in form when accessing a route that requires authentication. If for some reason you do not want this, but use Basic Authentication (and the corresponding browser username/password dialog) instead, this is a simple change.
Note that Devise's default configuration actually only redirects requests for HTML content (as requested by the HTTP Accept header).
For all other formats (like JSON) it would use Basic Auth if the http_authenticatable setting was enabled. So you can simply enable that flag and cl...
How to write good code comments
Code comments allow for adding human readable text right next to the code: notes for other developers, and for your future self. You can imagine comments as post-its (or sometimes multi-sheet letters ...) on real-world objects like cupboards, light switches etc.
As always, with power comes responsibility. Code comments can go wrong in many ways: they may become outdated, silently move away from the code they're referring to, restate the obvious, or just clutter files.
Good Comments
Here are some simple rules to keep your comments help...