Giant Japanese Robot

Let me tell you a story…

Jillian Michaels comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes Jillian Michaels go away… but sometimes she wouldn’t go away. Sometimes Jillian Michaels looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about Jillian Michaels…. she’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When she comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until she bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

When I think about today it reminds me of how people treat immigrants. I think of the Irish 100 years ago and how the exact same arguments were leveraged against them. They are taking our jobs, schools, bringing disease, consuming our social services, they don’t assimilate our traditions, etc etc.

If certain people had their way the Irish would have been sent back home, the richness that they brought our country would not be here and I would not be here.

Today I am going to lift a glass of Guinness against hatred, against anger and for the things that we have in common as human beings. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Ruby on Rails: String to Object

In my new app I have a whole bunch of nested models. For the most part they all have the same database structure and can use very similar partials. I hate to repeat code because it usually makes my life more difficult when I need to go back and change something or do maintenance. I am now placing these partials in a single location that all of these models have access to.

Problem is I had a very difficult time telling the partials what object it needed to represent without adding a parameter. (I am making a lot of AJAX calls) I solved it by using the controller that was passed along with the request. After that I needed to take that string that was passed and transform it so ruby recognized it as an object. This was my final solution:

Classify takes the string and gives it the proper camelcase format so that it conforms to the model naming convention. Constantize then takes that string and converts it into an actual object.